Manga First Impression – Hell’s Paradise

So lately I’ve been ordering a lot of manga. I’m in the mood to discover my next big manga love story. I’ve also not been reading as much webcomics. At least not family-friendly ones. As such, I figured I would switch my webtoon recommendations for manga first impressions until I build up a nice stock of webtoons to recommend once again. That way, maybe you can discover your next big manga love. Get ready for some action and gore with my first impressions of Hell’s Paradise!

Why I Picked up Blue Period

I was hearing about this manga from everywhere. My Twitter feed kept mentioning it, my friends on AniList were reading it or at least planning to and Amazon was recommending it to me. So I figured I should see what all the noise is about.

Official Summary

Even an invincible ninja may not be able to survive Hell’s Paradise!

Gabimaru the Hollow is one of the most vicious assassins ever to come out of the ninja village of Iwagakure. He’s ruthlessly efficient, but a betrayal results in him being handed a death sentence. He has only one hope—in order to earn his freedom, he must travel to a long-hidden island and recover an elixir that will make the shogun immortal. Failure is not an option. On this island, heaven and hell are just a hair’s breadth away.

My First Impression

Oh wow, so this is Annihilation re-imagined as a shonen manga. Interesting!

What I liked

The premise. This is a seriously great premise. The characters are really clichéd but that sort of works with the setting. When you go into this type of weird world-building it’s not bad to have very recognizable character types.

I don’t know where this story is going. Not at all. Hell’s Paradise could remain a superficial if slightly weird blood-soaked ninja adventure story or it could in fact lean into highly allegorical elements and explore a bevy of serious themes. The potential is entirely there for both and that’s really interesting.

Any drawbacks?

To be clear, this isn’t a drawback for me but I have read a lot of my fellow blogger’s posts to know that some readers may have issues with it. Hell’s Paradise is violent. Very violent and full of gore. It does have a bit of nudity but even that is presented in a violent context rather than a sexual one. Strangely, the only even mildly sexual suggestion is the fact that the main character is married and his relationship is very loving and respectful. That should go in the plus section. I’m bad at this.

Anyways, a manga with the title Hell’s Paradise is super violent, shocker, and from what I can tell, it will continue to be super violent.

This is my personal concern, I wish this was animated. At least for me, I would engage with the numerous fighting scenes way more if they were zipping around on my screen and from experience, I can tell the I would bond with these characters much better if there was an actor behind them to bring them to life.

I really want to know what happens but I would prefer it in anime form. I guess I’ll just have to see if it gets picked up for adaptation. This said, I have a ton of manga to read at the moment but when they run out, I will likely buy a few more volumes.

Have you read Hell’s Paradise? What did you think of it?