Toriko 337 Review: Acacia's Demon Wart! Midora! Life! Setsuno! Jirou!

Toriko, Chapter 337: Resurrection and Reunion

Another absolutely great and reveal-heavy and hype-heavy chapter. A good chunk of it centers around Midora and Joie, as well as a couple of revelations regarding the weird Acacia Appetite Demon of Armageddon thing who I'll just call Acacia from this point onward. And a lot of cryptic hints about what's going on with Neo.

Let's just break down the chapter, yeah? I honestly am not quite sure just how I missed this chapter after reading Bleach and One Piece yesterday. We start off with a bit of a redundant reaction shot of Midora, before cutting away to this 'Farthest Kitchen' in Area 1, where chefs are being led towards these giant pots and pits filled with crying souls similar to what we saw in Area 6. I'm not sure if the chefs are being just fed as food spirit fodder or if these are even the kidnapped chefs at all. But all that's certain is that something totally sinister is going on.

While this is going on, we're immediately distracted by Acacia's screaming face going all "MORE FLAVOUR MORE MORE MORE". This black-furred Nitro with balls in his hair (it's not Nitro!Pair or Fake!Kaka, the two prominent Blue Nitros we know of) note that this is bad and that Acacia can revive any moment, so they are trying to, well, revive Acacia either using a specific procedure or at a specific time. There are also a couple other Nitros with him -- including a rather fat one, and they have a stock of the full course, with their forces going out to replenish their stock of Atom, News, Earth and Another... so, yeah, our heroes are definitely going to tangle with Neo forces in the near future.

The fat Nitro note how cooking the full course is hard -- especially locating God -- and demand that Joie needs to come and help out revive "Neo" instead of doing her project of cultivating "Life". Life isn't an ingredient, but we do learn what exactly that is. And apparently in the original Japanese version "Neo" is written with Katakana instead of the kanji, so it's not referring to the organization. Is Acacia, uh, this "Neo" they're speaking of?

The fat Nitro talks about how the resurrection must happen with utmost perfection and tells one of the other Nitro that Acacia is calling for Joie. But one of the wart-like balls on Acacia's giant body (can you even still call that a 'body'?) sprouts gross-looking eyes and mouth and shivers and shoots straight up devours half of the fat Nitro's body, and the others identify him as the Blue Nitro with the name News, so he's definitely pretty high-ranking among the Nitro hierarchy.

Some kind of balls seem to crack (we learn what this is later) and Nitro!News regenerates from his wound all Homonculus-like, and the other Nitro are panicking and want to catch Acacia's demon wart thing because it apparently can eat every single living thing on Earth. One can't help but notice the similarity between the gross demon-wart with the Appetite Pacman created by the Four King's Ou Shoku Banshan technique way back during the Four-Beasts arc... both are vaguely Pacman-looking balls of appetite that won't stop eating until it's full... except, y'know, Acacia's demon wart isn't exactly looking like it's going to be full any time soon.

We cut back to Midora at this point. Joejoe moves towards him, but BAM Midora just causes his upper body to just disappear with Hungry Tongue without even moving from where he is standing. Zaus attacks him with his sword, which back during his introduction is stated to be so powerful it'll leave a goddamned imprint to your descendants... but the sword itself gets fucked up. And then BAM there goes Zaus's head. Kousairou tries to use that gross calorie transfer technique, but BAM there goes Kousairou.

Mohyan tries to Pause and Rewind, but Midora just gives him a stare that goes all 'you seriously think you can stop me', and sure enough, Mohyan's time-rewinding ability doesn't work on Midora. So there's definitely some kind of limit to it. But it appears to have worked on Joejoe, Zaus and Kousairou and rewound time to when they were alive... but it appears to be something else entirely!

Joie walks up, holding a sphere in her hand -- the one we saw her creating a large amount of last chapter, and the one we saw break right before Nitro!News' revival earlier this chapter. Those spheres are apparently 'Life', and can die in place of its owner (how does it know who its owner is?) and basically rewind a death. And, well, both last chapter and this chapter kind of affirms that the Neo have a lot of those Life spheres in abundance.

Joie then reveals her face to Midora, being all cryptic about whether the two of them has met before (because, y'know, Frohze and whatnot) and Midora's reaction is just an entire page filled with his face making a silent "what." It's an awesome expression, that's for sure.

That's the last we see of Midora and the Neo people in this chapter, because we cut away to Acacia's demon wart, who's eating a gigantic Lio Tiger (capture level 3980) and is basically just sucking the gigantic beast into itself. The Lio Tiger does this gigantic Hyper Beam attack thing on the demon wart but it doesn't even react, just eating and sucking in the Lio Tiger without breaking a sweat. And, y'know, it's a level 3980 creature. The Eight Kings -- Bambina and the Battle Wolf and whatnot are at capture levels of 6000, sure, but so far most of the big dangerous creatures we saw are around 1000-2000 ish. And the Lio Tiger is nearly capture level 4000, near two-thirds the power of an Eight King. 

And Acacia's fucking wart just ate it no problem, as well as a Blue Nitro. Nitro!News straight-up died, he didn't just regenerate himself due to some ability or whatnot, it's only because of Life that he survived. And Blue Nitros, if we have forgotten are notoriously though cookies themselves, Fake!Kaka having survived Full-Power-Bambina's Monkey Breath Attack.

The final page shows the gross little demon wart blob just burping, and he is approached by Jirou, Setsuno and Chichi... it's going to be an awesome battle, at least, if anything else.

Overall still another in a series of awesome chapters and honestly I can't give two shits about the cooking contest or Area 6 anymore. Keep on with the Neo stuff!