Toriko 374 Review: Offscreen Fights

Toriko, Chapter 374: Biting and Biting Back

This chapter opens with an introdump that it's dangerous for Nitro or Appetite Demons to eat others of their kind because they'll explode, which is why they excluded Center from their full course. Also, the reason why Neo and Jirou are both so freakishly powerful. Which is all well and good if it was something that they really built up to. Again, it's things like this that really felt like the manga really skipped several arcs and are just info-dumping in these chapters without any real buildup or payoffs either way. 

Toriko and Neo continue to fight, with Toriko's red oni manifesting to block Neo's attack, which is basically bare hands. Toriko's blue oni just bursts out and launches several attacks that manage to push Neo back. Go, blue oni! You're really the only hope Toriko has of surviving this fight. 

Then God shows up, and just attacks Neo randomly with its tongue, hitting Neo so hard that it sent Neo all the way to the opposite side of the Earth, with a pretty cool visual of explosions from either pole as God keeps hitting through the Earth to damage Neo. Neo is enraged, causing the two remaining blue nitro -- Pair, who Toriko met in Vegetable Sky, and Fake!Kaka whose real name I forgot -- to charge in to try to help. Again, none of the Blue Nitro have much personality, something that really probably would've been built up slowly through the arcs we didn't get. But oh well. Fake!Kaka and Toriko get a bit of a confrontation regarding how Fake!Kaka used to be a bit hopeful regarding Toriko's potential back when he trained him to use enbu, and then Toriko just unleashes both onis to fight the two Nitro.

And then we see Grinpatch, Tommyrod and Starjun take out Kuromado with a combo attack... and it seemed Grinpatch got some of Tommyrod's "spit insect" powers. Starjun had a pretty cool "I'll tell the boss your sanity return in your dying moments"... which honestly is anticlimatic. Not that the fight really would mean anything in the long run, but it felt odd to re-introduce five old characters who really could've been absent from the manga until it ends without doing anything meaningful at all with them. 

Grinpatch and Tommyrod apparently got melted by Joie's fungus, and Joie apparently defeated Coco, Zebra and Sunny off-screen. All these off-screen battles! I wouldn't be surprised, really, if Toriko has already defeated the Blue Nitro off-screen, as awesome as unleashing the two Onis are. Joie and Starjun face off, talking about food luck, but then Starjun's third eye gets activated, which is pretty cool, and he goes all 'do you have any idea whose son I am?' which is just... weird. And can I honestly just say that I don't care? Among everything that is happening, dropping in this random mystery just felt like redundant. 

Meanwhile, Komatsu's friend is doing something I don't care. He found out something about God, but I don't care. When so much is being ignored but this little uninteresting twat gets screentime, I just don't care. 

Overall, though, despite my bitching about it, it's a bit of an enjoyable, if ultimately chaotic, chapter. So much is going on, so many random offscreen fights and huge introdumps of information we really should've gotten in previous arcs are dropped upon us, and the lack of focus is really hurting the progression and cohesion of this final arc.