Monster Acacia looks really cool, and the area they were at was nicely designed and drawn. The Blue Nitros each have a nice and unique design and I am interested to see them in action. The fact that Midora, Jirou, and Setsuno are on the move is interesting as well. The plot of giant monster going to eat the planet in 3 months sounds like something epic. Despite all that, I find myself to not care overall about Toriko as of late.
It's not that I think Toriko is bad, I still like a good bit of it. There's just something about how the series has been going lately that I have a hard time pinpointing. Part of it is how the pace is too quick. We had a great bit of build up to the Gourmet World, now we have this rush of collect ingredients to beat giant galaxy monster. When the Gourmet World part started, I was looking forward to seeing even crazier places than we saw before, with everyone going on adventures and discovering ingredients. Instead, we get some small glimpses of areas, but then rush to get ingredient and go on to the next area.
The cooking stuff was a nice change of pace, as we got to appreciate the area they were in a little more and get some build-up to something. Then suddenly we go to the Neo stuff, which even now I care little for their addition to the series. In the end, I guess I just preferred the early Toriko stuff. It was about going to an interesting area, explore the place and find various ingredients which would eventually lead to some kind of conflict. Now, they go to areas because they have to, and focus on the Acacia ingredients because of a time limit. The Monkey continent sounded quite promising, but after one scuffle we went to training to dance off with no exploration of the continent the size of the regular earth.
I'm hoping that time will allow me to warm up to this stuff more, but at least I can still enjoy certain aspects of the manga.
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