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The manga's pacing is erratic and all over the place. Battles are littered with awfully convenient time skips, and characters tend to appear or disappear whenever it's most convenient for the plot. At first, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why the battles always ended so abruptly, often cutting straight into a mini comedy segment—but I didn’t care much either, since I mainly came to see what the magic system was all about. And honestly, that kind of progression didn’t really affect that experience in any noticable way. If anything, it made the story easier to get through. But it comes at the cost of undercooked character writing and half-baked motivations.
As the story went on, though, I started to notice a pattern: the battles feel like fixed matches. Around 80% of them introduce a new villain, only for a character to suddenly reveal an ability that just so happens to be its antithesis. It’s still enjoyable to a degree, but the writer tends to cut short any narrative potential by killing someone off right after we learn something new about them—reducing the number of moving pieces in the story. Characters rarely get screen time after they’ve done one new and cool defining thing.
Then it hit me: once a character reveals their ability, the story often skips ahead to the outcome of the battle—whether or not you can even imagine how it went down. It doesn’t work in the author’s favor, because the more battles the character goes through, the more compelling their journey becomes. And that’s something a lot of the cast never gets a chance to develop. This is exactly why characters like Gojo, Nanami, or Mahito feel intriguing—they’re more fleshed out, and their actions come with higher stakes and consequences.
For example, it's cool to see how Gojo uses his reverse cursed technique to keep his brain in an optimal state, which explains how he can constantly trigger his own cursed technique—and maybe even explains his annoyingly energetic personality. Or how he automatically sorts objects by mass or cursed energy. Like yes, please show me the full extent of what’s been set up!
On the flip side, you get things like the 2.5x Black Flash crit multiplier because, “what even is cursed energy raced to 1? And then let's add a 0.5 for the sexiness!” As hilarious as I found that explanation, it would've made more sense to connect it to an existing mathematical ability like Nanami’s ratio technique. There are a lot of cool abilities and mechanisms in the manga, but a couple of it feels thrown in just for the sake of it, even though some of those ideas could have been revisited or developed further.
It seems like the author leans too heavily on knowing more than the reader, instead of letting the characters carry the story forward. And all these criticisms exist alongside the fact that, yes, it’s still fun to read and I will continue to read the remaining volumes. A lot of these narrative shortcuts possibly seem to be made in service of the shonen genre, but there are shonen manga that manage to maintain enjoyable pacing without sacrificing story.
So, 3/5.
As the story went on, though, I started to notice a pattern: the battles feel like fixed matches. Around 80% of them introduce a new villain, only for a character to suddenly reveal an ability that just so happens to be its antithesis. It’s still enjoyable to a degree, but the writer tends to cut short any narrative potential by killing someone off right after we learn something new about them—reducing the number of moving pieces in the story. Characters rarely get screen time after they’ve done one new and cool defining thing.
Then it hit me: once a character reveals their ability, the story often skips ahead to the outcome of the battle—whether or not you can even imagine how it went down. It doesn’t work in the author’s favor, because the more battles the character goes through, the more compelling their journey becomes. And that’s something a lot of the cast never gets a chance to develop. This is exactly why characters like Gojo, Nanami, or Mahito feel intriguing—they’re more fleshed out, and their actions come with higher stakes and consequences.
For example, it's cool to see how Gojo uses his reverse cursed technique to keep his brain in an optimal state, which explains how he can constantly trigger his own cursed technique—and maybe even explains his annoyingly energetic personality. Or how he automatically sorts objects by mass or cursed energy. Like yes, please show me the full extent of what’s been set up!
On the flip side, you get things like the 2.5x Black Flash crit multiplier because, “what even is cursed energy raced to 1? And then let's add a 0.5 for the sexiness!” As hilarious as I found that explanation, it would've made more sense to connect it to an existing mathematical ability like Nanami’s ratio technique. There are a lot of cool abilities and mechanisms in the manga, but a couple of it feels thrown in just for the sake of it, even though some of those ideas could have been revisited or developed further.
It seems like the author leans too heavily on knowing more than the reader, instead of letting the characters carry the story forward. And all these criticisms exist alongside the fact that, yes, it’s still fun to read and I will continue to read the remaining volumes. A lot of these narrative shortcuts possibly seem to be made in service of the shonen genre, but there are shonen manga that manage to maintain enjoyable pacing without sacrificing story.
So, 3/5.