User blog comment:IamJakuhoRaikoben/Chapter 431 & 432: My sword is... & Brair in Love, Review./@comment-1776824-20150428200536

What worries me now is that Team Natsu is so overpowered that there may not be any one group of people who can challenge them. Right now the only kind of threat they have against them is Zeref himself. The person out of the bunch who worries me the most is Erza. Should there be any person out there aside from Zeref who can challenge her and pressure her, Kyouka kind of ruined whatever sort of opposition she may face, though mostly in power.

But let's talk about the actual chapters.

Chapter 431 This chapter was pretty bad. The first part of it was alright, especially the Lucy bits. Gray was being pretty smooth, and I have to say that watching him casually take out the mass amount of minions was hilarious. Briar gave us some kind of ominous hope that they would be able to contend with Team Natsu, but I'll get to that later. It was after Jerome decided to fight that things went downhill. While seeing Erza use an actual, and new, armor was awesome, what transpired after it was total crap. Being a fan means realizing that sometimes things are just total shit, and Jerome had the potential to give Erza a real fight with his sword that corrodes whatever it touches, but in the words of Misk, nope.jpg. Erza has a sword that gives her the ability to strike people without them even knowing they've been struck, and Jerome goes down in one hit, even though he's been built up to be this total strong badass. He and Briar were my only real hopes at strong Avatar members, outside of D-6. Disappointment hit me hard. Score : 4/10

Chapter 432 So how this one started out was Briar calling Gray out on his shit, which was pretty cool. Briar was the only one who fully trusted him out of the group and 100% advocated for his loyalty, so seeing this was good. Though Gray is still hitting home with his obsession for the Book of E.N.D., however I liked it much more when he was like, crazy obsessed. A loose desire to find the book doesn't really suit him considering he's so gung-ho about fulfilling his father's last wish. It's contradictory, to me.

Meanwhile, we have Mary, who goes back to Lucy and has a pretty dangerous kind of magic. She can create viruses (and makes a joke about shitting your pants, lol) that can attack any part of the body. Here it is made clear she is not a fighter. Her magic serves a sort of eerie, long-range kind of purpose in combat, so I have to say, her joining the front lines in general was pretty cocky. She is defeated by a pretty sweet Lucy Punch after Wendy and Carla show up, with the former removing the virus from Lucy's body, before it can reach her brain, with some (new? I don't know. Their effects are exactly, to me, like Raise and Re-Raise :/) spells.

So we go back to Briar and we get to see Briar's nice Clone Magic, which splits her body into four (I'm assuming that the clones remain the same as the original in power, otherwise why bother), each with a different aspect of her personality. We get some lels when we find that Briar was crushing on Gray, and even more lels when Juvia shows up and kicks a clone's ass. Gray freezes the other three without a sweat, and then they both strip (an acquired habit?) and proceed to fight together. So then we find that Wendy can go Dragon Force of her own will, and then Avatar continues to get demolished. >_> Natsu confronts Arlock and he reveals that he predicted all of what was to happen? Heh? Then he talks about this thing called Ikusatsunagi, and that when it shakes the earth, they're going to win.

So where I had my biggest problem with this chapter was that Briar was Avatar's strongest member, and she was rekt so hard. Aside from that, it was leagues better than the first one because it had more redeeming aspects than not. Score : 7/10