Junk: Record of the Last Hero

tl;dr: A henshin hero manga that has a few good moments, but overall has a directionless plot and unlikable characters. This manga is essentially a dark tonkatsu hero type story. The protagonist, Hiro, was originally a shut in due to being bullied at high school. He then receives a device through the mail called Junk, which lets him transform into a masked superhuman. He goes on a power trip and does all sorts of crazy things such as severely hurting his bullies. But it’s not like he really has any sort of goal and he’s not especially heroic, so he just ends up using the suitfor random stuff and essentially just killing time. The first five volumes are incredibly directionless since there really isn’t any sort of overarching story to speak of. Hiro gets involved with other Junk users and various things happen that vastly change his life circumstances, but ultimately none of it really goes anywhere or has much of a point. There aren’t really any major plot threads or character arcs. There’s not really any world building either and everything regarding Junk is left vague and mysterious. Furthermore, characters are pretty much all flat personality wise and terrible people for the most part, and thus hard to get invested in them at all. There certainly still are parts that are interesting or amusing, though it leans heavily on being overtly edgy for that. If you’re not a fan of edginess for edginess’s sake, there’s probably very little that’ll appeal to you. The last two volumes seem to get to the point, but the manga gets even worse surprisingly enough. The mangaka said that the original plan was for the manga to be twice as long, but he was forced to rush things into an ending. That explains some of the issues, but I feel that a lot of the problems are too deep seated for simply a longer manga to fix. The protagonist actually has essentially nothing to do with the main plot. As such, the manga switches back and forth between showing him living his normal life and other characters actually moving the plot along. However, his normal life is really boring, and while there were plot threads there, they all get cut off in ways that make them feel completely pointless. The protagonist is eventually thrown into being involved with the main plot at the end, but the ending overall is just unbearably stupid and not satisfying in the slightest. The moral of the story overall is that young people need to start taking more responsibility for themselves and society. That’s one of the most generic morals in existence, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but what made it awful was that this moral was conveyed in a way that was incredibly hamfisted. It involved a character enacting an incredibly dumb plan and this moronic plan somehow working. It made no sense and was past any reasonable threshold of suspension of disbelief. All the explanation for the various mysteries throughout the manga also made absolutely no sense. For example, the explanation for how Junks are powered absolutely does not make sense in the context that Junks can shoot lasers. It’s just terrible writing all around. The art was okay in terms of quality, but I can’t say I was much of a fan of the style. The designs were pretty boring too. The fan translation seemed pretty solid.