Claymore starts off full of mystery and suspense in a world that slowly reveals itself to you. The relationship between Raki and Clare is one of the strongest points and the action is killer good. The first half of the manga is dare I say almost perfect. It pulled me in so much that I bared through the second half which is where Claymore lost my interest and my hope for it's future.

While reading the manga the half way point should be fairly obvious (not going to call it out for spoilers reasons.) The second half starts with promise but soon descends to fights you don't care about and characters getting screen time that they don't deserve. For the majority of the second half Clare and Raki are no where to be seen which as I said earlier is one of the strongest points of this manga. A lot of new characters are introduced on the fly and the author acts like you care about them almost as much or more than the characters you've been with since the very beginning.

To make it worse bad guy after bad guy pop up almost instantly one after another. The bad guys have no back story and are just "pure evil" which is fine but you know they'll just die and be replaced in 5 chapters.

Now I did still enjoy Claymore overall not as much as I could have but it's first half is good enough to pull this manga up from the depths. Although the second half hasn't impressed me too much I still have a shimmer of hope for Claymore as it continues.