Manga: Toriko

Quote:

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In the world where the taste and texture of food are very important there is Toriko: a hunter of precious foods regularly hired by restaurants and the rich. He is a man with inhuman skills to capture the ferocious, evasive and rare animals to complete his ultimate dinner course. His current accomplice, a weak, timid person, but who was inspired by Toriko's greatness, accompanies him on all his journeys on his quest for the course of his life. Nominated for the 2nd Manga Taisho Award (2009).

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Any readers of this manga? I just read through it, and I think it's kinda good.
mostly a fighting story, but I feel that it has a great mood.
It's a "larger than life" world, with monsters that can take down a tank and characters that don't blink an eye taking down those monsters. population is hundreds of billions and every island is the size of Africa. Most series have a distinction between character classes that doesn't really make sense (think getbackers, or fairy tail), but here, the differentiation between 'people who gather food ingredients and chefs really does make sense, so it's alot easier to get into it.

feels like a cross between Hunter X Hunter, Harulaye II boy and fairy tail. the art is really old school, muscle man and giant beasts..

anyone got thoughts on where this arc is going? the introduction of the 3rd fraction kinda threw me off guard.
http://www.mangahere.com/manga/toriko/

I started watching the anime but haven't nearly caught up.

The premise started out cool, eating anything in the world.

And the premise of the characters is actually cool(and kind of like Bioshock). Implanted DNA from special Jellyfish that lets them get stronger as they consume the DNA of other plants and animals.

And if that's what it was, badasses hunting down rare plants and animals to get stronger? That'd be fine.

But it's way to fucking silly.

I pretty much checked out the moment it started to become common where, instead of ingredients growing naturally, entire prepared foods were being introduced. Like plants that grow fully formed desserts or pasta dishes and really dumb shit like that. Which completely defeats the purpose of having a primary character be a cook.

Also, don't like the cook. I don't mind when a main character is not as good a fighter as the hero, like in Naruto or One Piece, but I can't stand main characters that can't fight AT ALL, i.e. half the Dragonball cast.

I'm probably the only one reading it, but still..
The red\blue Oni thing reminds me of the divide between red and blue Nitro. I wonder if there's a connection.

I think I'm gonna give this manga up. The premise was very interesting and the story kept interesting for ~200-250 chapters but since there's no serious tone to the series whatsoever it becomes hard to even care anymore. Since everything is whacky food, nothing ever stands out. Even though all battle shonens are basically the gradual scaling of power levels, in this case that's all there is to this story.

The final chapter was released today. 396 chapters in total.
I've felt the series got sort of lost in the past year, since the giant ape arc. it turned cosmological weirdness and got into navel gazing.
but for the first 250 and so chapters, it was amazing.
I highly recommend it.