Review: Skeleton Soldier Couldn’t Protect the Dungeon
Poor Mister Skeleton, you’re having a bad afterlife.
It’s a Groundhog day-esque feature of one soldier who’s experienced the death of his friends and masters just enough times to nope out of doing it one more god-awful time. The effect is he gets himself to trip through resurrection…again…and again. I don’t think that was his plan at all, but after his first resurrection ends with his succubus master dying and him desperate to not die, and doing so anyways, he’s resurrected by a necromancer twenty years into the past and decided that he’s not going to let people die on his watch again. From that point, he starts re-experiencing resurrection every time he screws up enough to die. Again.
Thankfully, the manhua doesn’t have us re-experience that too many times to enforce the point that the poor bloke is going through a hell-loop of destiny. It forces him to become stronger and more intelligent as he desperately tries to survive a terrible choose-your-own-adventure-story style life. This type of trope is fantastic for developing OP characters that I adore reading.
I’ve read this one a couple of times now. Three times, I think. Once when it was at 150 chapters, then started over when it hit 265. Now I’m starting it over again because – jeez, when did it go into the mid-300s? I guess if it’s popular and people keep reading it, there’s no good reason to stop making it, as long as the story keeps flowing smoothly.
Honestly, when I got into the manhua the first time, I genuinely liked where it was going and was ready in that 150 chapter area for it to wrap up tidily. Then shenanigans happened and the story got a little lopsided and hard to follow. I figured after the second time I read it, that I’d set it aside, come back to it in a year or two (hoping for a completed manhua) and reread it from the beginning once more to see if the story made cohesive sense at that point.
Genuinely, it does help make a lot of things clear, just starting from the first chapter. The skeleton is sent 20 years into the past from the point that a lot of conflicts happen in the mid-200s section of the arc that was leaving me baffled last time I read everything. Sometimes when it takes a long time to release an entire story, facts get forgotten by the reader.
The art style to this is punchy and decent with solid linework that makes the art feel grounded and like it wants to be a graphic novel. The faces also aren’t terrible. The color work has a bit of an ink or watercolor on thick cold-press feel to it adds nice contrast to the story. It keeps the content on the edge of gritty rather than going with bright, smooth coloration, which might have made the tone a bit more cheerful.
When I said the storyline gets a bit wonky, it’s primarily a sense of scale, and the volume of characters you gradually pick up through the read. At a point, it feels convoluted and you are left questioning if the direction this arc or that arc took was integral to the story. The art style, the action sequences, and the puzzles are what hold the story up through those sagging middles and makes it just a bit more forgiving for turning into such a long-winded piece.
Regardless of it’s length, I genuinely would love to watch an anime of this – at least a 24 episoder done by the same studio that handled Solo Leveling (which I still want the entire manhua turned into an anime for that one, but that’s for a different review). The 3d graphic rendering in that was sublime, and I can imagine it doing wonders with this manhua as well.
Do I suggest it? Yes. When you either have copious time on your hand, or are willing to take several weeks or months parceling it out. I think even if you don’t read much of it, do take a moment to appreciate how many panels the artist had to draw out bones. I can appreciate the amount of talent it takes to just draw a flesh body, the dedication to bone work while accounting for scale and posing is impressive.
