The Phantom King

The basic system for this manga wasn't too original or deep, but it was one that works. Certain people have the special ability to deal with monsters that suddenly appear, with an extra layer of depth added from the fact that these monsters are the manifestation of the negative emotions humans feel. The action too regarding this was solid enough and it looked pretty cool. There was a decent amount of variety to the power users, and it seemed like it was getting to the point that they would be adding more structure and depth to the combat itself. However, the overarching story and the characters as wellas their relationships were pretty weak and turned into a complete mess towards the end of the story. There are too many characters introduced, with not enough development for most of them. Really, it's hard to tell who the main characters even are most of the time because no one really gets focused on that much other than Sung-min. Furthermore, a lot of aspects related to the characters felt really inconsistent throughout, such as it opening in a way that felt completely inconsistent with the characters of both Sung-nim and Yu-min, and Maid being blind never mattering at all other than occasionally mentioning that it was strange that she could do things even though she was blind. And all these problems get even more ridiculous at the end. The overarching story isn't that bad for the most part, in that it pushes things along, albeit somewhat slowly, with hints of a much larger narrative in the background, but as we get to the end the larger narrative turns out to be a train wreck. It's pretty much an instance of nothing that happened actually happened, which isn't always bad, but really hard to get right, and they didn't get it right at all. The key to these is making the story despite that still have an impact on the world and still give the feeling that it was worth it for the reader to be invested in it, but this failed to do either of these. The easiest way to do this is to show that the relationships and character development that occurred and that the reader is invested in are still having a major impact, but rather than accomplishing this, I feel the attempts at doing so, with the final major advancement in Sung-nim's relationship with Maid and the flashback like scene all the way at the end did more to highlight how little there was to be properly invested in any of this, and hence it all seemed pointless. I also did not like how the plot suddenly got tremendously more convoluted and turned into something completely different from the rest of the manga right before the ending, wherein I understand that it's based on a novel and that there's more to come, but I felt like this was a bad place to end it, in that it should have been done sooner or later. The art and designs were all really good. tl;dr: A manga that is decent for the most part due to some solid action and a decent general plot, but that turns into a mess towards the end due to how it relies completely on it's far weaker aspects.