Flame of Recca is a manga by Nobuyuki Anzai that ran in Weekly Shonen Sunday and wrapped up after 33 volumes. It became a minor talking point that it landed on the same 33-volume count as fellow Sunday series Ushio and Tora and Zatch Bell!!, which finished around the same time — but this 5ch thread actually kicked off with someone pointing out that, oddly, the series never comes up in online discussion at all. Posters went back and forth on the quality of the artwork, whether accusations that it ripped off RAVE and Liar Game hold any water, and the odd gap between a series popular enough to spawn pachinko machines and its surprisingly low profile online.
What people said
1AnonymousSep 12, 2026 20:35
Why is that, though?
3AnonymousSep 12, 2026 20:37
Put that way it sounds like Sunday and Magazine are constantly ripping stuff off, but was there ever a "Magazine version of Demon Slayer" or a "Sunday version of Dragon Ball"?
4AnonymousSep 12, 2026 20:38
Bet there are people out there whose kinks got warped by Tendou Jigoku.
6AnonymousSep 12, 2026 20:38
All I ever got from it was "dumb delinquent (yankee) manga" vibes.
7AnonymousSep 12, 2026 20:39
The mom being the cutest character in the cast — way ahead of its time.
9AnonymousSep 12, 2026 20:39
It's not really as much of a rip-off as people make out — about on the level of Liar Game and Kaiji, nowhere near enough to call it plagiarism. RAVE, on the other hand, is blatantly ripping off One Piece.
76AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:34
Re: #9
I own the complete run of both and they're nothing alike. If anything the art's way better than Oda's, and nobody's ever topped the Sieg Hart arc either.
10AnonymousSep 12, 2026 20:39
The early chapters are painfully boring, and once you're an adult you just can't buy into Joker being cool anymore.
14AnonymousSep 12, 2026 20:42
The art was good enough that I could actually get through it.
23AnonymousSep 12, 2026 20:45
Re: #14
It was terrible, though — the only thing he could actually draw was faces in that anime style.
18AnonymousSep 12, 2026 20:44
Right at the start, when the princess got kidnapped, they zapped her with electricity going "it's a human experiment" or whatever — what exactly was that supposed to prove…?
96AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:56
Re: #18
lol
Reminds me of a slave endlessly pushing a wooden pole round and round.
27AnonymousSep 12, 2026 20:49
A manga where "actually, THIS guy is the strongest" keeps getting rolled out one after another — you really feel the padding.
49AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:14
Re: #27
Kurei stayed top-tier strongest all the way to the end, though.
34AnonymousSep 12, 2026 20:53
45AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:08
It really did end cleanly, didn't it.
50AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:15
Re: #45
So cleanly it almost feels like it burned itself out. With Kurei especially, it's like Anzai poured every coolest villain idea he had into that one character and used it all up.
53AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:17
Re: #45
It ended with everyone watching fireworks together, right? That "he's going to live happily ever after with Yanagi now" vibe was a good note to end on.
47AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:11
48AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:12
Majuya — a legend in the world of jobbers (characters who exist purely to get beaten).
51AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:15
Re: #48
Would've liked to actually see what the madougu (magic tools) could really do.
52AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:16
The endgame and the fanservice beat Yu Yu Hakusho, honestly.
62AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:21
The mom is adorable and the heroine is easily the weakest link.
64AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:23
Well, of course — this place is nothing but affiliate marketers now, guys who bought into some info-product scam and can't turn back.
65AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:25
Re: #64
Pretty honest of you. Fine, I'll let it slide.
74AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:32
Couldn't accept how the heroine's fight turned out in Ushio and Tora, so he went and fulfilled his true wish in his own manga instead — a model otaku right there.
101AnonymousSep 12, 2026 22:02
Re: #74
Basically "Boy" from Jump's From Today, It's My Turn!!
79AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:35
The pachinko machine is a legendarily terrible one, and yet they still made it to a third installment — must have a cult following.
90AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:50
Re: #79
Pretty sure it even had a song from some completely different anime in it. Not totally sure, but can that kind of mix-up even happen?
80AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:35
Didn't the heroine's face suddenly change early on?
81AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:38
Re: #80
If we're being honest, Recca's face changes plenty too.
84AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:43
Was it deliberate that Ushio and Tora, Flame of Recca, and Zatch Bell all ran exactly 33 volumes?
86AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:46
Re: #84
Respect for his mentor, maybe?
93AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:54
If he'd worked in a bit of a raunchy rom-com angle a little earlier, being Sunday's answer to To Love-Ru wouldn't have been out of reach. Then again, with Kurei and the other male characters pulling in such a strong female fanbase, fully committing to a male-audience play probably wasn't really an option.
94AnonymousSep 12, 2026 21:55
Re: #93
Sales-wise it was already outselling To Love-Ru to begin with.
99AnonymousSep 12, 2026 22:01
The guy who only shows up for two pages.
100AnonymousSep 12, 2026 22:02
Re: #99
I love how wrong the use of pork belly is here.
102AnonymousSep 12, 2026 22:03
"Domon's strong! Domon's so strong!" — yeah, except this guy just stood there uselessly during the final battle.
103AnonymousSep 12, 2026 22:10
Re: #102
Everyone on their side was useless in the final battle… they were all just stalling for time until Recca showed up.
Background and Key Points of the Discussion
Flame of Recca is a series by Nobuyuki Anzai that ran in Weekly Shonen Sunday starting in 1995 and concluded in 2002 at 33 volumes, with an anime adaptation also airing that same year. Whether sharing that same 33-volume count with fellow Sunday series Ushio and Tora and Zatch Bell!!, which wrapped up around the same time, was coincidence or intentional was never settled in the thread — no clear answer emerged.
Opinion split mainly on two points. First, against claims that the series resembled RAVE or Liar Game, some pushed back that it stayed within familiar genre conventions rather than crossing into outright plagiarism. Second, on the artwork itself, opinion divided between those who felt the art was good enough to make the series worth reading and those who thought the drawing was poor apart from the anime-style faces.
One point readers can easily misread is the thread title’s premise that the series “never gets talked about” at all. In reality, its continued run of three pachinko machine tie-ins shows it has kept a certain fanbase and commercial presence going — this is less a case of a forgotten work and more that it simply doesn’t come up often in specific online circles like social media and aggregator sites.
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