By now you probably have noticed that I like anime and I watch a fair share of it. I do consider myself to know a thing or two, altough you really shouldn't take my word as the law of the land (a comon misconception about anything some retards think about something one has posted on a web page, I'm just a dude, yo).
Now, if there is a word I like to use to describe my tastes, it would be ''Simple''. Simple doesn't mean stupid. Simple doesn't mean ''for children''. Simple doesn't mean ''cheaping out to reach a wider audience''. Simple simply means ''easy to grasp''. Making stories is a lot like describing physics or chemestry, you can go on and on in a tangent about some sort of complex bullshit, by the time I have already used the wifi the classroom has since it's next to the computer lab and have continued reading Achewood, or you can put it in to a few easy to understand sentances, or maybe show me, then I'll be able to understand even the most complicated concepts as long as the rules remain clear.
Shounen!
Shounen manga is generally intended in Japan for like 12 year olds or something, but doesn't mean it's only for them. Shounen Jump, obviously, the magazine that contains most of the most the famous shounen manga. Mangas like Fullmetal Alchemist or Fist Of The North Star or Great Teacher Onizuka have been categorized as Shounen simply since they were published in magazines with Shounen in the title, but I would argue that they're really not, atleast not by today's standards.
Let's start with an obvious choice that some might argue becomes unobvious again due to the obviousness and the fact that it gets hated on. The definitive shounen manga, Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball, the 42 volume manga spanned from 1982 until 1995. It was adapted in to two animes, the first one, Dragon Ball, spanned for 153 episodes and adapted the first 14-ish volumes detailing Goku's childhood up until his fight with Piccolo Junior and becoming a man. It was followed by a 293 episode (edited down to 272 episodes in the initial western release by Funimation) anime that told the rest of the story contained in the manga. It also had several anime movies offering non-canon side adventures taking place in debatable time spaces in the story. It was followed up by the anime Dragon Ball GT, which was made after Akira Toriyama ended the original manga and had a story made by the studio, it was a pretty big failure and a lot of fans consider it non-canon. Recently it was rehashed in to a condensed, remastered series called Dragon Ball Kai.Anyway, I'm not sure if DBZ really needs any big introduction, since it's one of those anime everyone has heard of. It popularized, if not created a lot of the tropes present in shounen manga, such as the aspect of power levels and how the characters scale according to them, the training thing to become way, way stronger, tournaments, transformations and the way how the inner energy is a plot device to do some superhuman shit. Altough Fist Of The North Star and Saint Seiya also had some of these elements, in them these things were more vague which makes them less definitive.
The story of Dragon Ball is the story of Son Goku, a naive country bumpkin with incredible power, and his adventures that involve the Dragon Balls, ancient crystal balls that can grant you any wish by summoning the eternal dragon Shenron.
Dragon Ball chronicles Goku's life from when he was a kid to when he had grandchildren, when he has fought the baddest motherfuckers in the galaxy, in all of nature and magically possible across the earth, the galaxy and even the afterlife.
Dragon Ball has an expansive cast, altough most of them become irrelevant about at the time when Z begins.
The first 14 volumes were more about the adventure and make a lot of dick and vagina jokes and less about the fighting, and the being stronger aspect was less about how much Ki you have (like in Bleach) and much more about how you can adapt to this situation (like in One Piece or Naruto, or One Piece).
But after the time skip and the introduction of Goku's son, Gohan, the series becomes much more power level and fight centric and it's a lot more about WE HAVE TO SAVE THE GALAXY FROM EVILDUDER, YO! But not all of the charm is abandoned.
Definitive version : highly debatable. The manga is the most straight up version and arguably the best, but the anime adaptation is fine on their own, but they suffer from the two anime STDs of Bad Pacing and Filler, but I kind of like the expanded universe they created with the movies and the TV specials. GT can be ignored since it's not very good. Kai has a superior soundtrack and doesn't suffer from the STDs, but the digitaly edited remastering isn't that good and the voice actors (in Japan) are now all old people and have started not to give a shit about their performances since they're old, maybe not as much the heroes but the villains show this pretty clearly.
Biggest flaw : the translations, continuous arguments over demographic and the totally fucked dubs, and maybe the plot element of powerlevels.
But the things that make it good would be the fact that if you go to it with an adult mind set, you can still enjoy it and see things you wouldn't see as a child, provided that you're not watching the OG Funimation dub.
You still have to appreciate DB for it's historical significance to manga if not for what it is itself, since it defined shounen manga in Japan and was one of the first anime to become really, really popular world wide.
What you can call the true successor to DBZ, Eichiro Oda's One Piece is a still running 50+ volume manga about pirates, who are pirates in the same way the characters in Naruto could be called ninjas, on a seemingly never-ending quest to find the ultimate treasure that the legendary pirate Gold Roger hid at the end of the Grand Line, an isolated ocean crossing the middle of the planet, going from island to island, encountering the inhabitants of them, rival pirates and the world government who want to stop the age of piracy.The main character, Monkey D. Luffy (everyone calls him Luffy) is a Goku-like weirdo with a big dream of becoming the Pirate King by finding One Piece, a quest that even the mightiest pirates consider nigh-impossible. At first everyone thinks Luffy is crazy or really, really naive, but when he displays his actual power, people quickly stop laughing. Luffy has consumed the Gomu Gomu No MI (Rubber Rubber Fruit), a Devil Fruit which gives his body the elasticity of rubber, which he combines with his monstrous physical power results in making him a very powerful fighter.
He is joined by his crew that he gathers on his journey, his crew is joined by Roronoa Zoro, a swordsman who weilds three swords and wants to be the strongest swordsman on the earth, Nami, the navigator who mostly serves as the voice of reason and provides comical punishment for most of the crew, Usopp, a cowardly sniper who has to constantly face his fears and try to man up in the face of danger, Sanji, a cook who fights only with his legs and fancies himself a ladies man, Chopper, the ship's child-like doctor and freak of nature that is a cross between a reindeer and a human, Nico Robin, an archeologist who spends most of her time not really interacting with the other crewmen and being mysterious, Franky, the fucking awesome cyborg guy who runs on cola, Brook, the ''gentleman'' skeleton with an afro who is no gentleman at all. (also I would like to take an educated guess that Boa Hancock will probably join the crew at some point after her status as a Warlord Of The Sea will be revoked, maybe).
But the things that in my mind makes One Piece in many ways superior to DBZ would be that A : it feels like Oda has a lot of imagination and B : the fact that it never really lets go of the adventurous feel that Dragon Ball let go of during Z.
Flaws : Some people may not like the artstyle. 4kids tarnished the reputation of this series with a god-awful, censorship-filled dub. Some very uneducated people think it's much too kiddie to take seriously.
But the thing that might stop you from enjoying One Piece would be it's ball numbing lenght. The anime has nearly 500 episodes at this point, which is slightly less than DB, DBZ and DBGT combined. Watching all of this would require a massive time dedication. And the manga has 60+ volumes, which is also pretty damn long. And the manga isn't anywhere near it's end anyway.
Now for something a bit more obscure (not that you could truly call anything running in Shounen Jump in the past 15 years ''obscure''), Hiroyuki Takei's Shaman King. It has had an anime adaptation that I've never watched, but I have read the manga back to back.Shaman King is a pretty typical shounen manga about various characters fighting in a tournament and pretty much every trope established by DBZ is used, but with a ''spirit'' theme. But what made it enjoyable was that the characters were pretty well developed through the series and they and their abilities were quite imaginative.
The story is about Yoh Asakura, a young shaman (the universal word in Shaman King for people who can mess around with spirit based abilities) who participates in the Shaman Fight, a tournament that happens every 500 years where shamans from across the earth fight over the right to use the power of the Great Spirit, which is pretty much god, to change the direction in which the future will go and fufill the winner's wish.
Yoh himself doesn't really desire anything, since he acts like he's stoned all the time and doesn't really need anything. However, Yoh's twin brother Hao Asakura, who is quite possibly the strongest Shaman on earth since he commands the Spirit Of Fire, wants to wipe out humanity so nature could rule over the world again. So Yoh's quest to win isn't quite ''I want to make my dream come true'' as much as it's not letting Hao have his wish.
Yoh, who's spirit partner is the ghost samurai Amidamaru is joined by his allies, the ex-delinquent and fucking awesome guy, Bokuto No Ryu (Ryu Of The Wooden Sword) who is partnered with the spirit of the bandit Tokagero, Yoh's rival Tao Ren (the Vegeta of Shaman King), who at first hated humanity in the same way as Hao but then realised he was wrong (thanks to the power of FRIENDSHIP) who is partnered with the ghost of the ancient chinese warrior Bason, HoroHoro the snowboarding nature enthusiast and Faust XIII, a necromancer who has led himself to near-death with his obsession of reviving his wife.
Some anime fans complain how tired a trope the tournament thing is, since it's the cheapest way to get two characters, regardless of their relationship to get in a fight, but I actually really like this cliche, I think it works better than in like Bleach where they just go on a walk and get assulted by someone like in a JRPG.
The interesting thing about the fights is the Over Soul abilities, where they channel the spirit of their ghost partner in to a medium item to generate a spirit-powered weapon (a concept ripped off by Bleach but with cutting the ghost parner part out, altough I think the idea might have originated from YuYu Hakusho), and the Oversouls are inventive enough to seem original without seeming as absurd as some of the Devil Fruit abilities in One Piece.
Biggest flaw : There are no real flaws about it, but it's kind of like the Uncharted series as it brings nothing new to the table, instead just being well constructed. A personal complaint I have is the incredibly wrong way naked feet are drawn by the artist. Oh yeah and also the manga was canceled around 17 chapters before the story could come to it's natural conclusion, but the Kanzenban rerelease of the manga a few years later had the last 17 chapters in it.
Yeah I'd suppose this would be it for the first volume of reccomendations, since the shounen genre kind of is the same thing over and over, and I want to keep FMA, Eyeshield 21, Hokuto No Ken and others which I don't quite consider pure shounen in my hand for a bit longer.
happy holidays, niggili dillilies
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