FOR THE SAKE OF SPOILERS, I WILL NOT BE PROVIDING SPECIFIC EXAMPLES FOR MY ARGUMENTS.

This manga was painful to watch develop.

You see, I'm not really qualified enough to talk about art and such but what I can talk about is how much this manga fell apart.

You see, I am VERY partial to this manga since it was indeed the first anime I had ever watched from the day it aired. It was my introduction into my now weeb life and what a wonderful one it was.

I remember watching the first season and simply being infatuated with how amazing everything seemed but sadly, this was not always the case.

The quality of the anime started to fall off, albeit the second season still was very good (in my opinion), but this drop-off which took place in the third season spurred me to check out the manga.

Previous to the first part of third season, I had promised myself that I would stick out the anime and would not read the manga since I wanted to finish what I had started in the year of 2015 but, my impatience soon outweighed my self-promises.

As I started to read the manga from chapter one, I was thrown back into the wonder of what I first encountered as a freshman in high school. With this manga came a flood of memories (the most prominent being: when a new episode released the discussions that my friends and I had shortly after watching) and many emotions. Some may say that I am blinded by sentiments but looking objectively, I do believe that Shokugeki no Soma is truly great in its first half. The true turn for the worst is marked by the second trial in the Promotion Exam.

After this event takes place, the manga loses all sense of good character development, good character and story arcs, good character relationships, and consistency which it so masterfully did in its earlier stages.

This dramatic deterioration is most likely what plummeted my ratings to where they stand now (Story: 2, Art: 9, Character: 2, Enjoyment: 1 = Overall: 4).

This is painful for me to write because of my emotional attachment to this manga (and it's anime) but I must be honest. Honestly, you should simply stop reading the manga once the time-skip takes place (Chapter 264).

After this time skip takes place is when the greatest disappointment also takes place. We are now introduced back into the world of Shokugeki no Soma, but this time, we are given the same feeling as if we were back at Chapter 1. For me at least, I felt as though the manga had reset and the Promotion Exams were merely a slip-up in the manga and it would steadily progress. With this time skip we are given hope of the original Shokugeki no Soma that we all know and love BUT, those feelings are quite quickly taken away.

A few chapters into this new arc and we can tell that the manga will never be the same. We know it will never return to its former glory but we press on because of the obligation to finish what we once loved, much like an old married couple's promise to live out their final days together although they no longer desire the others company.

In the latter half of the manga, it seems that the authors simply had given up on putting the same passion into each chapter as they had previously because of the dedicated fan base.

Character development got lazy, extremely lazy. We were fed the same facts and flashbacks over and over with shallow reasoning or shallow attempts at emotion. For me, this lead to characters becoming less and less attached to not only the manga, but to myself. I often caught myself skimming over long monologues which I had once carefully analyzed. The repetitiveness of the manga is mind-numbing.

In the first half of Shokugeki no Soma, character's actions are carefully thought through and logically consistent with their previous actions or decisions but in the latter half, all of this established story and logic falls apart. It falls apart not because it wasn't strong enough to hold itself together, but because things start to contradict themselves. There are many times in the latter half of this manga that I find myself questioning the characters and not being able to come up with logical reasons or examples as to why said action would occur. In the first half, I could quickly reason with myself as to why a decision was made the way it was or as to why an action had taken place.

But on top of all of this, the ending is by far the worst. I will not say any details but this ending single-handedly could have taken this manga from a 9 to a 5. The ending literally leaves an entire arc open-ended and the entire over-arching arc of the manga open. It is so bad it actually feels as if Shounen Jump got bored with the series, axed it, and told Yuto Tsukada and Shun Saeki to wrap it up somehow. The ending was beyond unsatisfying and my least favorite part about the series.

You see, the let down of this manga is one of the worst I have yet to experience (yes, I know My Hero Academia also is quite bad, so far, but I was never really attached to it to begin with). But, even in all of this disappointment, would I recommend reading this manga?

Yes, I would. The feelings cultivated from the first half of the story are priceless and something I will always remember.

Thank you for reading this long, ignorant review.