Blade of Heaven, Volume 1 Book

Blade of Heaven is yet another manhwa around strong dudes fighting for ideals and world domination. Anyone interested in reading it must be warned beforehand that its story is nothing new, following the formula of all similar Korean works (which are in my eyes 45% cheesy shounen-like stories and 45% cheesy romances). As much as I tried to give this work a chance to feel different than the bulk of anything similar, it just failed to impress me after awhile.

The art is ok I guess. There is a lot of simplistic lining going around in peacetime and funny moments, but there is also plenty of cool detailing during dramatic moments or major fights. The characters and their clothes are rather generic in looks while the decorations on palaces and weapons are pretty cool and do attract your eye. Fighting scenes are done in an epic scale awesomeness but tend to repeat in pattern and eventually tire you. Not bad but I have seen better.

The storyline is going fine while still it the first third. It's about the usual war between Heaven and Hell, where there are three super swords that decide the outcome of war. The good sword, the bad sword and the ugly… I mean the neutral sword. There is also a plethora of secondary super swords that aid in a small part the overall battle.
Hold on, why am I talking about swords and not about characters? Well, it ain't my fault, the swords do all the work and the wielders are just decorations with such power their swords possess.
You see, although many characters have various motivations, they can all be grouped as the ones who fight for the control of the world or because they plain like fighting. The simplistic way the story and the cast are built upon make it hard to sympathize with all those stereotypes of a cast. So, if I am to describe them, you'd think I am referring to practically any shounen out there, in the vaguest way. The spunky boy who likes fighting, the gentle girl, the comic relief midget ninja, the cute mascot, etc… They are typical to the point of not paying attention.
The greatest problem lies with the pacing which it's not only taking advantage of the few good ideas it has, it actually manages to ruin them by shoehorning a lot of pointless extra to expand the story twice longer than it needed, while keeping no balance in power levels. For example, the first big bad is the strongest demon. After the lead gets stronger and defeats him, he faces the second strongest demon, who for some reason is equally hard to beat. So he keeps becoming stronger and then faces the third and the fourth, and then the seconds in command of the fifth demon, and a bunch of human strong dudes… and they are all still equally hard to deal with. No consistency at all.

And anyway, as I said it's all about the swords and not the characters because, no surprise, the lead wields the neutral sword and is chased around by Heaven and Hell, who have the other two. And gets to form a team of misfits who possess the most broken powers which so happen to work fine while a step away from death yet are completely useless in any other situation.
If the story had ended right after the conclusion to the battle in Heaven, I would have liked it a lot more. But unfortunately, the mangaka decides to give the lead amnesia (for God's sake, that thing again) and reset everything to now include a war on the mortal realm between two kingdoms. Now excuse me, is the swift from and uber warrior taking on the strongest Gods and demons still be equally interesting as an amnesiac boy fighting typical bandits and soldiers? Not only that, but the story turned from "get the sword" to "random adventures in the wilderness". Even the demons he faces there are nothing but weaklings in comparison to their masters, yet are equally hard to fight.

In all, Blade of Heaven is a completely mediocre yet somewhat entertaining work up until the first third and then becomes a random pile of ideas that randomly occur around random people in random moments. Not really recommended if you have read good fighting shounen and expect something equally good.