Webtoon Review: Doom Breaker

Spoilers for the early chapters of Doom Breaker! Sometimes your find a gem of a story that takes a well-worn formula and…actually does it well. Doom Breaker is one of these. If you’ve browsed fantasy webtoons for more than two seconds, you’re familiar with tales of someone getting sent back in time to relive about ten years of their life and change the outcome. Doom Breaker starts with the “mostly dead but not all dead” hero Zephyr falling in his last stand against the demon invasion of the world. The gods interrupt Zephyr’s last moments to offer him a chance to redo it all. Thus far the formula. So what makes Doom Breaker better than average?

Review: I’ll boil the answer down to three things. First, Zephyr gets to keep his knowledge of the future—but only his knowledge. All of his other assets—skills, stats, artifacts, etc.—have to be earned all over again. Even if knowledge of the future confers a huge advantage, he still has to come up with plans on his own, and he’s not innately OP. So you can feel actual stakes involved when he takes a risk (and the plot is not above unexpected wrenches into his plans), even though we know in the long run his plans have to more or less work out. That alone sets this apart from a lot of stories built around the “decade do-over” trope.

Second, Zephyr does get some pretty sweet perks from the gods—but they’re all proverbial double-edged (or triple-edged) swords: OP buffs that can only be used three times in his life; spells that negate damage until the user runs out of mana, at which point all the damage hits at once with a vengeance; death-dodging blessings that leave the user a mind-slave of one of the gods; and so on. You see, the gods aren’t even pretending to help Zephyr out of any altruistic sense; they just want entertainment. This leaves Zephyr bending over backwards to find ways to use the divine perks without getting hit with penalties—like playing the gods against each other. (Ok, now that was fun to watch!)

A lot of heroes in parallel works have OP skills without any real drawbacks; in Doom Breaker, the drawbacks threaten to negate the value of the OP skills altogether. Equivalent exchange, if you will.

Third and finally, the plot clips along at a rapid pace, with chapter after chapter creating what is basically a cliff-hanger conga line. I’m some twenty-odd chapters in at this point, and while there are some moments to take a breath within the chapters (Zephyr’s encounters with the nun White Rose are particularly fun, like when she casually and cheerfully suggests he sell off his organs to the Church), the ends are never so amenable. No need to eat dinner, kids, at the rate you’ll be bitin’ your nails!

So head over to Webtoon.com to read the series for free, or pick up the paperback over at Amazon! (As always, buying on Amazon helps the author and your resident blogger.) And when you do, say hi to Zephyr for me, because he should know me pretty well—we’ve been spending a lot of time together lately!