Manga series · Original series

Bakuten Shoot Beyblade (manga)

Bakuten Shoot Beyblade is Takao Aoki's manga adaptation of the Beyblade toy line, licensed in North America by Viz Media and in Australia under a separate, earlier translation. It follows Takao Kinomiya's rise as Japan's top Beyblader after receiving Dragoon, teaming with rivals-turned-friends Kai, Max and Rei as the Bladebreakers to face the villainous Demolition Boys, run by Volkov, and later spun off the sequel Bakuten Shoot Beyblade: Rising.

Key events

  • Second installment of the franchise, following the Next Generation Beigoma Battle video game
  • Received an anime adaptation of the same name that began airing in 2001
  • Ended its run in 2004 alongside declining franchise popularity, leaving a roughly four-year gap before new manga or anime
  • Daichi Sumeragi's separate 'Gaiden' side chapters were folded into the main storyline and later fed into G-Revolution
  • Was succeeded by the sequel manga Bakuten Shoot Beyblade: Rising starting in 2016

Differences from the anime

  • The anime progressed faster than the manga, so it references little of V-Force, tying instead into the start of G-Revolution
  • Overseas fans have often mistaken the manga's name for the whole franchise's name, since it was the only manga localized in the West until Beyblade X two decades later

Claims We Could Not Check

Attributed, not verified by us

  • Chapter titles only appear in the Shinshoban reprint volumes; the original CoroCoro serialization ran untitled
  • An Australian English translation predates the American Viz release by roughly a year
  • Early chapters referenced Beyblade Fighting Tournament tie-in Beyblades based on the Dranzer, Driger, Draciel and Dragoon archetypes