Kateikyoushi Hitman Reborn! Review: Mainstream Battle Manga

Kateikyoushi Hitman Reborn tells us a story of Tsunayoshi Sawada, who's essentially a pussy of a man. One day he encounters a small infant named Reborn whose job is to make Tsuna into tenth boss of Mafia Family called Vongola.

When I first started reading the manga or watching the anime (can't remember which it was) I couldn't believe my eyes how bad series this was. The first 60 chapters or so represents a sad try to make some sort of gag manga or something like that, but after those sixty chapter the whole series makes a complete turnaround into a mainstream battle shonen. This is also where KHR turns into a readable, even sometimes enjoyable series.

Art of KHR can be described as good mainstream shonen quality when reading chapters from the latter part of the series. It's pretty hard to actually make a review of a series' art that ran for almost a decade, since there are lots of improvements in the art over time. I'm just going to say that the art is good enough, it improved tremendously over the years.

Characters of KHR represent something that I've found too often in several series. The main character isn't likeable in my opinion, so the series has to rely on side characters which in KHR vary from bad to very good. Considering all of them I'd say that the side characters are mostly good ones. Basically everyone except for couple exceptions people surrounding Tsuna are very good characters, but he himself didn't impress me too often.

Story of KHR is perhaps the best part of the series. The whole setup gives the author very much room to make stuff that he wants and he uses that "liberty" pretty well. The arcs are interesting, engaging and well thought, of course if we don't count the first 60 chapters or so that were terrible. Even considering them the author deserves some praise on the storytelling.

I'd say that Katekyoushi Hitman Reborn is a recommended manga for anyone who may have tendency to like mainstream battle manga, but if I'd myself had to read the series from all over again I'd try get familiar with the characters and mostly skip the first 60 chapters. Maybe even skip the getting familiar with the characters part and just start reading from where the quality changes tremendously.