Welcome to This Week in Shonen Jump, our weekly check in on Viz’s various Shonen Jump series. Viz has recently changed their release format, but our format will mostly remain the same. We will still review the newest chapters of one title a week, now with even more options at our disposal. The big change for our readers is that, even without a Shonen Jump subscription, you can read these most recent chapters for free at Viz.com or using their app.
This week, Robbie checks in with “Jiangshi X.” If you have thoughts on this or any other current Shonen Jump titles, please let us know in the comments!
Jiangshi X Chapter 31
Written and illustrated by Norhiko Kurazono
Translated by Nathan A Collins
Lettered by Arbash Mughal
Reviewed by Robbie Pleasant
Last week, “Jiangshi X” took a break to give Norhiko Kurazono more time to focus on the final few chapters, as the series is nearing its end all of 30 chapters in. And while I stated the manga had potential early on in its run, it’s a shame to see that potential never fully achieved.
At the same time, it’s not hard to understand why. “Jiangshi X” hits all the classic tropes for a Shonen series – a plucky band of young heroes with great untapped power, a general power ranking system for their magic of choice, a tragic event forcing them to become heroes, a time skip for training under slightly unusual teachers, and even a slightly tsundere princess. But what it doesn’t have …is anything original.
Yes, it hits all the classic tropes, but it’s all things we’ve seen before, and it doesn’t do anything new with them. And chapter 31 continues this trend by giving us more of what we’ve already seen: the arrival of a big powerful boss enemy that the heroes will eventually have to defeat when their teachers can’t.
“Jiangshi X” chapter 31 shows us the continuation of several daoshi fights, picking up from where past chapters left off, but barely progressing them until a Shi Lei (powerful evil thing, that’s all you need to know) is summoned. The rest is designed to show how immensely powerful it is, and for a moment it seems like it’ll actually do something shocking by crushing a character’s head, only to reveal that no, it was just a premonition of death.
So all the chapter serves is to introduce an enemy for everyone to beat, and not one we’re particularly invested in either.
With that said, this chapter isn’t all bad. The artwork remains incredibly solid, with great character designs that lean into the aesthetic, very clean artwork with a nice amount of volume and detail, and some fast-paced action scenes. Admittedly, the visual flow of the narrative is a little choppy at times, but the fundamentals are rock solid.
So visually, there’s very little to complain about. Even the Shi Lei gets a nice dramatic appearance, building up its pressure and power by having it appear in a blast of light, and showing the effect its presence alone has on other characters before giving us a full page of it illuminated against a dark background. Its design is neat too, utilizing alternating black and white body parts with a connective line running through them, a third eye, and a mouth that’s invisible until it launches an attack. It all looks quite nice.
However, that can’t make up for a lackluster story, and while “Jiangshi X” has the right ingredients of a Shonen series, it doesn’t do enough to elevate it above the same tropes and stories we’ve seen before.
Final Verdict: 4.0 – While the artwork is quite solid, “Jiangshi X” suffers from over-reliance on Shonen tropes without bringing anything new to the table, and fails to live up to its potential. We’ve seen it all before, even as it comes to an end.
