Toriko 391 Review: Rocks Fall Everyone Dies

Toriko, Chapter 391: Acacia vs. Toriko

I've been complaining about Toriko's breakneck pace for months now, which is honestly a bit of a strange thing to say, but this chapter is another example of a chapter that should've been utterly epic, but kind of fell flat on its face for me and ended up being nothing more from getting from Point A to Point B. The thing is, a lot of the characters who were only introduced at one point and didn't really end up doing anything, so their deaths don't really have the same impact as they probably should. Like, Derous the Dragon King or Sky Deer the Deer King. They both are built up (Derous especially) to be wto of the Eight Kings, powerful opponents that are likely to be more powerful than Bambina and Heracles, the two Kings who actually did get long arcs to themselves. In the manga itself we only get a big intro scene for both of them, they do a couple of cool things for a couple of pages and just disappear into the background until they're needed.

Also in this chapter we have Toriko and Acacia fighting which is pretty cool if nothing overtly special that we haven't already seen before, and then the remaining Eight Kings -- Guinness, Derous, Sky Deer -- all launch their beam attacks, and are joined by Coco, Sunny, Zebra and Bambina. Acacia eats all the beam attacks, and apparently they're just trying to overload him with angry taste. Then Acacia begins to systematically eat the heads of Guinness and Derous, then a stray energy blast cuts off Brunch, Komatsu and Komatsu's cheering squad's lower bodies, then cuts apart Coco, Sunny, Zebra, then Bambina and Sky Deer get blasted apart. At this point it's obvious that the earliest scene in this chapter of Ichiryu finding all the presumably dead Blue Nitro that Neo ate in the past will be key to resurrecting everything or some shit like that. And Toriko's about to unleash his full course of anger or whatever.

So yeah, and Toriko hasn't even unleashed the third troll that Acacia's so afraid of. So honestly it's a bit in the bag for the good guys already, and this is just going with the flow as to just what is going on. Which makes it honestly a wee bit disappointing.