Ubel Blatt Review: A Revenge Story That Loses Its Own War

Twenty years ago, fourteen soldiers marched out to hold back an invasion that would have ended their empire. Seven of them came home as legends. The other seven quietly disappeared from the official record, remembered, if at all, as cowards and traitors.

Except that is not what actually happened.

Ubel Blatt, the completed dark fantasy seinen manga from Etorouji Shiono, spends its opening volumes proving that the empire’s celebrated history is a lie, and its remaining volumes deciding what to do with a war that grows too big for that lie to matter anymore. This is my full Ubel Blatt review: a spoiler-free breakdown up front, a clearly marked spoiler section for anyone who has already read it (or does not care), and my honest verdict on whether this one still holds up in 2026.

If you would rather watch than read, the full video review is embedded above and covers the same ground in about seventeen minutes.

Quick Verdict

Rating: 7.6 / 10

Ubel Blatt opens as one of the sharpest revenge premises in the dark fantasy seinen manga space. It stays that way for roughly a third of its runtime, then widens into a full-scale war narrative that never fully recovers the personal focus that made the opening so effective. The early volumes are genuinely great. The back half is a different, messier manga wearing the same title.

Read it if: you want a revenge story with real moral weight, you like Berserk-adjacent art that does not flinch, or you want to watch a supporting cast slowly realize the official history was written by the wrong people.

Skip it if: you need your worldbuilding to stay coherent across the full run, or a war arc that swallows its own plot is a dealbreaker for you.

What Is Ubel Blatt About? (No Spoilers)

Ubel Blatt is set in the empire of Szaalenden, which credits its survival to seven men celebrated across the land as the Seven Heroes. Twenty years before the story begins, these seven were part of a larger group of fourteen soldiers sent to stop an invading force from a neighboring power. Only some of them are remembered as returning victorious.

Into this world walks a mysterious, frail-looking swordsman who calls himself Koinzell. He has one goal: to hunt down the Seven Heroes, one at a time, and make them answer for what actually happened on that campaign twenty years ago. That is the entire premise stated plainly, and it is exactly as sharp as it sounds, at least at the start.

This is a dark fantasy seinen manga in the tradition of Berserk and Vinland Saga: violent, morally complicated, and unconcerned with making its protagonist likeable in any conventional sense. If that combination appeals to you, the opening volumes of Ubel Blatt are worth your time on premise alone.

Series Facts: Volumes, Availability, and the Anime

For anyone deciding whether to pick this up, here is the practical information.

• Author: Etorouji Shiono
• Original serialization: December 2004 to March 2019, in Square Enix’s Young Gangan and later Monthly Big Gangan
• Length: 24 collected volumes (numbered 0 through 23), 167 chapters
• Status: Completed
• Genre: Dark fantasy, seinen, revenge, war
• English publisher: Yen Press, releasing in omnibus volumes
• Anime adaptation: A television anime adaptation began airing in 2024, with an English-language release following in early 2025

Because the manga is fully completed, there is no risk of picking up an ongoing series that gets cancelled mid-story. That is worth something on its own, even before you factor in how the story is actually paced.

Spoiler Warning: The Twist Behind the Seven Heroes

Everything past this point discusses plot details beyond the first act. If you want to go in clean, skip down to the Final Rating section.

Koinzell is a disguise. Underneath the frail exterior is Ascheriit, one of the original fourteen soldiers sent out on that campaign twenty years ago, as part of a group known as the Lances of Betrayal. In the field, the men who would go on to become the celebrated Seven Heroes turned on their own comrades and left them for dead. Ascheriit survived. Everyone else assumed he had not, and he has spent the two decades since letting that assumption work in his favor.

This is what makes the opening stretch of Ubel Blatt so effective. The revenge stays personal. Koinzell is not toppling a government in the abstract. He is confronting specific men, one at a time, and forcing each of them to sit with the truth before he kills them. Watching a celebrated hero’s public myth collapse in real time, in front of the one person who actually knows what happened, is some of the best material in the entire series.

Glenn, the man who orchestrated the original betrayal, is the clearest example of how bold this structure can be. By any normal storytelling logic, he should be saved for the final volume as the ultimate confrontation. Ubel Blatt kills him off less than halfway through instead, and the story is stronger for refusing to draw out that particular fight.

The manga also uses supporting characters to explore the collateral damage of the lie itself. Ichfeis (sometimes localized as Ikfes), for example, has his entire understanding of his own family rewritten in real time once he learns his father was not the disgraced coward the empire’s official history remembers, but one of the men murdered to protect that same history.

Past the midpoint, though, the story changes shape. The personal, focused revenge structure that defined the first act gets swallowed by an expanding, full-scale war. New factions arrive. New magic systems get introduced without much explanation. The tight thesis about who gets to write history gives way to a narrative that is mostly interested in how large the war can get. That shift is the single biggest factor in how this review lands where it does.

Character Breakdown

Koinzell / Ascheriit: The Protagonist

Koinzell works because Ubel Blatt never lets him be a clean, comfortable hero. His war is not abstract. It is a list of specific men who did a specific thing to him, and he is upfront about the fact that killing the Seven Heroes will destabilize an empire that depends on their myth, hurting people who had nothing to do with what happened to him. He proceeds anyway. That is not a writing flaw. It is the entire point of the character: Koinzell is not fighting for justice as some clean, systemic good. He is fighting because the men who tried to erase him do not get to keep the statues.

Glenn: The Antagonist

Glenn earns the word “compelling” specifically because of how thoroughly he seems to believe his own propaganda. Twenty years of being worshipped as a savior appears to have half-convinced him that the myth is simply true, and watching that self-deception meet the man it actually wronged is some of the sharpest antagonist writing in the genre. The manga’s willingness to kill him off early, rather than saving him for a finale confrontation, is one of its boldest structural choices.

Rozen: The Supporting Cast Standout

Rozen starts the story as a genuine obstacle, fully convinced Koinzell is exactly the villain the empire’s official record paints him as. What makes his arc land is that Shiono refuses to rush it. There is no single moment where Rozen flips sides. His loyalty erodes slowly, under the accumulated weight of evidence he cannot keep explaining away, until siding with Koinzell becomes the only position his conscience will allow. Of everyone caught between the official myth and the inconvenient truth, Rozen is the character whose arc the manga completes with the most care.

The Art: Berserk’s Influence, For Better and Worse

Etorouji Shiono draws violence with the same unflinching, texture-obsessed intensity readers will recognize from Berserk. When a blade goes through someone in this manga, you see exactly what that means, in exactly the amount of detail you probably were not asking for.

That commitment is genuinely impressive in the early volumes, where every kill is still connected to the twenty-year lie the story is unraveling. Once the war arc takes over, though, the same visual intensity starts to work against the manga. A hundred meticulously rendered deaths in a row stop registering as individually meaningful. They start reading as background noise, which is a real shame given how strong the linework is on a panel-by-panel basis.

Where Ubel Blatt Loses the Plot

To be fair to the back half, it is not badly drawn or badly paced panel to panel. The problem is structural: the manga stops asking the question it opened with. The first act interrogates what a country does when a comfortable lie is more popular than an inconvenient truth. The back half mostly interrogates how large a war can get before the story stops being able to hold it together.

That shift costs the manga its own thesis. Ubel Blatt is, at its core, about how history gets written by whoever survives long enough to record it, and how much damage that convenient version does to the people who never had a vote. That is a genuinely strong idea. The manga just loses its grip on it right around the point it decides the size of the conflict matters more than the truth it originally set out to defend.

Final Rating and Who Should Read This

Ubel Blatt: 7.6 / 10

What it does exceptionally well:

• A genuinely sharp central premise: a revenge story where the true antagonist is a falsified history, not just the men who benefited from it
• Rozen’s slow, patient break from imperial propaganda is some of the best character writing in the genre
• Killing Glenn well ahead of schedule instead of saving him for a finale is a confident, unusual structural choice

What holds it back:

• The pivot into full-scale war costs the story its personal focus and never fully earns it back
• New factions and magic systems arrive without doing the work to justify themselves
• The ending does not circle back to the thesis the opening volumes set up

Read this if you want a revenge story with real moral weight behind the violence, you appreciate Berserk-style art that refuses to look away, or you want to watch a cast slowly realize the record they trusted was written by the wrong people.

Skip this if you need your worldbuilding to stay coherent for the entire run, or a war arc that swallows its own plot is going to lose you.

It opens as one of the best revenge premises in recent seinen manga. It closes as a war story that forgot which war it was actually fighting.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Ubel Blatt finished? Yes. Ubel Blatt is a completed manga. It ran from December 2004 to March 2019 and was collected into 24 volumes.

How many volumes does Ubel Blatt have? 24 volumes total, numbered 0 through 23, covering 167 chapters.

Is Ubel Blatt worth reading in 2026? The first third of the series is genuinely excellent and worth reading on its own. Whether the full run is worth it depends on how much a sprawling, less focused war arc bothers you. My full rating is 7.6 out of 10.

Is there an Ubel Blatt anime? Yes. A television anime adaptation began airing in 2024, with an English-language release following in early 2025.

Is Ubel Blatt similar to Berserk? The art style and the unflinching approach to violence are clearly influenced by Berserk, and fans of that series will feel at home here. The two stories are otherwise distinct, with Ubel Blatt centered on a revenge plot against false national heroes rather than Berserk’s broader dark fantasy world.

Where can I read Ubel Blatt in English? Yen Press holds the English-language license and publishes the series in omnibus volumes.