HIGANJIMA

DESCRIPTION

CAST

CHAPTERS

ONA FantasyHiganjima X
MANGA ActionHiganjima: Saigo no 47 hiai
MANGA ComedyKare, Higanjima

REVIEWS

• 

  VinnieSift

  30/100
  What started as a great horror story became the most boring, repetitive and stupid shonen ever. Best BBEG ever.

  It started as an interesting horror manga of vampires. The island was dark and oppressive, the vampires were evil, inhuman monsters, the demons and other creatures were horrible and powerful, and the main characters suffered and tried to escape, struggling to survive in the cursed island.

  And suddenly, a timeskip, and the whole manga changed. The main character had the ability to cut iron bars with a sword that it found on the trash for no apparent reason except because he was oh so strong. The vampires, established to be stronger and faster than any human at first, were easily killed now, not even a nuisance, and then the demons were also killed with ease. Even the supporting cast became also great warriors, even if they didn't had that much training, and one of them had infinite bombs for some reason. It wasn't horror anymore, it was just a dumb shonen with ridiculous power levels for absolutely no reason.

  The main character changed completely. From a young kid that barely knew anything he became a powerful warrior, impossibly strong, confident and great leader. He had a Goku personality where he always wanted to fight the greatest warrior to test his strength, and no one could attack him from the back because... he had a sad back. Seriously. How can a back communicate feelings, I don't f*cking know. Oh also, he has a small problem of loss of short term memory where he can't remember some stuff, like the fact that vampires smell even a small drop of blood. Something that he forgot, two times, in less than 5 minutes, in the final battle, after fighting vampires for a year.

  The story became full of plot conveniences too. The island was suddenly mutable, and it had as many cities, abandoned buildings, named forests and swamps as needed right at the moment. The main cast arrives to one of the towns and it saw that it was in bridges over a river, and suddenly it remembered that the town was called over the water, fact that was never mentioned before. They needed to go somewhere, but apparently there was a cursed forest full of monsters in the middle that no one mentioned until that moment. This repeated over and over and over, and as easy as these landmarks appeared, they disappeared too. The same happened with swords, that were everywhere for some reason, and some other stuff like vehicles.

  And this also happened with characters. "Oh yes, in this town that we are basically right on the door, there was this character that was never mentioned before, that is the right hand of the main villain and that it was also a friend of your brother and a student of your master, who is also super powerful"... Right. This happened a few times too. I won't even mark it as a spoiler because as it appears, it also disappears that easily.

  The story became very boring and repetitive, but when the story remembered that it was an horror story and acted as such, it was very good. This usually happened when Miyabi appeared, the Big Bad Evil Guy of the story. Honestly, the best character, he looked incredibly evil, he was incredibly evil, he was powerful and terrible, and he had reasons to be that powerful and terrible. He always had the spotlight, with that terrible grin and his inhuman intelligence and cruelty. He had a weak backstory, but I can forgive that with such a good character.

  I will say a spoiler here. At the end of the manga The main character forgets how the main weakness of Miyabi works, a medicine that deactivated it's regeneration for a few moments. So he used the medicine, and when he had the chance to kill him, he just stood there, not dealing the final blow, because he acted as if the medicine was a poison. Then he remembered how the thing worked, but Miyabi reacted, escaped and battled him until the medicine passed and he recovered his powers. Because there is no more medicine, the main character wasted the possibility to kill Miyabi. Ever. Because he's an idiot.

  There's a second manga with the end of the story. I stopped reading it when I saw the phrase "he has a sad back". It's the same stupid shonen but right from the start, and I knew that there would be some deus ex machina so they can defeat Miyabi. I'd rather not see how the best character in the manga is killed off by some convenient crap after the last hope of defeating him was forever lost thanks to the main character stupidity

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• 

  Healibord

  34/100
  What should've been a collection of a few scary stories instead got turned into a tired, bland battle shōnen mess.

  TW: Sexual Assault

  Higanjima, Matsumoto Kōji's first and only manga series is baffling. Both to read and then to think about as a story. And it is a shame because I quite like the first few chapters of this manga. The opening pages are thrilling, a mysterious character with a face mask and glasses killing what seems to be a rabid vampire in this very surgical and calculated way yet it could not have been done a more violent and brutal manner. I loved that. What follows, though, is not as tense nor as enthralling.

  Higanjima as a story has an active identity crisis. It does not know which to be first, a terrifying horror story that will always keep you on your toes? Or an awesome violent battle shōnen? It jumps from one to the other on a moments notice and does not let you take in the aura of either. The story itself after the first few volumes is very straight forward. A guy and his friends go to a scary vampire island, vampires kill most of the guy's friends, the guy is angry at the vampires and then the story just kind of follows the main guy trying to kill the king of the vampires— who I can only describe as Dio if he wasn't gay so you're just left with this weird, greasy evil dude. That's mainly what holds back Higanjima. It is the fact that is a continuous story. In my eyes if this was a collection of many short pieces about scary monsters it would've been great. Kōji has the artistic ability to do that. But since this is a serialized manga it loses that punch of a good, short horror story. It needs to keep the status quo, characters don't die, elements of the story get explained when instead they should've been kept hidden and everything that makes horror great was ignored in order to make a bland bland battle shōnen that tries to act as a tough seinen for big boys. But it really isn't.

  Along with its identity crisis, Higanjima is also actively scared of any challenging decisions that could've made the manga better. Everything relies on the fact that its cool. It's cool to fight vampires with a katana, it's even cool to fight big monsters with a katana. Some characters do the same but a different weapon. No one ever really loses or dies and when they do it barely ever does affect the plot in a meaningful way. For a story that is very much not for kids it feels immature. Not to mention the amount of fetishistic content such as the of scenes of sexual assault against female characters. A lot of just unneeded, naked breasts in general and there's a scene in particular where upon seeing a giant spider monster a character points out how the monster had like old, saggy breasts. That was just insane to me.

  The moments when Higanjima does decide to go in a more horror oriented direction are great however. Matsumoto Kōji is amazing is post cosmic and body horror. Because there aren't solely vampires, since this manga is so long they decide to introduce so bigger monsters as well. You get countless unique and interesting designs of creatures that feel monstrous, impossible, simply beyond human understanding. In certain moments I genuinely felt quite tense. Kōji's art style has unique quality to it, where the human character designs come off as cartoonish looking but the monsters don't look like that. It's all sharp teeth, strange morphed bodies or even the regular vampires can look quite scary in certain moments. And seeing those cartoony-looking characters in moments of sheer terror makes the overall imagery even more chilling.

  But considering the length of this piece and how far little and in between those moments are, I don't think Higanjima all too much worth reading.

  
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