Shuumatsu no Valkyrie/Record of Ragnarok

[shenlong]

mangadex.org/title/33537/shuumatsu-no-valkyrie/chapters/1/


Anybody been reading that ? This is another in the series of kinda dumb, straight to the point fight tournament mangas. Hell, this one might have the laziest setup possible : The gods (like every god ever) want to end the world, but valkyries call out an obscure rule that says humanity has the right a fighting tournament against the gods and humanity gets to survive if they end up with more wins. Then Brunhilde, the main valkyrie, picks 13 dudes from mankind's history and the tournament just begins in the very first chapter.

Anyway, while it's no Baki, I find it pretty enjoyable. It is pretty outrageous and ridiculous shit and there's some crazy art here and there. You guys might want to check it out, just don't expect much story.

[dannythm]

Not yet, have it in my backlog, it looked fun.

Is it still ongoing, either publishing on japan or not yet fully translated?

[shenlong]

Seems to be ongoing. I'm guessing the scanlations somewhat follows the Japanese release's rythm, possibly with some delay.

[jettatore]

In one chapter they allude to Baki. During one of the fights, they show us a scene that happens after it, where they interview one of the gods to give his opinion about the fight he saw a couple of hours ago. 
Since it is a narrative technique widely used in Baki I do not think they are not alluding to that manga.

[onepenguin0]

I've been reading it, but the powers are extremely lazily written. Short of the narrative being simply unclear as to why it happens, it's not even noted that Zeus doesn't use lightning to fight, Poseidon doesn't use water, so forth. Most of the characters we've seen fight so far, on both sides, are 'punch really hard' or 'swing weapon really hard', and I don't understand the logic to that. You'd think a series with a premise such as this one would take a leaf from similar properties and find license to have aimless fun with power creation. Either there's another as-of-yet unspoken factor which has proven to aid the human side(e.g. the weapon-durability thing) concerning that or the series' foundation is extraordinarily bizarre.

That aside - I quite liked the Jack v Heracles fight, and Adam v Zeus was exciting. Kojirou killing Poseidon was cathartic in an otherwise perplexing fight.
On the other hand, Lu Bu's fight was one of the worst things I've ever read in manga, and it's the first fight in the series! I only read past it to get to that other stuff at the urging of others.

[shenlong]

Jun 30, 2020 22:06:54 GMT onepenguin0 said:

it's not even noted that Zeus doesn't use lightning to fight, Poseidon doesn't use water, so forth.

Adam remarks at the start of their fight that Zeus is going in barehanded. In mythology Zeus doesn't simply have thunder powers, thunder is a weapon that was forged for him by cyclops, so it's not absurd that it would be treated like that here. Poseidon also doesn't necessarily have water powers, he's the god that was granted dominion over the sea and oceans. If anything, his known powers are more about causing earthquakes. Still, I agree that it was strange to have him fight surrounded by water and it never being a factor. Still, I though that was a cool fight. The Lu Bu fight was definitely the weakest one, but it did a decent job establishing the tone of the manga : big dumb hulking guys smaking the shit out of each other in fights to the death.

But yeah, the power scaling is really out there and doesn't make much sense (I mean, Shiva can litterally end the world in Hinduism, how's anybody supposed to fight that ?), but the premise really doesn't anyway so... Eh. All in all, there's some good and some bad. Its biggest weakness might be that since it's a series of death battles, there's really little time to start caring about the characters doing the fighting, but I don't expect this series to last very long anyway. It's a curious beast and I'm curious to see where it goes, and part of the fun is seeing interpretations of mythological and historical characters, one thing that got me intrigues was the design of Zeus. I love that creepy greek theatre mask-like face of his. Other than that, it's hit and miss, I didn't care much for Jack the Ripper (although the fight wasn't bad), partly because it wasn't really anything special, and partly because using him is a bit exploitative at this point.