Title: Tokyo Ghoul:re Vol. 9
Author: Sui Ishida
Publisher: Viz Media
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 248
Genre: Fantasy, Battle
Publication Date: February 19, 2019
The Story
Tokyo Ghoul:re Volume nine continues the CCG vs Aogiri Tree battle on multiple fronts once again. Suzuya’s “death” was a simple misdirection as he equips his Arata armor and heads back into the battle. Meanwhile, Akira Mado and her squad deal with Tatara until they receive help from the unlikeliest source: Takizawa! Takizawa enacts his revenge and kills Tatara and wants to be showered with praise for being the hero that helped the CCG take down an Aogiri Tree leader. It doesn’t work but Amon shows up and wishes to save Takizawa instead. A new battle between the two of them commences.
Meanwhile, Kuro confronts Dr. Kano, wanting him to save Shiro but Kano says he cannot bring back the dead. We have a new battle between Kuro and Kano in which Nishiki ends up getting involved as well.
Towards the end of the battle with Takizawa, Akira ends up getting heavily injured and he looks to take her hostage to seal his escape. Meanwhile, we learn that the Washu family has all been murdered except for Furuta who proclaims himself as the new Washu King. It also shows that Furuta has aligned himself with The Clowns.
Another action-packed volume of Tokyo Ghoul. Even though Ishida jumped around from fight to fight, at least he was able to stick with some of the fights long enough for you to absorb them and understand what is going on. It made reading this volume a LOT easier and he was even able to sneak in some character backstories, too!
Characters
The biggest and only real development came from Dr. Kano and how Kuro’s family squandered their fortune because their father was terrible at business. The CCG bought out his debt in exchange for using his house’s foundation as the grounds for Kano’s lab in order to turn humans into ghouls. Speaking of Kano, we were also given a flashback to when he performed the ghoulification process on Takizawa, calling him the only person out of 20 to be a successful owl.
With this, we learned how Kano received his lab and how the CCG was experimenting with turning humans into ghouls. In previous volumes, we saw how Kano defected to the Aogiri Tree which, pretty much, completes his backstory thus setting him up for a death flag.
Outside of Kano, not much in the way of development this time around. We did get a small flashback with Akira right before she was heavily wounded but she was not confirmed dead… at least not yet. Seeing the anime, I already know the outcome of this but I’ll avoid saying anything to avoid spoilers for those who only read the manga through U.S. releases.
Final Thoughts
This volume was nothing more than all action. Sure, we got the nice little plot twist at the end with Furuta and the clowns taking over the Washu family by deadly force but we’ll have to wait until the next volume to expand on that. The battle with the Aogiri Tree is certainly winding down as there is just more death and destruction being thrown at us. The sad thing is, I think there are about as many characters that have died in this series as there are total cast members and the cast size still seems to be 50/50 right now in terms of alive and dead.
I really would love to see Sui Ishida’s workspace. I can just imagine him having this huge wall dedicated to every character he ever created so he could just look up and reference which one he wants to add to the scene. If he’s doing this all by memory then my hat’s off to him for being able to remember a cast of characters this huge along with all of their backstories.
If you love action, you’ll love this volume of Tokyo Ghoul:re. Next volume looks to wrap this up and looks to move the plot/story forward. While I love battles, this is the third straight volume with the same fight. It just gives you a grand view of how large and important this fight is but I have a feeling with Furuta pulling some antics, that this fight will pale in comparison to what is coming next!
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This item was provided for review by Viz Media
