The Climber

Type: Manga

Score: 10/10

The start of The Climber is bad, like 4/10 type writing completely carried by the art where there is zero subtlety with anything, like straight up the teacher says 'could it be something in his past that made him shut his heart'. It had bad pacing like they said that Mori is changing after knowing him for like 2 weeks and it felt slow and fast at the same time somehow so I probably would have dropped this but apparently after volume 3 the original author left and the artist had to do his job for him, and the artist immediately killed off most of the side characters literally or by turning them into whores. He changed the plot from a sports manga to a psychological manga with climbing as a backdrop to it and the art kept getting better and better and by the final climb it had reached a peak as high as even Berserk and Vagabond in my opinion. The final climb was probably my favourite arc and ending in all of manga and hit so hard not knowing if he would live or die until the very end. I did not move for the entire duration of it. This is peak literally and figuratively (I'm a comedic genius).

Edit: I went a bit hard on the start of the manga it's not that bad, not that good either though.