(art by Irene Lee)
Food Wars! took the world by storm when it was first released in 2013. With vivid illustrations and equally colorful descriptions, audiences were captivated, week after week, by an oddball cast and wildly exciting cookoffs. Seven years after its initial publication, Food Wars! still is widely regarded as one of the best mangas to ever be in circulation, and ardent fans continue to wait for the airing of the final season of its anime adaptation, which was unfortunately delayed by the coronavirus.
That being said, Food Wars! stagnated and only provided an extremely disappointing finale to the seven-year-long series. It became far too predictable, and although this could be attributed to the authors’ consistency, it completely ruined the overarching plot. True, Food Wars! is a cooking manga, but only having cooking battle after cooking battle with little external storyline meant it could be unsatisfactory at best. For example, the deuteragonist, Erina Nakiri, was the only one with a personality arc. All the others remained exactly how they were, if just a little older than in the beginning chapters. After dragging out the possibility of a subtle romance between the protagonist, Soma Yukihira, and Erina, the author decided to introduce a new antagonist – whose only personality trait is his inhuman ability to copy other chefs’ talents perfectly after one look – to throw the three into a lopsided love triangle. The manga lost its flow as it progressed, and it almost seems like the author dropped some of the supporting characters because he was too tired to keep up with all of them. Other characters are introduced in the last few chapters with vague backstories and no actual purpose, raising tons of new questions that the author left unaddressed.
Cliche after cliche ultimately resulted in a limp ending to what could have been a spectacular blockbuster given the right care. The finale to Food Wars! is the epitaph to the brilliantly designed arcs from its early years. So, yes, Food Wars! started with an explosion of flavor and aroma but ended with cold, bland, and uncooked noodles.
