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Title: Voyage of the Shaman
Series: Shaman King #9
Author: Hiroyuki Takei
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Manga
Pages: 208
Format: Digital Copy
Title: Voyage of the Shaman
Series: Shaman King #9
Author: Hiroyuki Takei
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Manga
Pages: 208
Format: Digital Copy
Synopsis:
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Yoh has broken Ren
and Jun out from the dungeon their father has imprisoned them in. Ren
insists he's going to confront Yuan again and Yoh decides to go
along. They make it back to the hall where they see both Horohoro and
Ryu being defeated by one of Yuan's super corpses. It is revealed to
be Sha-wen, the old Master we met in an early volume. Jun appears
with a fixed up Bai-Long and Bai-Long takes out his old master
Sha-Wen quite easily.
Yuan comes crashing
down on his throne and begins lecturing Ren and Jun and attacking
everyone. Ryu and Horohoro cut his arms off but it has no effect on
Yuan and he puts them back on and proceeds to demolish everybody. Ren
finally has enough and everyone starts fighting with their “serious”
faces on. Yuan reveals he's been pulling a Wizard of Oz for years and
then Ren's mother and Grandfather show up. Everyone sits down for a
merry family feast. For real. Ren is confirmed as the Tao heir and
Yuan gives him some special family sword heirloom. Then everybody
high tails it back to Tokyo for the next Shaman Fight.
All the Shamans
assemble at an old Military base in Tokyo. Everyone is all chummy
when some chump walks up and punches Horohoro through the porch. He
introduces himself as Hao and says with absolute confidence that he
is the future Shaman King. Hao reveals all the other shamans he's
already subverted and tells Yoh to survive so he can be a good
servant once Hao is Shaman King.
The Patch reveals a
jumbo jet will be taking everyone to the Patch Village “In America”
(say that in your BEST Bandit Keith voice). Hao and his confederates
begin talking amongst themselves and it becomes obvious that they
have inside information about what is going to happen. Turns out that
the “jumbo jet” is just an oversoul of the Patch officiants and
they dematerialize at 40,000 ft and 700 miles from the Patch village.
The test is to survive the fall and find the Patch village in 3
months.
Our group combines
their oversouls to create a last second cushion that allows them to
survive the fall. The volume ends with Our Gang now in American but
clueless as to where to go.
My
Thoughts:
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The fight with Yuan and everyone else was pretty good. It quickly
resolved into the ridiculous and the denouement was Yuan's wife and
father-in-law showing up with a table full of food for everyone. I
was grinning like an idiot, because it fit, it really did.
Unfortunately, the grandfather then goes on some philosophical spiel
about good and evil being the same thing and all that mystical
baloney. Have to admit, I wanted to shoot him for that. Let's see him
talk about good and evil while his guts are coming out of his back!
That Hao. Ugh, what a complete creep! He's so obviously the bad guy
that I hate him already. And the fact that he's got an entourage and
knows what is going to happen means underhanded skullduggery.
Finally, we get a real badguy we can root against!
I was pretty happy with this volume. A good solid fight and the
reveal of the slimey badguy. Oh, Dr Faust the 8th and his
spirit Eliza show up at the end of volume falling through the air. A
guy in a wheelchair cackling like mad at Our Gang (which is what I'm
now going to use for the group we've come to know as the good guys)
as they flail around at 40,000 ft. How perfect does THAT ridiculous
image fit in this manga? It fits just right :-D
★★★☆½