The Best Battle Manga That Are Actually Finished

Here is the short answer. If you are only reading one, read Naruto. If you want something shorter, read Fullmetal Alchemist. If you want the most story packed into the fewest volumes, read Yu Yu Hakusho.

These five have exactly one thing in common: they are finished, and the English edition goes all the way to the last volume. I have read all five in Japanese. What I am giving you here is my own reading of them, plus what Japanese reviewers say, plus the verifiable facts — volume counts and completion years. I cannot tell you anything about the English translations or the paper, because I have not held those books.

Who this list is not for

If what you want is the battle manga everyone is talking about right now, this is the wrong page. Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, Demon Slayer and My Hero Academia are all either still running or only just finished, and Hunter × Hunter has gone on hiatus repeatedly. None of that makes them bad books. It just means nobody can promise you today that buying in gets you a straight run to an ending. Most English-language "best battle manga" articles put those titles in the same list as completed series with no distinction drawn at all. This page is for the reader who does not want to follow something for forty volumes and then be told the rest is undecided.

How I chose

Three criteria. Complete — including the English edition being published through to the final volume. Volume count and completion year confirmed from primary sources — so that you know the size of the commitment before you make it, rather than just that it looks good. And depth of Japanese reader coverage — with one important qualification: I checked whether a review was actually about the manga, or whether it had drifted into being about the anime. Dragon Ball is the problem case. Most of the glowing Japanese coverage of it lives on film and anime review sites, and standalone articles about the printed volumes alone were hard to find. I say so plainly in its entry below.

The short list

1Best overall

Naruto

72 volumes · complete

The definitive mainstream shonen series, set in a world of ninja villages. The main story finished in 2014, and VIZ has all 72 volumes out in English.

2Best payoff, and the shortest

Fullmetal Alchemist

27 volumes · complete

The shortest series here, and the one whose setup-and-payoff construction Japanese reviewers single out above everything else. Readable over a long weekend.

3Best for disappearing into

Bleach

74 volumes · complete

The longest of the five at 74 volumes, finished in 2016, complete in English including digitally. Opinion on the final arc is divided — I do not hide that below.

4Best density per volume

Yu Yu Hakusho

19 volumes · complete

The shortest run here. Finished in 1994, all 19 volumes published in English. A shonen coming-of-age story that does not take a year of your life.

5Best for reading the original

Dragon Ball

42 volumes · complete

Finished in 1995, and the template a great many battle manga were built from afterwards. In English it exists in several formats, which is worth understanding before you buy.

Where an entry below carries a star score, it is not a verdict on a book I handled — it is a summary of reactions gathered across Japanese review sites, blogs and message boards. I only put a number on an axis where at least three independent sources agreed. Axes where the material was thin, or where anime reactions had bled into manga reviews, get no number at all.

Naruto

Ninja villages, bonds between people, a rivalry that never quite resolves — close to every element of mainstream shonen, running for 72 volumes and landed properly at the end.

It ran in Weekly Shonen Jump, the main story concluded in November 2014, and the final volume 72 went on sale on 4 February 2015. Two phrases keep coming back in Japanese reviews: that it is entertainment brought to a close without leaving its readers behind, and — said without irony — that it works as a textbook for life. It is the longest series here, and what you get for that length is the complete mainstream-shonen experience rather than a sample of it.

Reading it again from the beginning, I keep hitting chapters where some throwaway early scene turns out to have been setting up something forty volumes later, and every time I am surprised again by how carefully Masashi Kishimoto built it.

Execution as mainstream shonen — Japanese reviewer consensus

4.5 out of 5☆☆☆☆☆★★★★★

• Right for you if: you want to live through one complete mainstream shonen series, and ninja, rivals and growing up are the things you came for
• Not right for you if: 72 volumes is itself the obstacle — if you are looking for something that ends sooner, Yu Yu Hakusho or Fullmetal Alchemist is the better call

VIZ has published all 72 volumes in English.

Fullmetal Alchemist

The shortest series here, and the one whose construction Japanese readers rate far above the rest.

It ran in Monthly Shonen Gangan from the August 2001 issue to the July 2010 issue and finished in 27 volumes. Japanese reviews call it the most tightly structured shonen series of the modern era, and describe it as a two-day weekend read that stands as one of the great examples of setup and payoff in the medium — and those descriptions come from independent reviewers landing in the same place. Of the five series here, this weight of agreement about construction only really existed for this one.

When I finished it I sat at my desk for a while with the book closed and did not move. That is how carefully it lands.

Setup and payoff — Japanese reviewer consensus

5 out of 5☆☆☆☆☆★★★★★

Short enough to finish — Japanese reviewer consensus

4.5 out of 5☆☆☆☆☆★★★★★

• Right for you if: you do not have time for a long series but still want the satisfaction of a finished one, and you like it when a story pays off what it planted
• Not right for you if: length is part of what you are buying — 27 volumes is the smallest commitment on this page

VIZ has published all 27 volumes in English.

Bleach

The longest series here — and also the clearest example that "it is finished" is not the same as "every part of it is safe."

It ran in Weekly Shonen Jump for roughly fifteen years, from 2001 to 2016, finishing at 74 volumes, with the final volume released on 4 November 2016. VIZ has all 74 in English, and the last volume reached digital in October 2018.

Something I would rather be straight about. Japanese reaction to the final arc, the Thousand-Year Blood War, is clearly split. One reader poll had "not good" finishing ahead of "good." The people who like it say it corrects weaknesses of the earlier run and praise the art and staging; the people who do not say there are too many characters and the power escalation runs away with itself. The complication is that a lot of this discussion does not separate the anime adaptation of that arc from the manga itself, so I will not claim the split is specifically about the printed volumes. What I can say from multiple independent sources is that the ending is not received uniformly. English-language write-ups treat "74 volumes, complete" purely as a selling point. I think you should know the other half.

How divided the reaction to the final arc is — Japanese reviewer consensus

3.5 out of 5☆☆☆☆☆★★★★★

• Right for you if: 74 volumes does not scare you and you want to live inside the Soul Reaper world for a while
• Not right for you if: you want something that stays universally admired all the way to the last page — this one does not

VIZ has published all 74 volumes in English.

Yu Yu Hakusho

The fewest volumes here, and the most packed into them. The kind of story it is changes three times across nineteen books.

It ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from issue 51 of 1990 to issue 32 of 1994, and finished at 19 volumes.

Describing this as "a short, easy coming-of-age story" misses what it actually does. The machinery of the story is rebuilt three times. It opens as an episodic occult series about a dead delinquent who becomes a detective for the spirit world. The Dark Tournament arc turns it into a full-blown fighting tournament. And the Sensui arc turns away from raw power towards reading your opponent — a psychic-ability battle series. You are reading the same nineteen volumes, but the beginning and the end taste like different books. Japanese summaries of the series tend to cover only the first of those turns.

I fell for this one completely, and it was not the pacing that did it — it was the characters and how the situation between them keeps changing. Enemies become allies; those allies each have something they will not give up; every arc reshuffles who owes what to whom. It is not a story about numbers going up. It is a story about why each person is standing where they are standing. Which is why nineteen volumes is not "conveniently short" — it is impressive that this much fits into nineteen volumes.

That strength of character work shows up in the numbers, too. In both of the in-magazine popularity polls the series ran, the winner was not the protagonist — it was Hiei. Writing in Real Sound, Rio Wakabayashi puts that down to a kind of slack in him: overwhelmingly strong, but hot-headed enough to be argued into silence by the more calculating Kurama, and the gap between those two things is the appeal. Hiei and Kurama were popular enough that the Jump editorial team addressed it in print, and Yoshihiro Togashi himself joked that those two were the real leads by then. Two supporting characters eating the protagonist is something Japanese readers treat as basic background knowledge about this series. English-language lists do not mention it at all.

One more thing worth knowing before you commit to nineteen volumes. This series builds at one speed and wraps up at another. If you have got used to how carefully the middle is handled, the last stretch moves fast enough to catch you off guard.

It was not cancelled. Togashi has explained it himself: his health had got worse, and he judged that carrying on under pressure from the publisher would just mean repeating the same thing until readers got bored — so he stopped, on his own decision. The ending was also planned ahead rather than improvised. Knowing that changes how the last few volumes read. Read them knowing it and they read as a clean exit.

Short enough to finish — Japanese reviewer consensus

4 out of 5☆☆☆☆☆★★★★★

• Right for you if: you want to watch relationships between characters move, you want one dense series rather than a long one, and a story changing genre mid-run sounds fun rather than annoying
• Not right for you if: you want a series that keeps one register from start to finish, or a change of pace near the end is something you cannot forgive

VIZ published all 19 volumes in English between 2003 and 2010.

Dragon Ball

The headwater the other four on this page flow from.

It ran from 1984 to 1995 and finished at 42 volumes and 519 chapters. VIZ has all 42 in English, in a standard edition plus VIZBIG and Collector's Edition formats.

An honest note. Of the five series here, Dragon Ball is the one where I could not find much standalone Japanese criticism of the manga itself. There is no shortage of high praise — that it is imperishable, that rereading it as an adult still works — but most of it lives on film and anime review sites, and I cannot claim it is about the printed volumes. Turning a verdict on the animation into a score for the books would not be honest, so this is the one entry on the page with no rating at all. What I will state as fact is the eleven-year run, the volume count, and the size of its influence on the shonen battle manga that came after it.

One practical warning about buying it in English, because it catches people out. In the single-volume editions, volumes 1 to 16 are branded Dragon Ball and volumes 17 to 42 are branded Dragon Ball Z, even though they are one continuous story with continuous numbering. If you work through the first sixteen and then cannot find volume 17, that is why. The 3-in-1 editions use the original Japanese numbering, 1 through 42, instead.

• Right for you if: you want to read the origin point of the whole genre, in a form that is finished
• Not right for you if: you want to choose based on the weight of Japanese reader criticism — on that specific measure, and limited to the manga itself, the backing here is thinner than for the other four, and I would rather say so up front

VIZ has published all 42 volumes in English.

So which one do you start with?

• If you are only reading one → Naruto. The complete mainstream-shonen experience, all of it
• If you want the payoff, and something shorter → Fullmetal Alchemist. 27 volumes, a long weekend
• If you want to disappear into something for months → Bleach. Just go in knowing the final arc divides people
• If you want characters and shifting relationships, densely packed → Yu Yu Hakusho. The shortest run here, and not the slightest read
• If you want to read where the genre started → Dragon Ball. The one entry here with no score, deliberately

All five are finished, and all five are published in English through to the last volume. Pick one today without wondering whether you are buying into something that never ends.