I picked up this manhwa a few months ago because a lot of my friends were raving on about this nonstop and I saw this being on the top 30 manhwas in MAL.
Noblesse is that manhwa where everybody hypes up to be the THING. But for me its just a shounen manhwa bordering between a 7 and an 8 on the first half and a 5 or a 6 in the second half.
I will admit even if the art is a bit average to say the leastas far as Korean manhwas go I can say its slightly distinct against the cesspool of average works in the same genre.
The arcs go up and downup meaning slightly average down meaning average as hell and I had to will my horny on main self to keep reading it till the end for me to make some sort of opinion about it. It was a very arduous journey to self control from reading Tower of God for the umpteenth time.
Before we move on I will preface by saying I actually enjoyed reading Noblesse before it devolved into a painfully average piece of work. I like the way it delivers dry humor and the character designs were actually really good.
My biggest gripe about this manhwa is the fact that the dialogues are very tongue and cheek a pain to read and are unnecessarily long. We readers dont need to hear their monologues for the millionth time. We get it you love humans at the point of sacrificing yourself. The author only needs to put that in our face once.
I tested the waters and read 5 chapters without skipping or skimming any dialogues and my god I never wouldve thought to be more bored than having to survive a day on a blackout.
And it took me 1 hour to read it all.
But my efforts werent wasted for nothing as I realized at that point that nobody needs to read all of these theyre the same thing repasted and the characters always repeat themselves. I would appreciate it more if the boring dialogues and expositions be paired with some visualization like what Nisio isin did with the manga adaptation of bakemonogatari. This is awful writing on its finest and it is disheartening that not many people noticed that. Might as well write a novel if the author wanted to and it wouldnt make any difference.
The second thing I noticed that the manhwa delivered awfully is the characters. We have raizel the handsome Kuudere bae that I really wanted to like because of that quirky personality of his but the execution of Raizel in the manhwa just fell flat the more I think about the character. Instead of making him this reserved and cool character hes a one dimensional character that was eventually downgraded to a boring deus ex machina.
Frankenstein is a henchman of Raizel and I cant seem to grasp why he submitted himself to Raizel at first sight. A good reason for this is the fujoshi fanbase. I never realized I read a whole fujo bait piece of work without even realizing it.
Taesoos dynamic with Ken Kitano was way more believable than Franks and Raizel to be honest. Both dynamics are surface level but there was way more character in the former the more we see them having a conversation. Whereas Raizels speech bubble were mainly composed of trails of periods.
I dont need to go over all the characters because of how forgettable they are. The orange haired guy is basically beta Itadorifrom Jujutsu Kaisen. Apart from him all others were very very forgettable.
The art quality is a gradually evolving thing you see in mangas where the artist uses his/her work to improve his/her skills because it is a weekly release. This in itself is a double edged sword because 1 One can appreciate that this artist wouldnt settle for less but 2 its very hard as a reader to go back to that scene in the first chapters. Thats kinda why I never would want to read the first 50 chapters of Tower of God regardless of how good the story is. The moment I see a butt ugly panel of Endorsi my Waifu thats where I draw the line.
And then... Theres the plot progression.
I already mentioned before that I preferred the first halfchapter 250 and below rather than the second half.
Heres why...
The way that the manhwa ended in a semicliffhanger didnt sit well with me. Not to mention it ended in a flash and I was never given the chance to absorb what was going on. Its not a cliffhanger as much as its an open ended one. The only resolution we get is the bad guy dying and thats itI wont get to too much spoilers.
But thats not the only problem I had with the second half. I also mentioned before about the lame ass dialogue of the characters they all happened on the second half. At that point they were just spouting nonsense over and over again that those were the times when I repeatedly put this manhwa on hold.
Also forgot mention that on the second part the manhwa took itself too seriously and there was no point on getting invested to anything: to the characters nor to the story. The comedy skits they used always do in the beginning were just thrown away and the first human character to appear in the first chapter and his friends were downgraded to mob characters until the last chapter.
Plotwise I could not remember a single thing about the second half and I wont bother to remember it. The formulaic pattern I remembered was: bad guys appear and wreak havoc good guys are notified big battle commences bad guys defeated. It was rinse and repeat until the last big battle and the finale flopped.
Whether or not youre willing to read it to the end youre not missing much in the manhwa world. Im not gonna stop you from reading Noblesse but if you want a manhwa that structured its story and characters very well even in the long run read tower of god. You wont regret it.
65
/100