“Worlds”
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Tomohiro Hasegawa
Translation: Paul Starr
What They Say
Third-grader Shota Aikawa’s pet beetle evolves from a larva to a pupa to a superhot human! The wacky adventures of the Aikawa family and the fabulous beetle who would be king now begins! You’re gonna LARVA this new comedy manga!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Moriking handled things well enough over a few chapters to bring things to a close to determine the Forest King title. Tomohiro Hasegawa made clear there’s a bigger picture here with Moriking himself now being the final member needed in order to move forward to find out who would be the Hoshiking, the one that would rule over the planet. With four other members from around the world already picked, Japan was the last one they were waiting on and that means the next phase of the story is close to getting underway.
It’s fairly amusing at first since it comes down to a backyard party at Shoko’s house where everyone is enjoying their victory. But it doesn’t take long to realize that Oka was also there and as part of his loss to Moriking, he basically has to dress and behave like everyone else. Not quite a part of the gang because he’s not got the personality for it but it does come to a place where he’s hanging around in regular clothes and interacting with everyone. If anything, it’s Moriking that needs to get back into regular clothes because he’s enjoying that sumo style outfit way too much at this point.
What shakes things up here is that the Hoshiking candidates start appearing quickly. I honestly expected at least one full chapter of downtime before getting into the next but hopefully, we’ll have some shenanigans soon. For now, we get two of the four that are already out there with Hercules and Cauacsus as they’ve shown up to reveal how the tournament will unfold. There’s some amusing material with all of this before we get the arrival of Menelaus, a butterfly type who acts like a butler, who is basically the conductor/referee for the battles. The tournament itself looks to be a standard bracket type with Moriking at the bottom of it all, and everyone looking down at his particular type of views of how he’d rule,
In Summary:
Moriking still has me enjoying it a good bit more than I expected I would but I’m also wary of it because of the tournament aspect coming up. I can see the pattern easily enough but am more than willing to run with it for a while on the hopes it can shake things up a bit as it has with prior story material. There’s a lot of fun things in this chapter as it gets underway but I do wish it had waited at least a bit more before introducing the tournament rules itself and others.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Shonen Jump
Release Date: November 8th, 2020
