Now that the sequel to The Breaker which I reviewed a while ago as been going for some time I think it’s time to give it a look and see if it’s any good. If you missed my review of The Breaker I thought it was pretty excellent with outstanding action scenes and a well told story. Also it did help that the character designs, especially the women, looked very nice indeed. The staff for the sequel has been a bit reshuffled which initially made me pretty worried if it was going to be able to live up to the original. Also given the way it ended the story itself will ultimately be a different one since the master-student relation ended which was such a central part in The Breaker.

The sequel starts off at some undetermined time after the original where Shioon has started going to school again. Since he had his Ki center destroyed by his master in the original he’s a pretty terrible fighter as he runs out of stamina quickly. He’s trying to exercise to get over it, but it doesn’t seem to work. Despite the efforts of his master to get him out of the martial arts world there are some people targeting him. Reasons for this are unknown and to top it off he gets a bodyguard to help him against these attacks from some people he doesn’t want to have anything to do with anymore. Most likely this of course has to do with his master and whatever he is up to, but again the real reasons and the players involved remain a mystery for some time. That’s how it starts anyway.

At the start Shioon can’t fight, but various things happen that motivate him greatly into somehow becoming able to fight again and sure enough he does grow his fighting abilities as the series goes. It took a while for the story to really hook me, but it wasn’t bad or anything at the start. Once I did get engaged in the story for real I thought it was pretty excellent and some of the fight scenes were really fantastic. All the worries I had about the series dropping in quality with some staff switches are pretty much gone now that I’ve read it and it’s still very much The Breaker which I liked so much. Shioon grows from being a weak student into someone who can actually take down some pretty mean dudes and returning from the original is his ability to make all the women around him love him.

I have to bring up the distribution of this manhwa since it’s actually an issue. The creators of the series took issue with the ease of which everyone could read it on other sites than the official one, so the scanlators put a huge “NO ONLINE READERS” on all images of several chapters. The only way to read it as far as I can tell without this annoying text is to read the Korean original version, but since I can’t read any Korean that becomes a bit annoying. Chapter 8-17 have it the worst and then thankfully the scanlators removed the watermark for a while until they then got it back a few chapters later on, but in a less heavy handed version. Thankfully more recent chapters don’t have the watermarks at all. I do think this severely impacts the enjoyment of the series, but right now there’s not much you can do about it in the affected chapters. An official English release would of course solve this, but as we have to make do with scans for now it will be something we have to live with.

If it wasn’t for the heavy watermark usage on some images (which I avoided taking pictures of btw) I’d say it lives up to the art and choreography of the original. As it is now some fights do come across in all their glory while you in other cases only get maybe 80% of the intended impact due to the overlaid warning text. Somehow the watermark issue will be solved in the future I think with either new scans or a proper English release, so to be fair I think it does live up to the original. There are several new characters both male and female and they mostly look great. The women are hot and kick ass rather well and Shioon as does make some nice expressions when he’s in tough fights. He works well as the main character I think even if he does tend to look weak most of the time.

Worthy sequel? I’d say so and I recommend you give it a look if you liked the original. Well you would probably have done so anyway, but now that it’s up to around 37 chapters there’s actually something to read of it. It will probably be long before it’s finished, but the story is interesting and the action is first class. If you haven’t read the original I highly recommend you do so and if you can’t get enough there’s actually something to read afterwards now that the sequel has been going for a while and turned out to be just as good.