Until Death Do Us Part

Spoilers. I enjoyed the concept and the first 30-50 or so chapters, however it quickly got repetitive and ultimately ended quite poorly. I also think this manga is miscategorized. It is not a Seinen, it's a Shounen with blood and a mild acknowledgement of basic realities. The main character has a childish 'no killing' rule, as if he is a blind Batman with the morality of a 5 year old and no logical justification for his philosophy. The manga does end up having very minor character death in the end but it's hardly relevant after 170 chapters of 'You can't kill bad guys because killing iswrong'. Anyways, the concept of the manga isn't bad. Precog loli because hey, everyone loves a blonde loli, and it'd kinda be weird if it was a shota. The abilities and technology are often poorly explained. Like how can he see shit with those glasses when he's blind. The echolocation creating an image is somewhat believable, but those glasses creating an image a blindman can see is pushing it. There is no way those glasses push an image he can perceive through his eyes. It'd have to be directly transmitted to his brain, something which a pair of glasses can do seems highly unlikely especially when poorly, if it all, explained. Putting aside that gripe and ignoring all the other ones, because we'd be here all damn day if I didn't, the story frequently pushes that typical shounen attitude of *The MC is super strong*, *Badass x3 Stronger than Protagonist Appears*, *MC gets his ass handed to him*, *Momentary power up, beats the bad guy*, *Return to status quo*, etc etc. Many characters appear, disappear and reappear haphazardly and have little value. The finale though 'happy' was pathetic as leaving alive this, by human standards, literal superman is completely illogical and more 'no killing' bullshit that tries to impart some idiotic moral lesson that anyone with half a brain would immediately discard. I think through the entirety of the story ZERO major characters died, and one named side character died. Though this could be incorrect as it's off of memory. Then Mamoru at the end of the story when the main villain is defeated, leaves the FMC alone for 7 years where she lives unhindered, which is complete bullshit for a laundry list of reasons. She is an extremely valuable asset, and has engaged in multiple high profile incidents which would made clear to any intelligence agency or country worth their salt to her value. This was just a poor excuse to push in a timeskip. Anyways, to summarize the story. Nice concept, poor execution, poor explanation to technology and abilities, myriads of plot convenience, childish attitude and constant shounen cliches. The art starts off not to good, but gets better as it ages, but otherwise isn't of much note. Art is scarcely perfect and this one is no exception and has plenty of "what the fuck is that shit" moments, but is otherwise passable. The characters are piss poor. Precog loli is exactly what you'd expect of a child. Childish and fucked up due the effects of her ability on her life. Other than that, she doesn't change to any significant degree through the length of the series, the same of which goes for Mamoru. He experiences little change, and while he is interesting in the dedication to his art, he is otherwise completely boring and quite often contradictory a character. Whether that be in regards to his past, his present attitude or whatever else is situational. The author also frequently tries way to hard to pass him off as a badass, especially when in each new arc he often gets beaten to hell by some new big bad, and consistently fails. Igawa goes through zero change, and is pretty boring, the only character in him is the contrast between his abilities and appearance. Side characters are extremely boring, and, as previously mentioned, appear, disappear and reappear at random. The majority of them leave little impact on the story as a whole as well. I could not enjoy the entirety of this series, it just started where it started and slowly got worse over time and not once did it regain any footing it lost. Most of the time I was just facepalming at how this is labeled a seinen, when it screams shounen. Or wondering how the fuck either this technology works or how we get these random ability contradictions. Overall this series was pretty fucking bad. It could be stomachable for a child, or for someone with the morality of a child. It was pretty much blind batman protects a loli for the entirety of the series.

What a phenomenal concept. As a review this is my biggest compliment to this manga, the idea of all of it is amazing and to show off different characters with these unique strengths reminds me of other greats. The shonen-junky in me really enjoys all the fight scenes and all the rapid plot developments, especially towards the final act. The only problem I had with it is things felt a bit off. I'm not quite sure what I mean but some chapters felt like they should've lasted 3 or 4 and some fights felt like they should've taken even longer. The end fight confuses me the most,all of that planning and beefing this guy as the most insane enemy for that? Really sort of a letdown, the same thing goes with the wedding. It makes sense in concept of how it's fully empty and the timeskip all makes sense but it's still a letdown and feels off compared to the rest of the tone of the series. There were times I really enjoyed it, and times I didn't. I think Jesus is one of the coolest characters with the most interesting dualities but I also think Haruka is as well. Places of ingenious character writing are written everywhere and I think it's really good in that essence but it just always feels off. I think it's a 6/10. If everything fleshed together it could've easily been a 9/10 but the disconnects between some arcs and the sometimes awkward panel design with equally awkward skips in fights that later retcon them makes the story flow much poorer than expected. I still enjoyed it, but objectively I can't give it anything higher.

This is a manga that has really good action that is incredibly cool a lot of the time. Mamoru as a swordsman is amazing, and seeing him deal with conventional weapons far beyond the scope of being dealt with a blade is amazing. As that begins to get old, a number of unique enemies are brought out that use strange weapons that have to be dealt with in special ways, which keeps things interesting. That holds up the core of the manga quite well. The plot overall, was a bit strange. It starts out pretty good, being well paced and at a scale that felt itfit the story. However, at some point, the pacing seemed to get inconsistent, where things began to escalate tremendously in terms of organizations and characters involved as well as in terms of scale, to the point it felt like a lot was being left out. I think that this may have had to do with the other mangas that are connected to this one, and hence I suppose it was a conscious choice that makes sense, however while this does work with comics, I feel it doesn't work as well with stories like this. Still, the plot was pretty fast moving and intense for the most part, though it felt like there were moments where it seemed to simply be messing around for no reason as well as a couple cheap moments, such as a deaths that felt forced, especially towards the end which felt kind of rushed. On that note, I would like to note that while the romance is apparently a pretty important aspect of the manga based on its self-description, and it certainly felt that way from the ending, it was not developed at all. By that I mean absolutely not at all. There was nothing. Zero. Nada. It seemed to pop up from time to time, but never in a way that was actually developed, so even though I'm fine with it and think it is the right way to take the story, how it just worked out in the end felt weak. Other than that, Mamoru is a really cool character that got developed really well, especially in regards to back story. Haruka seemed to develop as a commander too quickly, but the growth was still solid so it was nice to see. Other than that the characters were developed okay. I felt for many their characters that had a lot more to them, but that seemed to have been not really shown as much here in favor of focusing on them in the other manga, which is a bit of a bummer. I did find it somewhat strange though how Mamoru was able to become comrades with people that were previously villains so easily. Working with them towards a common goal makes sense, but he seemed to actually become their comrade and him theirs, along with them not being as menacing as originally portrayed, which felt somewhat inconsistent. The art and designs beyond the really well drawn action were just okay. tl;dr: A manga that consistently has really strong action and battles, though with a plot that has scaling issues and main characters that while well developed on their own, don't seem to get developed together at all.