I’ve never used that phrase before but it popped into my mind when I was 80-something chapter into the manga and I thought it fit pretty appropriately.
What makes me think this phrase is that Kengan Ashura is basically 95% fight scenes. The story feels tacked on and just serves as a flimsy excuse for why the fights are happening. Plot/character development – what little there is – are often forced and contrived because they happen seemingly on the fly. Even major plot points sometime seemingly come out of nowhere.
The manga basically resembles ‘Baki’ (seems like a common comparison), except with much better art. If you like Baki or manga with endless fight scenes, then Kengan will be a very enjoyable read to you. For me, it dampened a lot of the enjoyment.
Kengan suffered from much the same problems as Baki did and often to a worse degree. I enjoy fight scenes too but a great deal of the enjoyment stems from external factors. There must be a decent story to get you emotionally immersed and there should be suspense about how the fight will turn out and who will win. Kengan has neither of these.
It’s very difficult to get immersed in the story precisely because of the problem of the story being so thin. Even if one were to ignore the premise – corporations hiring fighters to fight for money and power – there’s the issue that much of the manga doesn’t even focus on the primary protagonists or even antagonists.
The manga has a massive cast and a huge portion is dedicated to showing long, drawn out, multi-chapter fights between these people…most of which you can’t remember anyway as most don’t have any real distinguishing features. They can all (including the main character) be described the same way: big, heavily muscled, highly competitive, and extremely strong. I suspect the author knows this too as he endlessly reintroduces the characters and reminds readers of what makes them special.
You can’t even look at them and try to guess their fighting style as it’s completely random. You could see a sleek, highly toned guy fighting a gigantic ‘powerlifter’ looking person and you might assume the former would have a faster agile fighting style while the latter would have a hard hitting tank-like style. Then the fight starts and, in reality, the sleek guy is the tank taking all hits without problem and the giant person is flying around like a ballet dancer. All the while, both would be pulling out techniques/capabilities that you never seen them use or would possibly guess they have.
The above would be why there’s no suspense with fights. When all the fighters are so similar and fights are so completely random, how could you have suspense? That comes with predictability. At some point, you must think ‘I don’t think that guy could beat the other person’ or ‘that guy is way too strong’ and be able to logically theorize why.
There are such cases in the manga where one person is overwhelmingly stronger than the other and the fight becomes a curbstomp, but it’s hard to guess because you can’t see it from their appearance, previously shown feats, or even hype…because, again, everyone in the manga is presented similarly. All of the fighters will look strong, show great feats, and be relentlessly hyped by side characters.
Ultimately, I ended up getting tired of the manga and dropped it. However, it isn’t completely without merit.
As I pointed out, if you like Baki or any manga with an extreme focus on fight scenes, you probably will enjoy Kengan Ashura. Furthermore, although I didn’t really enjoy the fights, I did think the manga did humor fairly well.
Overall, though, it just isn’t for me.
