Manga 77637 Helck

One of the best manga I read and I've been binging quite a lot recently. No pointless arcs, no mindless action, concludes the story with the right number of chapters. Helck is plot, plot is Helck. However, it is a solid 9/10 that I'm reducing to 8/10 because of the frustrating and regular chapter number retconning from the publisher themselves. Good luck finding a site or source that maintains all the chapters with all the pages. One has to keep 3/4 sites open and confirm they didn't skip chapters and pages.

It's somewhat dated manga and the initial parts may feel generic but the story is ... pretty straightforward unlike myopic or franchise milking repetitive storytelling from the likes of JJK, DS, CSM, Dandadan, One Piece, OPM spanning gazzillion chapters. The closest similar story that comes to mind is actually Attack on Titan and not the myriad generic medieval fantasy stuff. Just that unlike AoT it is not very serious, but not comedic either.

I'll add more as I finish rereading it.

I usually don't drop short manga like Helck just because I can just rush through it and finish it in a timely manner.
Helck, however, dragged everything out so far that I just had to drop it. Sorry, I have absolutely zero interest in anything, whether it be the "final battle" between demons and humans, Helck the hero's inner torment, or what happens to Vamiro. The manga manages to have a dramatic story with the most lacking story progression I have seen. As of this chapter, there have been no good fight scenes, and most of the chapters are filled with dramatic dialogue, if anything. There ... isn't a good sense of the situation at hand despite the entire series focusing on the demon and human conflict, and the sense of scale, strategies used, and positions are poorly managed.
Of course I have to talk about the comic relief, the only good thing about this manga. The Piuy is a nice and cute character, and to an extent, Vamiro is too, but these Omake and random interactions don't save the story at all.

Helck has an absolutely great start. When i watched the first 3 episodes of the anime, i was hooked. And unable to bear the weekly episode wait, i switched to the manga.

I loved it. Then, i loved it less. and i thought about dropping it. But i kept reading until i finally finished it. I realized that i should have dropped it early on.

Anyway, here's the setting:
The demon lord is just defeated by humans and a new lord is being chosen via an open tournament. and a human named Helck is also participating in the tournament. At the same time, one of the demon ... spies reports that she can't find any humans in the human kingdom and its just "empty". There are also these mysterious winged angel-like beings attacking the demon realm. Who is Helck? why is he here in this competition? What happened to the demon lord? Where are all the humans? Where did these winged beings come from? What a great setting to start with. full of mysteries and a fun set of characters from demon world.

It goes without saying that i fell in love with Helck from the very beginning. But as we keep moving forward, the manga drops hard in quality.

The author probably wrote himself into a corner, so they had to do some forced plot gimmicks to artificially maintain the mystery. After the first serious battle, Helck and Vermi (red haired girl) are forcibly teleported to some random faraway island. Its understandable why it had to be done. Helck knows a lot and he would have easily solved the mysteries at the very beginning of the series. So, instead, we forcibly keep Helck group separate from the rest of the cast for 90% of the rest of the story. I was hoping for more interactions between helck and the demons (rest of the characters).

It also doesn't help that the flashbacks are long and full of tragedy with generic human characters. The stakes increased too much, and at some point, the villains became too other-worldly(literally). As I was reading the climax, I had this nostalgic feeling, and remembered series like Naruto and Gintama. They are also filled with tragedy flashbacks (milking them) and the almost god like villains by the end. There's also stuff like bringing dead people back and giving happy endings to them. I kinda hate undoing death. It makes the tragedy feel like a joke.

With that said, it seems that i am in the minority and most people were more than satisfied with how the story progressed. So, please do give it a try. Because the start of the series is still great. And if you start to get bored in the middle of the story, then its time to drop it instead of wasting your time hoping it will get better.