Hello everyone, today I am going to review a manga series about a young pain in the butt boy with light-colored spiky hair, weird facial markings, a large appetite, and who happens to be the vessel for a being of pure hatred and evil.
No.
Thankfully I am not talking about Naruto. No, today I will be talking about a series called 666 Satan created by the younger twin brother of Naruto’s Masashi Kishimoto, Seishi Kishimoto. The story of 666 Satan begins with a young teenage girl named Ruby Crescent traveling through a desert wasteland looking through ancient ruins for artifacts called O-Parts. These O-Parts have a wide variety of powers and come in all different shapes and sizes, from a small pendant to a giant airship.
One day while heading towards the next set of ruins on her journey, Ruby is saved from a gargantuan turtle by the main character of the series, Jio Freed. After saving Ruby, Jio and Ruby become friends and they discuss what their personal dreams are. Whereas Ruby’s personal dream is to find O-Parts, particularly powerful ones, Jio’s dream is much more simple and straight forward; he wants to take over the world.
Of course!
Jio, however, has some character traits that he does not know about until he meets Ruby. It turns out that Jio is an O.P.T., or O-Parts Tactician, meaning he is one of the few people in the world that can use O-Parts. Jio learns that the giant boomerang he was carrying around for the last few years was an O-Part and its ability is that multiplies strength, explaining why a wooden boomerang was able to cut through a lot of things. Another thing we, the reader, learn about Jio is that he shares his body with Satan, the lord of Hell himself.
Whenever Satan takes over Jio’s body, Jio’s hair turns entirely white, all of his wounds heal, and the mark of the beast, 666, appears on his forehead in Roman, Arabic, and East Asian numerals. Jio has no recollection of when he turns into Satan and in Jio’s past, whenever Satan took over, it usually meant someone would end up dead, thus making Jio a lot of enemies.
Jio and Ruby decided to travel together in hopes of helping each other with their dreams and helping Jio with his past. After a few chapters Jio and Ruby run into the third main character in the series named Ball, a young resistance fighter in a town in which its government has enslaved the people to dig for a very powerful O-Part. Ball’s dream is to become an O.P.T. so he can protect his sister and help free his town.
Unfortunately for Ball, 666 Satan is a shonen manga series so it needs a token comedy relief character, and Ball’s that character, being the butt of many jokes after his introduction. Actually, even his introduction was a joke.
Pictured: Comedy
While fighting a strong O.P.T. working for the government of the city, Jio’s O-Part gets broken, so Ball takes Jio to an O-Part inspector living nearby so he can fix Jio’s O-Part. The inspector turns out to be a mysterious man with white hair named Kirin. Kirin agrees to fix Jio’s O-Part, but explains that it will take a while so he wants Jio and Ball to pass the time by playing cruel looking “games”. When Kirin is finished repairing Jio’s O-Part, which now has a new shape, he explains to both Jio and Ball that the games he had them play were actually O.P.T. training, thus revealing that Ball was an O.P.T. all along. Kirin gives Ball an O-Part, a spherical stone that Kirin used as a pickling stone. Its power is magnetism, meaning it is moved around by changing its magnetic pole.
Ball and Jio take their new O-Parts and their new skills back to Ball’s town and help free it from its oppressing government. Afterwards, Ball, Jio, and Ruby head out together on the same adventure. The rest of the series deals with Ball and Jio taking on other O.P.T.s, as well as the main government of the area. Along the way Jio and friends run into other characters who are the hosts of various other angels and demons from the Judeo-Christian religions.
Artistically, 666 Satan has a similar art style to Naruto, but this was unintentional. Seishi Kishimoto was heavily criticized for copying Masashi Kishimoto’s art style, but the two brothers have said over and over they only have similar styles because they had similar influences, like Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball. While in Naruto, Dragon Ball’s influence is not too obvious, it is more so in 666 Satan. The setting is very reminiscent of the setting in Dragon Ball. In addition, several characters in 666 Satan are like characters in Dragon Ball. For example, Jio, Ruby, Ball, and Kirin are a lot alike Goku, Bulma, Krillin, and Master Roshi, respectively.
In regards to length, 666 Satan is comprised of 76 chapters which have been bounded into 19 volumes and have been translated into English by Viz Media. For hopefully obvious reasons, when Viz brought 666 Satan to America, they changed the name to O-Parts Hunter.
666 Satan is an interesting series that I suggest any fan of shonen manga should check out if they have not yet. You can buy copies of the official release online at http://store.viz.com/search.htm?keyword=O-Parts+Hunter or at any retailer that carries manga.