Flame of Recca is a manga that ran from 1995 to 2002 that strongly embodies a lot of shounen tropes and structures that came into being during that era. It’s a very typical shounen, but it’s good shounen. The core of it is ancient objects known as Madogu that give their wielders supernatural powers, the vast majority of time these wielders using them to fight each other. There’s an overarching plot that involves ninjas, time travel, reincarnation, and an evil mega organization centered around making its head immortal, but for the most part it just felt like window dressing to provide some structure for the battles and character beats which were what really matters. As such, the manga is incredibly simplistic with very little in of major twists or variety to its plot threads, but that in and of itself makes it charming in a way. It’s a manga you can enjoy just going with the flow on without having to think about it at all.
The introductory arc involves the protagonist, Recca, getting into smaller fights with the rest of the core fighters, beating them, and them all ing him when the first major conflict emerges. The main cast also includes a healer girl, Yanagi, who can’t fight and thus generally serves as a damsel in distress that the rest of the cast has to protect or rescue. The motivations of the cast are thus generally incredibly simplistic, they just want to save their friend. Each of the main cast has background beyond that and some semblance of character and relationship arcs, but they felt pretty weak. There’s not a lot of substance to them and thus the cast ends up coming out pretty flat. Still, most of them can be pretty amusing so it’s enough to get the reader at least somewhat invested in the cast so what are supposed to be heavy emotional beats can land at least somewhat well.
There are a lot of side characters as well and though the vast majority have very little presence beyond the part, they’re relevant in, the manga does often briefly just throw them in again here and there for the hell of it. There’s very little substance but seeing the same characters repeatedly does make it easier to follow along and stay invested. The main exception to the lack of substance would be Kurei, who serves as the first major villain and then as a sort of side villain I guess but not really, and those who surround him. The actions of him and his group during the later portions of the manga don’t actually make a lot of sense, but he and his allies have a pretty strong presence centered around rule of cool so they’re pretty interesting nevertheless. Kurei also has the most depth of any character in the manga, though that still isn’t all that much. And this is a shounen battle manga full of karma houdinis from beginning to end so it’s pretty easy to ignore the villainry.
And finally, the action is pretty great. The power set has a good variety to it and the match ups between the powers of the characters fighting results in some pretty great battles. And while the characters in a general sense don’t have a lot to them, the moment-to-moment interactions during battles were pretty strong as well which once again came down to good match ups. The plot sometimes has to get incredibly forced in order to produce those match ups, especially in the final arc where it felt like half the battles were completely pointless in the grand scheme of things. Still, the way each member of the main cast continued to grow battle to battle while showing off new abilities, the way battles flowed and were framed, the pretty fast but not too fast pacing, and the general sense of impact and weight to the hits made the battles pretty satisfying and fun nevertheless.
The art I think was pretty good in of showing off the action, but was pretty lacking beyond that. The character designs were in general pretty dull I feel and outside of the action the framing and such wasn’t all that great either. The art quality was also pretty high for action related elements, but in general much lower for anything outside that. The cover art I also thought was mostly pretty bad.
