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Title: Voyage of the Shaman
Series: Shaman King #9
Author: Hiroyuki Takei
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Manga
Pages: 208
Format: Digital Copy

Synopsis:

Yoh has broken Ren and Jun out from the dungeon their father has imprisoned them in. Ren insists he's going to confront Yuan again and Yoh decides to go along. They make it back to the hall where they see both Horohoro and Ryu being defeated by one of Yuan's super corpses. It is revealed to be Sha-wen, the old Master we met in an early volume. Jun appears with a fixed up Bai-Long and Bai-Long takes out his old master Sha-Wen quite easily.

Yuan comes crashing down on his throne and begins lecturing Ren and Jun and attacking everyone. Ryu and Horohoro cut his arms off but it has no effect on Yuan and he puts them back on and proceeds to demolish everybody. Ren finally has enough and everyone starts fighting with their “serious” faces on. Yuan reveals he's been pulling a Wizard of Oz for years and then Ren's mother and Grandfather show up. Everyone sits down for a merry family feast. For real. Ren is confirmed as the Tao heir and Yuan gives him some special family sword heirloom. Then everybody high tails it back to Tokyo for the next Shaman Fight.

All the Shamans assemble at an old Military base in Tokyo. Everyone is all chummy when some chump walks up and punches Horohoro through the porch. He introduces himself as Hao and says with absolute confidence that he is the future Shaman King. Hao reveals all the other shamans he's already subverted and tells Yoh to survive so he can be a good servant once Hao is Shaman King.

The Patch reveals a jumbo jet will be taking everyone to the Patch Village “In America” (say that in your BEST Bandit Keith voice). Hao and his confederates begin talking amongst themselves and it becomes obvious that they have inside information about what is going to happen. Turns out that the “jumbo jet” is just an oversoul of the Patch officiants and they dematerialize at 40,000 ft and 700 miles from the Patch village. The test is to survive the fall and find the Patch village in 3 months.

Our group combines their oversouls to create a last second cushion that allows them to survive the fall. The volume ends with Our Gang now in American but clueless as to where to go.

My Thoughts:

The fight with Yuan and everyone else was pretty good. It quickly resolved into the ridiculous and the denouement was Yuan's wife and father-in-law showing up with a table full of food for everyone. I was grinning like an idiot, because it fit, it really did. Unfortunately, the grandfather then goes on some philosophical spiel about good and evil being the same thing and all that mystical baloney. Have to admit, I wanted to shoot him for that. Let's see him talk about good and evil while his guts are coming out of his back!

That Hao. Ugh, what a complete creep! He's so obviously the bad guy that I hate him already. And the fact that he's got an entourage and knows what is going to happen means underhanded skullduggery. Finally, we get a real badguy we can root against!

I was pretty happy with this volume. A good solid fight and the reveal of the slimey badguy. Oh, Dr Faust the 8th and his spirit Eliza show up at the end of volume falling through the air. A guy in a wheelchair cackling like mad at Our Gang (which is what I'm now going to use for the group we've come to know as the good guys) as they flail around at 40,000 ft. How perfect does THAT ridiculous image fit in this manga? It fits just right :-D

★★★☆½ ( )