Toriko 356 Review: Skipping Everything

Toriko, Chapter 356: All Coming Together

We're skipping everything! As you might be aware, I'm not a fan about skipping all the journey with Zebra, Sunny and Coco's teams. I mean, yeah, giving the pacing a kick to the balls and forcing the plot to move with the whole Neo crisis is great, but skipping everything entirely? We could've at least have had a courtesy one-two chapter flashback per area, but I guess that would just be even weirder for the pacing. Shame. I'm curious just what went along in the development of the manga, because the way this is built up is that we'll get 15-20 chapters per area, but things are just sped up with only the already-underway Blue Grill arc finished up after the sudden speed-up. 

But we just apparently wrap everything up, and it's a shame. The Zebra/Brunch pair has been very popular and we've been waiting for them to team up in, well, forever, so it's a shame that we don't see them. Sunny and Livebearer, too, are two of my favourite characters in Toriko so not seeing them team up and play off each other's flavour of weirdness is a shame. No one cares for the Coco/Tairan pair and evidently the manga doesn't, glossing over their partnership even worse than the other two pairs. 

We get quick descriptions of the area, and how Neo's attack kinda made their jobs easier -- Brunch and Zebra were spared from fighting the beasts of Area 5 thanks to the meatballs' arrival and managed to prepare News, for example. Yun the penguin get even more and more bigger as his camping capabilities are literally stretched to the limit per area. We see the Cave of the Old which was foreshadowed before that will age you 200,000 times the normal speed, stretches several kilometers like a labyrinth, and apparently the way to get through it safely is with the Back Channel. Jiji knew about this, and because he's a total dickhead, he neglected to mention it to Sunny and Livebearer, trusting them to come over it. I mean, yeah, Sunny and Livebearer did get Earth (which is connected to everything on the planet and absorbs nutrients or some shit) but that's besides the point. Jiji is a dick.

Sunny and Livebearer mentioned that they ran onto the 'Civilization' which showed them the way, and they ran onto Yosaku and that other dude from the 0th Biotope, so presumably everything went as planned like how it was in the Heracles, Bambina and Moon areas. Except off-screen. Man, all the wasted buildup...

We then go to Area 3, which is made entirely of clouds, and we've seen snippets of this area before, where the 0th Biotope HQ is and the mysterious floating roads that Jirou and Setsuno (?) were travelling through. Atom is apparently the magma that shoots into space and gathers space dust or some shit like that, and preparing it requires the removal of all the poison from it. Coco and Tairan are coincidentally fitted for the area... but we honestly don't get much from them. Even the farewell where Zebra, Brunch, Sunny and Livebearer all expressed some bromance with each other was reduced to a running joke for the Coco-Tairan pair. 

Literally everyone else goes off to bring the full course back to the human world, and that includes people like Chiyo and Brunch who you would think would hang out with the actual fighters. Brunch at least is going off to meet the Bishokukai, which means he might come in with, oh... who else is left from the Bishokukai that isn't already fighting with Neo? Er... Grinpatch, I guess?

Zebra, Coco, Sunny, Komatsu and Jiji head off to Area 2 on a leaf surrounded with Jiji's back channel, and Jiji starts to tell a story about the origin of Neo. Then we cut away to the Neo Blue Nitros telling the rampaging Jirou about the origin of Neo. Then we cut away to Toriko receiving the information from smelling Guinness' piss and telling Starjun about the origin of Neo. Then we cut away to Joie telling Midora about the origin of Neo...

Which will happen next chapter! D'oh.

Yeah, it's a decent enough chapter for the three aborted arcs, I suppose, but it still leaves a bad taste in the mouth nonetheless.