Friday, 25 September 2015

Toriko 340 Review: Neo vs NEO. Also Jiro what the fuck

Toriko, Chapter 340: The Blue Nitro's Goal


Well, we don’t see any of the Midora/Joie fight in this chapter, but we spend nearly the entirety of it on the rampaging Acacia-Neo entity. (So Neo, spelled thus, is going to refer to the monstrous appetite demon world eater thing with Acacia’s face. NEO is going to refer to the organization led by Joie and Blue Nitros. Yeah?) Acacia-Neo’s rampaging and has apparently eaten the Blue Nitro known as Air, and, well, that’s one of the main eight Blue Nitros gone, and I’m pretty sure Acacia-Neo killed a couple others in the last chapter too.

Atom, the Nitro with an afro, tells the others to get out of his way, noting that Air is straight-up dead, mostly because he exhausted his stamina cooking the full course. He tells News (muscular dude with a weird spike-hair that got killed by Acacia’s pimple demon last chapter) to go away and recover, while he handle Acacia. Atom transforms, opens his spiky mouth (and within his mouth is another set of eyes what the fuck) and grows a lot of spikes from his body. Atom speaks to Neo, the demon within Acacia – distinguished by having a weird dong-nose and an asshole-mouth, and notes that the cooking of Earth will not take much longer and Neo can really revive itself… and for a moment Neo seems to call Atom its “mama”… before even more of those horrifying pimple wart meatball pacman things sprout out and shoot off into the air.

Neo shoots out six of them, and the Blue Nitro note that Neo’s probably doing this and sending a meatball to each area to eat a part of the full course… while Neo’s main body disappears into the back channel. Well. Another, the Nitro that looks like an old witch lady, notes that they can just let Neo do whatever it wants so long as it reaches its perfect form…

And then motherfucking Jiro, hair all black again, just strolls up and goes all “you guys got a minute?” Another gets ready to fight, but Jiro just nonchalantly stops Another, telling her that he doesn’t mind fighting, but having the earth destroyed in the process is no good for any of the parties involved. The Blue Nitro then talk to Jiro a bit, confirming that Acacia, while not exactly the same with Neo, is also not sane. And all they can do is wait for the Solar Eclipse… which is a couple of days away! So this series is being rushed to a conclusion, which is a shame. Though I guess this is far more exciting than just repeating the full course one by one and just kind of being repetitive.

Jiro notes how the Blue Nitro were the ones who trapped Acacia so many years ago, and he asks the Blue Nitro what they want with such a gigantic powerhouse like Neo… and they reply that they want to kill it. Well, seal it, since gourmet demons will reincarnate unless they are ‘cooked’ and put inside a Golden Can. Because fuck logic, right?

I think we saw the golden can before, but well, I guess the golden cookware that has been foreshadowed all this while is actually the key plot device. Huh. Also, eating parts of Acacia’s full course will revive a different part of a gourmet demon, and they cannot miss a single cell when they seal Neo’s perfect form. We see that Pair corresponds to the right arm, and Air to the left, which was why Toriko and the others had an arm upgrade. Another corresponds to the tongue, which I’m assuming was the reason for Midora’s Hungry Tongue since he likes to drink Another.

Jiro and the Blue Ntiro kind of face off tensely as the Blue Nitro talk about how the ends will justify the means and they will kill Acacia and Jiro just says with this goofy face “’kay, I’ll kill Acacia now!” Jiro doesn’t want Acacia-Neo to, y’know, eat everyone on the world, but the Blue Nitro want Neo to eat God first before killing it. Jiro then stabs himself in the chest and starts to look scary and fuck, noting how they are spelling it wrong (some katakana/kanji wordplay is going on here). Jiro pulls out his hand and starts being scary, noting how the two spellings of “Jiro” correspond to different persona… and he starts to go all crazy and haywire and holy fuck how do you even describe that form.

Jiro notes that he, the ‘Second Wolf’ (normally Jiro is speled with the words for 'Second Son), was once a rampaging beast that used to eat lizards like the Blue Nitro back in the day… so holy shit, Jiro is a werewolf-thing? I mean, we do know he has this Guinness Punch technique and Guinness is the Battle Wolf King… but man, Jiro. He scary.

The chapter ends with one of the pimple wart meatballs landing in Area 7, and Bambina takes notice… ideally, Bambina would team up with Terry, Kiss and Quinn and kick the meatball’s ass, but it might go the other way too oh please fuck don’t kill Bambina off Bambina is funny. Kill one of the kings we don’t care about – like, the Deer King or whatever.


But, yeah, we’re definitely eschewing the ‘one area as an arc’ theme to just go straight for the endgame. Which I guess is far better pacing than the snail’s pace we’ve been going throughout Heracles and Bambina’s arcs, because as enjoyable as those two were… I kinda want something more, y’know? And this is definitely it. 

No comments:

Post a Comment