This manga is set during the Tokugawa period, predominantly in Edo. It features the Mushibugyou, which means the Insect Magistrate Office, who are a group dedicated to the extermination of giant insects that appeared in Japan 100 years before the start of the story. It primarily follows Tsukushima Jinbee, a very earnest samurai that joins the Mushibugyou in place of his injured father. He starts off weak compared to the other members, but thanks to hard work and some secret abilities he turns out to have, he quickly becomes one of the most powerful. The plot begins with the Mushibugyou simply defeating random mindless insects thatattack Edo. The overarching plot, which is centered around the origin and true nature of the giant bugs, begins in volume 5 and continues to the end of the manga, with a bunch of smaller character focused stories thrown in in throughout. The plot is solid enough. It’s not amazing and the main themes are the standard shounen stuff like power of friendship and such, but it builds upon itself well with some good twists and ultimately reaches a satisfying conclusion that overall felt very fair.

The way the story flows isn’t very good though. It feels very segmented. It’ll focus on one thing and it’ll go all in on that. And then after that’s over it’ll move to focusing on what feels like something completely different. Everything is ultimately connected, but in the moment it kind of feels like it’s jumping around. This is heavily in part due to how the manga doesn’t really lay the foundation most of the time. It’ll introduce something new and then it’ll just suddenly become the most important thing in the manga. The anime actually did a pretty good job at fixing this, in that it added filler scenes that built up to certain plot points.

Character wise, Jinbee is a generic good guy that just wants to help people without any more depth to him, so he’s certainly not a very unique protagonist. Still, I felt the execution on him was good, in that he’s just so earnest and straightforward all the time that he naturally helps bring out others best selves. Most of the rest of the cast have darker aspects to them, and Jinbee having a positive effect on them and their way of viewing the world is satisfying.

The rest of cast overall are developed pretty well too. Their backgrounds and character arcs aren’t anything too special, but they’re solid enough. However, the issue with segmentation that applies to the plot also applies here. And it really screws over some characters who don’t get properly fleshed out until very far into the manga. For example, Tenma is one of the main characters from volume 1, but he isn’t really fleshed out until volume 24, and he doesn’t have much of an impact on the plot or in battle until then either. The side characters are a mixed bag. The villains I felt are especially bad. Some of them actually worked decently as just cartoon villains, but then it tried to add depth to them by giving them more complicated motivations, but those motivations often just turned out to be really dumb.

The manga also has romance, but it’s kind of half assed. Jinbee has a very positive effect on the mentality of Hibachi, a ninja member of his squad, and Naa, a girl that’s at the center of the mystery behind the giant bugs. As a result they end up falling in love with him, and this is fleshed out reasonably well. There’s also another girl, Haru, who is just a waitress at a local shop without any major plot significance who just falls in love with Jinbee because he’s awesome. This sounds kind of stupid, but in context it felt fair enough. However, there is absolutely zero development on Jinbee’s side of romance with any of them. Despite that, I felt the ending to all this was really good. It caught me completely by surprise in that there’s an actual proper ending and not an indefinite one. It’s one that probably wouldn’t work if the romance was taken more seriously, but this manga did not, and thus for this manga I felt it was absolutely perfect.

The action in the manga was good but not great. There is a general progression to the ability set of Jinbee and Mugai’s abilities and thus their fights are the best because they build upon previous ones. With everyone else it was much more random and thus not as good. The art is okay. The style looks messy, but it’s a manga about bugs in feudal Japan so it fits pretty well. The character designs are a mixed bag, though that heavily comes down to how I don’t really like bugs and like half the characters are bug themed, even the ones that aren’t actually bugs.

tl;dr: A shounen manga that’s somewhat cliche and very messy but still comes together really well.