Akki Goyou Garan

Manga is like an ocean. It is deep and seemingly endless, and sometimes there are beautiful fish lying forgotten in the dark depths, just waiting to be discovered. This manga is not one of those fish. It is much more similar to the thousands of fish travelling in schools, making up the majority of the ecosystem with nothing more than sheer quantity.

To start with the story is incredibly linear. We don't even find out the back story of our only side character. Each chapter is just the main character sensing evil and running off to kill it. The villains are all one dimensional. There is no moral gray area here, the author writes all of these villains as evil for the sake of being evil. On top of this, there are bucket loads of gore and death that are incredibly graphic. Yet, there is one scene that is censored and I can't understand why, as nothing else in the manga (including the underage sex) is.

The characters aren't really anything to write home about either. The main character has one mission, and the whole manga is him fulfilling that mission without ever stopping and thinking about things. He has no development. The side character is a 14 year old prostitute who also doesn't develop much, and even though she tells a small portion of her backstory in one chapter, we don't ever get to really know what happened or even see it in flashback.

The art of this isn't a strong suit here. It looks like it was written in the 80s, which would be fine if this wasn't published in 2005. With that in mind, however, the art is hard to appreciate. The only thing that really stood out were the gore segments, as painstaking care seems to have gone into drawing them.

Perhaps I was in the mood for gore when I stumbled across this, because despite it's many flaws I managed to get a sliver of enjoyment from this.
For the most part though, it's an unremarkable piece of fiction that simply chugs along in the vast ocean of manga, eventually being reeled in for no other reason than pure chance.