Zombies. The horror comfort food, that if an apocalypse actually happened without them, people would somehow make them happen just to not have that Y2K style survival book and mental training for a Walking Dead roleplay go to waste.
After all, we stuck them even in Pride And Prejudice, we had them destroyed by Abraham Lincon, and Sankarea exists to ask questions we shouldn’t really ask.
So of course we were gonna have them mixed with historical fantasy, going basically the Onimusha route but during the Warring States era of Japan (as depicted in popular media like Samurai Warriors more than actual historical drama), specifically reenacting the legendary rivalry between Kenshin Uesugi and Shingen Takeda… in modern day.
Mugen Tenshou: Hidden Dragon and Crouching Tiger and Sengoku Zombie is indeed the manga that dares asks: what if Sengoku era zombie samurais happened today, with a darkness castle emerging out ot nowhere, undead warriors of old, and of course Oda Nobunaga emerges as the Demon King that had been planning this while lying in Hell for centhuries?
And what if the beef between the Takeda and the Uesugi continued through the ages, even if now it’s reduced to a civil rivalry between the two families, with the youngest descendants, Kotora and Ryuki, keeping a rival-escque bickering relationship despite being childhood friends, but they don’t know they are also fated to fight, with their family heirloom swords actually revealing to be magical and containing the soul of their legendary ancestors, awakened to fight the reborn Demon King?
Well, it means putting aside the old grudges to save Japan from this growing army of undead sengoku soldiers and having other descendants of legendary historical figures joining the fray…
This action horror historical fantasy extravaganza is written and illustrated between 2011 and 2012 by Shinichi Hiromoto (Hells Angels, Violent Runner Vibrator, Sex Machine, Hokuto No Ken: Jagi Gaiden), whose really rough artstyle i do enjoy and felt familiar…. it was because he also illustrated one of my old manga favorites, Fortified School, i love his rough and rude style and the elongated character designs, but i understand at times it feels a bit too messy and arguably “rough”, very jagged and gritty, which is very punk and really is a distinctive one, which you either love or hate.
It’s kinda amazing that he also worked in providing designs for the Pokemon Gamecube games developed by Genius Sonority, Colosseum and XD Gale Of Darkness, and illustrated some Star Wars manga for Dark Horse Comics back in the 90s.
The main protags have the expected Romeo-Juliet sorta of relationship, declinated to the manga cliches like the girl being a tsunderella and their families handling fairly regular activies (an ikazaya and a liquor store, respectively), and it pretty damn silly, as we have not only samurai zombies, but also magical swords that evoke their weilder spirit guardian/fighter like it’s Shaman King, and we have stuff like a Mori clan descendant, a timid policewoman with the swirly glasses which ransforms into a badass rooting tooting action beauty, like Lunch/Launch from DB if she also physically mutated with bigger bahonkas but transformed back everytime she’s hungry
It’s so all over the fuckin place, with Nobunaga resurrected as the Demon King Of The Sixth Heaven trying to conquer the world, starting by basically making political promises to a disgruntled, frustrated Japanese populace, like removing the US military presence in the country, give instant marternity leave, on top of the “7 magical swords” subplot… but it’s mostly done in a fun way, including extensive history excursus and various puns based on Sengoku personalities, battles and general events feeding history into national mythology.
Even if it doesn’t really excel in anything because this all pastiche of stuff already done to death (heck, even the Sengoku stuff is somehow already a retread of Hiromoto’s past works, he stuck Oda Nobunaga in a story about sex powered android, no joke), it’s a cute fun pastiche but it’s also very short lived, it’s just 2 volumes, and i’d say maybe its for the best….. even if this was clearly meant to be way longer, heck, it literally ends on a cliffhanger that say this was just Part 1, but we never got a continuation and is listed everywhere as a “finished/completed” series, which is technically true.
Though i kinda get why a Part 2 never happened, since this is also nothing special, it’s okay and i mostly liked the characters…. but again, there’s just nothing that crazy, interesting or that good here, and while i enjoyed the manga for what it is, it’s hard to recommend because it teases a new Battle for Odaware Castle…. but it ends before that battle can begin, setting up the stage so it could happen in Part 2, and at least in hindsight it feels reckless to bank on the publisher ever greenlighting a second part, when all of his works barely lasted more than 3 volumes at the very best (Fortified School is a special case because it wasn’t written by him, but Narumi Takeshi).
If you like any of the various thems thrown together here, i’d say it’s worth a read, at least.
This is the kind of a review that usually ends on “and the author never worked on anything else ever since”…. and while afterwards Hiromoto did also illustrate Garo The Bible and contributed a story to the Manga Of The Dead anthology volume, it has been more than a decade since he worked on anything, and Hidden Dragon, Crouching Tiger and Sengoku Zombie is the last work he wrote and illustrated, he hasn’t officially retired or anything, let’s just say him coming back is very unlikely.
