Bought this to read the final published work by Kazuki Takahashi, whose YU-GI-OH! manga was a big deal for me in middle school. Sadly it’s a bit of a dud. The story, which sees Tony Stark and Peter Parker rendezvous in Tokyo to battle a villain best described as the off-brand lovechild of Seto Kaiba and Doctor Octopus, is about as rudimentary as you can possibly get, without any clever Marvel-brand one-liners to spice things up and lots of awkward “Japanglish” terminology left untouched in translation. It quickly becomes apparent that this mainly exists for Takahashi to draw big action panels with his favorite Marvel characters, mano-e-mano action scenes being something he rarely got the chance to do in the past.
The results are mixed: character designs and coloring seem to be limply masquerading between Takahashi’s familiar style and modern American superhero comic pastiche, so I doubt they’ll thrill fans of either. Things step closer to Takahashi’s comfort zone when he introduces a sort of hydra-like alien cyborg creature, the kind of supple metallic monstrosity he always loved to draw, and lets the superheroes fly and dance around it in more traditionally manga-style action layouts. Spatial coherence and motion were never his strong points, though (compare other action-oriented Shonen Jump artists like Masashi Kishimoto) and the big fight scene that takes up more than half the book degenerates into a repetitive stream of swings and staredowns well before the end.
Overall not a major project for Takahashi so much as a middling experiment - one over which he may not have enjoyed all that much creative freedom, given the combined editorial hands of Jump editors and Marvel branding suits involved. It’s a disappointing closing note on which to cut his career short. If you want a better sendoff to Takahashi, I recommend either the DUEL ARTS artbook (regrettably out of print at the moment) or the film YU-GI-OH! THE DARK SIDE OF DIMENSIONS, a surprisingly thoughtful epilogue to the original manga for which Takahashi wrote the screenplay and designed new characters. Both are more fitting tributes to Takahashi at his unconstrained, endearingly bonkers best, piloting his most beloved creation into the sunset.