Off-Topic General Discussion - Page 1062

Imagine a society based around a huge-ass tower (150+ floors, each one as big as a continent) split into outer area and inner area. The tower chooses people (known as "Regulars") who start climbing it in the hope of getting wheir wish granted once they reach "the top of the tower" (we learn soon enough there exist a category of Regulars who climbed to the top of the currently explorer levels and they're called Rankers).
The story starts with a guy named Baam who lived in a sort of cave with only a girl visiting him from time to time, till the day she tells him she's going to climb the tower. He tries to follow her and decides to climb the tower in order to be with the only person he's ever known.

It should remind you of the start of the HxH manga, because climbing the tower is amdinistrated with tests (and a harsh weeding of candidates) and the progression is somewhat slow in terms of how time passes, which isn't bad. The atmosphere itself, without being edgy, is still pretty dark because of all the information that's given on how harsh it is to reach the higher floors (there's no "I'm full of hope and good will so I can make it"), although it cheered up a bit at some point, the author himself having admitted to altering his style to fit with the public (the manhwa 's popularity exploded and the main demographic wasn't the initially expected one, apparently readers started thinking it isn't light-hearted enough so he eased up a bit).
Art goes up by a bunch, I started reading from super early so I didn't notice, but going back to the first chapters it's true that they're significantly worse.

Considering that the way the fights were handled (short, the exchanges of blow mostly condensed so they focus on the other stuff) was one of the good points of the manga, these scenes were the opposite of what made them good in the first place. The rythm took a beating too with the final fight taking ages, a slow grind of chapters compared to the rest of the manga.
I bought the tomes and everything, the introductions and afterwords of the author are often amusing or interesting (I remember one where she mentioned how she often comes to the library to check books on science experiments on PoW and stuff like that, and hopes the clerks don't view her as too weird ). The whole part about the Ishbaal war and how the characters from the military dealt with it is one of my favourite things of the manga (also the fact that the main characters can't even relate because of how young they are was a really big plus for me compared to stuff like shonens).

That part gets weirder and weirder at times and although it's in line with the author's style and favourite themes, the whole end didn't feel like a mindfuck as much as a "he's tried to thrown logic out the window but he only managed to crash it in the wall instead", it was pretty disappointing (the very end of Part V's main arc final fight was some Deus Ex Machina too, which makes them disappointing since understanding the concept of the enemy stand and finding a logical way to defeat way is a big part of the appeal).
The second half of Part VI was a grind for me, although toward the end there were some pretty cool passages (like the Under World stand), so I haven't started reading part 7 yet.
Apart from cool concepts (Stray Cat was fun, and Bad Company was awesome) having these tensed fights retaining the core of figuring out the stand's concept and the identity/location of the vulnerable user is what made Jojo's rythm for me, and until late in part VI I didn't really find it. Part IV had the long searchs for a user's identity, while Part V had the excellent Beach Boy+The Grateful Dead fight, and Aerosmith as a stand conducive to great fights, I hope Part VII goes back to this.