Van takes center stage in the LBX World Tournament, Artemis!
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Hideaki Fujii
Translation: Tetsuichiro Miyaki
What They Say
Van enters the LBX World Tournament, Artemis, and begins to battle his opponents. He’s trained well, but he’s still a noob. Can he hold his own against the best of the best? His father’s true fate could hang in the balance.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Following up on the last volume, we join our heroes at the LBX World Tournament, Artemis. Fresh from his intense training with Lex, Van is pumped up and ready to dive into the competition. When he sees his first opponent, Dak Sendo and his LBX Harlequin, getting warmed up he gets even more excited. However, when the powerful foe prepares to trash his opponent Van’s mood turns sour and he steps in, setting off sparks between the two. When the actual battle starts, Van’s friends step back and allow him to go solo against the tricky enemy. It soon turns out that there are actually three of Harlequin, pushing Van into a corner, but fortunately for our hero he has a trick or two of his own up his sleeve.
For their next opponent, our heroes end up against the eerie Nils Richter. Though Van is still feeling confident, he admits that he actually didn’t manage to master the ultimate technique, Vorpal Vortex, during the training. To make matters worse, thanks to some creepy experiments, Nils and his Judge LBX are incredibly powerful. In fact, after our heroes team up to take down his teammates, Nils’ Psycho-Scanning mode is activated, changing his hair color and making him even stronger! Will Van and friends be able to pull things together to take out this artificially enhanced human?
Finally, Van finds himself in a rematch with Justin. Will his training and modifications prove enough to beat this unstoppable foe? Or will things just end up the same as last time?
In Summary
With this volume, plot is thrown to the wayside and replaced with battles, battles, and more battles! Fortunately, this works out to the series’ advantage, as the fights really do all manage to feel intense and unique. Rather than a slow build, things start in overdrive and only ramp up from there. The central fight with Nils Richter is particularly crazy and feels like a finale in and of itself. Like with the first volume, this probably isn’t for everyone, but if you can get into it then there’s definitely a lot to like here.
Content Grade: A-
Art Grade: B+
Package Rating: B+
Text/Translation Rating: B
Age Rating: All Ages
Released by: Viz Media
Release Date: November 4th, 2014
MSRP: $9.99