Hello, everyone. My apologies for not posting for so many months (especially since I've been visiting my local bookstore much more often, due to family issues!).
But, as they say, better late than never.
A long time ago, I followed the manga/anime series Toriko from its very beginning. I'm talking, back when it first came out in English and all. At the time, I enjoyed it greatly-it's combination of physical action, wild fantasy and fantastic food description. I'm a writer, and I've lifted more than a few good ideas from it (with a few ideas changed to avoid plagiarism, of course). It's a good series for beginners, as well as a good series from the beginning, but after a while it begins to fall apart.
In this world, fantastic creatures like pigs that sweat butter and poisonous spiny tunas the size of whales (just two hypothetical examples I made up; don't look for them in the actual manga) roam most of the world freely. But the world of everyday humans is only a small part of this massively-expanded planet. The rest is a savage wilderness known as The Gourmet World.
It is to this fantastic world that Gourmet Hunters like the eponymous Toriko train to one day go, in the hopes of discovering, capturing and, of course, cooking new and undiscovered animals and plants. A big thing in this world is also completing one's "Full Course Menu of Life", something I wholly support.
It seems to me that it's not only the hardest things you've ever had to hunt down/prepare, but also the things you've discovered on your journey that matter to you the most.
But a hunter needs a chef to prepare this food, so Toriko befriends the world-ranked Chef Komatsu, a hapless normal with incredible luck. But, in the shadows of this world, a secret evil group known as the Gourmet Corps seeks to gain control of all the world's ingredients, netting for themselves immense power.
Now, you would think that that's that, wouldn't you? Well, you're wrong. Halfway through the series, a new enemy force known as Neo appears, leading to the heroes and the Gourmet Corps to work together in order to end the world-wide famine that wound up being caused by them (It Makes Sense In Context).
I dislike this, but I also dislike how the series has moved on from there. It used to follow the same old formula of "find dangerous animal/food in a dangerous location, go through hell to capture/prepare it, describe the food, power up and move on". But, for more than 100 chapters or so, it's been all "travel to crazy place, train to reach food, go through hell to capture/prepare it, move on". No more time is spent on describing the food anymore; it's pretty much degenerated into all battles and a vague ticking clock of a race against time before something terrible happens.
(Spoiler Alert: It appears that alien cells landed on a regular Earth like ours God-knows-how-many years ago and created all these incredible species. But those cells were just the seasoning for some space monster, and soon the Earth will be ready for it to cook and eat.)
New elements such as Spirit Food (just what it sounds like) and faster-than-light travel are introduced, but not much is actually done with them for more than one arc as the series seems to move forward at almost a breakneck pace, at the expense of many good ideas getting tossed by the wayside.
Hell, Gourmet Corp and Neo have barely even shown up recently! My advice on Toriko is to stay close to the beginning but try not to get too invested before things start going bad.
(The anime was heavily censored, also, and the currently Japan-only movie was a major flop. 'Nuff said.)
