Toriko 367-368 Review: Fall of the Wolf

Toriko, Chapter 367: Those Tears

Jirou dies! At least they had the decency to dedicate an entire chapter for Acacia and Jirou's fight. It's a harder-hitting blow than Don Slime's death, because Jirou has been a presence throughout the entire manga, whereas Don Slime, as fun as he was, was pretty clearly set up to die. 

And Jirou does get a couple of badass moments, like using the life orb to negate Acacia-Neo's strike, doing that million knocking attack in a well-drawn scene. Jirou gets sentimental and asks Acacia if his tears upon Frohze's death was real. Jirou talks about how he expects Acacia to break free of Million Knocking (Acacia uses tentacle tongues to undo the knocking) but why doesn't he do anything against it? He tries to Grand Knocking Acacia, but like the endgame villain he is Acacia just eats Jirou's punch. Acacia sticks his icky tumour-arm into Jirou's mouth and undoes all the Damage Knocking Jirou has done all through his life.

Which apparently just stops hits in time. We get to see an absolutely gruesome moment as Jirou starts to get hit with enough damage to last a lifetime, and naturally Acacia goes all 'those tears were fake'. And as Jirou gets absolutely mangled and twisted he still manages to find the strength to tell Acacia not to tell it to Midora. 

Pop goes Jirou. Man, that was sad. 

Meanwhile, during the fight against Midora,  Joie transforms into Frohze and talks about giving their fight a bitter flavour...

Toriko, Chapter 368: Give Me That 0.1 Second

Guinness, King of the Battle Wolves, howls all throughout the world, and we cut away to Team Toriko. Brunch catches up with them, Take in tow, and apparently the Gourmet Eclipse has begun, and god the ingredient is about to appear. The Four Kings' demons appear in their bodies, and at the end of the chapter apparently god rises out of the ground and it's a gigantic silhouette... that resembles Mappy the frog. 

It would be so much more climatic if we actually had an actual buildup to what god is, y'know?

Meanwhile, Joie fights Midora, talking about how she is cooking Midora, but where Joie is super-powerful, Midora just Wolverine-regenerates through every blast of damage, every limb-fillet, every exploding head. Midora uses his hungry tongue to eat up a bunch of fungus that can decompose people in an instant, and then unleashes a barrage of tongue strikes on Joie... except Joie's power is apparently food luck, and she can just walk through Midora's tongue barrage with reckless abandon, and can just breathe and live in the fungus simply due to her food luck. 

There was a moment where it looked like the fungus won out and is about to dissolve Midora, but Midora just uses Minority World to reverse everything and apparently kills off Joie. God's appearance, however, distracts Midora enough for Joie to reappear, pull off this pacman thing and seal Midora within... a weird fanged condom which she puts in the golden tin can. She talks a bit about gourmet luck and blah blah. 

Man this is just so disjointed and messy, isn't it? On one hand, fights like Jirou vs Acacia and Midora vs Joie are cool as hell, but on the other hand it's still rather m'eh since we don't really have that much of a buildup to any of them. Or towards god appearing, at that.