The Series That Could Have Been the Next Jujutsu Kaisen

hello and welcome to another manga Spotlight so the series we are spotlighting today is Phantom sear it is written by Togo goo and illustrated by Kento matsura I am not familiar with any of goto's previous stuff that theyve Ren however I am familiar with a series that masura was involved in illustrating and that series is Tokyo Shinobi Squad actually series that I've been debating about doing a spotlight on best way I can describe it would be cyber Punk Naruto so if that seems like something that you would like to hear more about just let me

know but yeah he did the illustrations for that and it's it's amazing his his artwork his artwork is freaking beautiful I love it and uh Phantom sear was a series I say was because it unfortunately was cancelled but it was a series that ran on weekly Shonen jump from August 31st 2020 to April 5th 2021 it is a series that kind of just spotlights how cut wrote the manga industry can be especially weekly shown and jump if you're not putting out a immediate Banger uh the chances of you surviving for more than a couple months

just drastically drop and this series unfortunately did not survive the ax so why am I spotlighting it because despite being canceled it's still a pretty damn good series so the basic premise of phantom seere something strange and mysterious occurs you should go to him they say he has psychic powers but convincing him to actually help deal with Fierce Phantoms may be a challenge and the he that they are referring to is our main character Yori katagi Yori is a shaman and Shaman are people who fight Phantoms Phantoms are exactly what they sound like they're basically

ghost spirits uh best way to describe them would be picture curses from jusu kaisen and you pretty much have a phantom and Yori is a really good Shaman however unlike your typical shown protagonist who wants to be the very best Yori just wants to be normal he doesn't want to be a shaman he hates being a shaman he is uh he starts off the series very kind of lazy and unmotivated doesn't want to really help anybody but he continues being a shaman for two reasons one because his sister who is like the most powerful Shaman

in the world pretty much forces him to and two because there is a specific Phantom that he wants to hunt down and Destroy for killing someone that you held dear to him and so he cannot quit being a shaman until this specific Phantom is no more yeah our series follows yot uh he has tamed a phantom called Ang Yoki who uh is like the king of Shadows which gives Yori the power over shadows and Yori can summon anoki for a certain amount of time basically the longer that anoki is in our world the more crazy

and harder to control he becomes so eori tries to not summon him unless he absolutely has to and when he does he tries to end battles as quickly as possible so he can recall anoki we're not actually introduced to Yori from the get-go we're actually introduced to our second main character her name is rku I betsu and rku is a girl who loves to help people her parents are police officers and nurses is and so it's within her blood to like help other people and she has this mysterious power or this mysterious ability to sense

danger when it's about to happen like the first time that we see her use these abilities her and her friend are walking down the school hallway when she grabs her friend the stopper and just ahead of her the windows of the hallway shatter and glass just start spraying everywhere and if her friend had kept walking her friend would have been cut up by by glass so rku is able to sense danger when it's about to happen and Yori gets a message from his sister that hey there's something up with this rku girl call her out

and let's see what's going on so Yori calls her out and uh discovers that there's a ghost that's following rku and as the series continues we discover that rku is a beckoning hands and what that means is a beckoning hand is someone that attracts Phantoms the one that draws Phantoms to them like a magnet and so eori forced to team up with rku because he believes well if this girl keeps attracting Phantoms maybe eventually she'll attract the Phantom that I'm hunting down and eventually not long into the series rku is able to develop her own

abilities her abilities is basically anyone who's watching bleach she kind of has the same ability as uh orime she's able to do like purification bubbles she's kind of able to create Shields to protect people she's basically a support class and so we kind of follow just these two characters for a while until eventually we get our third main character because it's a shownin series you can't just have two main characters you got to have a group of three right two guys one girl that's your typical shownin group and our third character is kenma oawa and

kenma is the complete opposite of Yori while Yori is kind of unmotivated blazy somewhat obnox is Kima is stoic he takes his job as a shaman very seriously he has tamed tenus so his ability is that he's able to manipulate sound waves using his three tenus and his tenus are basically his brothers not biologically his brothers but they were all raised together as kids so uh yeah seeing him interact with his tenu brothers is pretty adorable at times especially later on in the series kimma comes across it's kind of annoying at first but then eventually

he becomes okay he's basically like your Sasuke character your akie character I don't want to say meami cuz meami is pretty easy going from the get-go he basically he turns he starts off as Sasuke and then eventually becomes meami if anyone's familiar with Naruto and jiu kaisen then of course we get other characters that play a parts I mentioned one character earlier uh eori sister Yori sister is Yaya katagi and yaaya is the most powerful Shaman ever or at least that's the way she's kind of portrayed in this series like she's basically op she's Untouchable

she's the Gojo of this series in fact she even has her eyes covered with bandages and she always has a smile on her face even when terrible things are going down so she kind of comes across as a little like uneasy to be around we don't really really get to see too much of what her abilities are we do get a little bit of it but um yeah she's just super overpowered and uh our final character that we really get to spend a lot of time with would be Chihiro kosi he is the uh young

star of the shaman World he's like the new upand comer a lot of people think he's going to be like the next greatest Shaman well everyone else is kind of like teenagers he's the adult in the group he's a constant flirt he reminds me a bit of Sanji from one piece and his power is that he has pyrokinetic abilities he can control fire but he can't create fire so he needs some kind of source and that Source usually comes in the form of a lighter and after the series was cancelled we actually had a special

Phantom Seer one shot and that one shot actually follows Jiro and we get more of his backstory we get a little bit of it from the main run but we get more details in the one shot his back story is basically that he was a shaman with his lover and his lover is the one that's used the the lighter that he always carries it used to belong to her and she was murdered and the reason why she was murdered was because she was with the group of other Shaman and they abandoned her when things got

tough they left her behind and she got over powered and killed and so now he's on this quest to destroy Shaman and one of the Phantoms that he's trying to destroy is this Phantom named synu DOI it is the same Phantom that Yori is trying to destroy so synu DOI is the Phantom that takes on the form of a little girl she's very sadistic she takes pleasure in killing people especially Shaman her current goal right now though is hunting down all the beckoning hands as I mentioned earlier a Beck beckoning hand is someone who attracts

Phantoms and that's what cry Doge's goal is is to hunt down all the beckoning hands and shihiro wants to kill SRE DOI because SRE DOI was involved in the death of his lover Yori wants to kill C DOI because C DOI killed someone that Yori held very dear to his heart someone that he was assigned to protect a former beckoning hand and because because of his failure he let her die at the hands of sju DOI and so now he can't quit being a shaman until he hunts her down and destroys her so s DOI

plays the part of the main villain for this entire series and uh there you go there's like the basic gists of the characters and their goals and powers and the series pretty much just follows Yori and rku for a little while as they're hunting down Phantoms it kind of starts starts off similar to how jju kaen starts off where we don't have like long arcs but just kind of like monster of the week sort of things and then eventually kenma gets involved and then the series starts following like longer arcs where we have uh them

trying to take down sanre DOI trying to figure out clues about where C DOI is and eventually discovering her plan to try to collect all the beckoning hands and Destroy them I do believe that the series got ruined by executive meddling I'm not 100% sure about that but one issue that I had with Phantom sear was that it starts off a certain way and then a few chapters in it feels like it turns into something completely different so it starts off kind of like as a monster of the week and then eventually it turns into

a okay we got to worry about evil shaman we got to worry about powerful Phantoms and then we got this whole cja DOI and what's her deal and even some of the character interactions kind of change so for example Yi starts off as kind of like lazy and unmotivated but that soon drops um rku starts off as someone who can just sense when Phantoms are nearby and kind of attracts them to her and then eventually she gains her own powers like I mentioned earlier and she gains her powers way too quick she literally gets a

one chapter training montage and the next time we see her she has full control over her powers there's no like break there's no period where we have her struggling there's no like actual full training montage it's just not even a full chapter it's just parts of a chapter where we just see her training and then she unlocks her abilities and she has full control over them uh so that kind of like bugged me so yeah it just it feels like the suits at weekly Shonen Jump realized that the series wasn't getting the hits that they

wanted and so they got involved and tried to change it to be more of a Shonen cliche in the hopes of grabbing more readers and then eventually it just got to the point where they're like all right this series isn't getting the views that we want so let's just cancel it and uh yeah it got canceled at the 30 the 30th chapter and it's kind of a shame the reason why I wanted to Spotlight this was because I feel like this is one of those series that just needed to find its identity for example one

of my favorite TV shows of all time is Seinfield Seinfield is awesome it's amazing it's considered one of the greatest sitcoms ever and even as someone who's a huge fan of Seinfield I can admit that the first two seasons of Seinfield are just absolutely terrible especially the first season it it's just God awful and the thing is that it's not until around the third season that it starts to kind of find its identity a little bit and the fourth season is when it really perfects it and from then on out it's just nothing but Banger

after Banger episodes and I feel like there's a lot of manga out there that kind of have this problem where they start off and they might be a little cliche like ah this is something that we've seen before aashan for example is one of those black torch is another example even Phantom Seer I would say is one of them but there's something there while it might be a little bit cliche there there's there's potential and it's just hidden there and it just needs some time to find its identity to find its own Mark and once

it does I think it could have been an absolute banger but it's just never given time to find that and uh that's a problem that we find not just in manga but even TV shows and stuff nowadays I mean the SciFi was was given three seasons to find its group whereas here like nowadays if you're if you don't have a banger from the get-go your show is pretty much cancelled unless it's a show that has a bunch of like messages that Studios want to promote then usually they last for longer than they deserve but the

same happens in the manga world where it feels like you got to come out with an instant Banger and if you don't then you you got to make huge changes really really quickly otherwise you're pretty much going to get cancelled I've seen so many series that have just gone down that path I'm like okay there there's something here so it's a bit cliche it's a bit I've seen this before not really doing anything new but there's something here I just it just needs to find that one piece that it's missing but it never gets the

chance and that's Phantom sear for me Phantom Seer it it has has all the ingredients to be a huge hit it has amazing artwork has pretty cool interesting World building it has characters that are either relatable or sympathetic or characters that you can easily follow uh eori like I said he starts off not the greatest of Heroes in my opinion some people might like him from the get-go I didn't eventually though he becomes a more likable character or at least someone that I can easily follow Ru is a good character right from the Geo pieces

are there and it was just missing that one thing and I feel like it was maybe heading towards finding it and then it just we introduced all these new changes and it pretty much lost its identity and since then it just wasn't long for the world like once I started noticing all the changes I realized okay this series is going to get axed pretty soon and eventually it did and it's just one of those series that it could have been the next hit like I honestly believe it could have been the next jusu kaon and

um it just wasn't long for the world unfortunately it just didn't find that one missing piece and um yeah it's kind of a shame so that's why I'm spotlighting it I do believe that there's a lot of potential here that went missing it's still a good series I still recommend checking it out and and um I'll leave a link to where you can read it down description below but there you go there's Phantoms here A series that just H it it just it kind of hurts to to talk about it being cancelled and stuff because

it it had promise it had so much promise and just something about it just wasn't clicking with the Japanese fans but uh there you go there's Phantom sear I hope you enjoyed the video I hope to see you next time if you got any recommendations for stuff I should check out let me know and yeah if you want to see a spotlight on Tokyo Shinobi Squad the uh cyber Punk Naruto series just let me know but there you go hope you enjoyed hope to see you next time take care later so what did you guys

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