Dec 2, 2022
Villain to Kill poses the question, what happens when your motivations are genetic and not necessarily your choice, combined with superpowers? The answer is apparently, you just get your own entire section of town to yourself, no-one really bothers you unless you cause trouble and it gives you the emotional range of a brick. Can't say that's predictable but it's not exactly compelling either.
The story starts off with a semi interesting premise, pitting a story of revenge in a villainous backdrop with conspiracies over motivations and the nature of choice. But within the first few chapters, the revenge plot takes a backseat, the main character ... is on an entirely different continent to those he wants revenge on and the story becomes more about internal villain politics, boring fight scenes with no stakes and almost every line of dialogue seems to be talking about the main character. There isn't a whole lot of things actually happening and most of it is just giving food for theory crafters to try and figure things out before they happen. In 54 chapters nothing moves forward, there's little in the ways of developing characters and most ongoing plot threads are pretty common and cliched, nothing to write home about.
The weakest link of Villain to Kill is its characters. The main character is very boring and emotionally stunted, often not caring about situations he's in, walking away from conversations and keeping a consistent low lidded expression that I found myself mirroring the more I had to follow him. Their trigger of 'anger' for their superpowers very rarely affects them and they meld into a lot of stock dark haired cool boy protagonists you'll see in the industry. Most other characters are fairly flat, mostly there to be knocked over like bowling pins in fights to make our protagonist look strong and cool and their motivations are either vague or just shrouded in mystery, with plenty of manic, evil smiling villainous characters who can be punched in the face. The main Psyker character is the only one who has any kind of arc of slight growth, and even then? He's not the focus and barely shows any more emotional depth than our lead.
The action has very little bite to it. There's never any sense our protagonist is ever in danger as he can perfectly dodge anything thrown at him and knock down 'strong villains' in single hits. Even the final big fight of the first chapter which seems like it may be a challenge, literally ends with our protagonist saying "actually this fight was bad and easy and I wasn't even trying." You’d think with a setup of being reincarnated into a new body, the protagonist would be very weak but have his experience to fall back on, but instead he’s just overpowered from the get-go and nothing poses a challenge, it’s not compelling.
The art is fine, mostly? I wouldn’t think twice about it besides some terrible ‘wcdonalds’ logo nonsense in the background, and fights being difficult to distinguish. It’s a lot of very bright colours and effects without any sense of weight or space to them that makes it hard to map out fights mentally. It certainly looks flashy but it’s hard to recall anything specific about any fight scene.
Ultimately, it comes across very basic and going for commonly tread themes of, light is not good and dark is not evil, with occasionally interesting power sets that are still a little vague and generic. I mean, come on, the main characters powers are fire and darkness, It doesn’t get much more trite than that. Exploring the genetic side of things would have been interesting had the narrative not manufactured ways for villains to just ignore the genetic side of things and never have them be a problem for the lead, rendering it all pretty moot. I would describe this as flashy but shallow and there are better things out there to read.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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