Sidonia no Kishi
Knights of Sidonia

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Knights of Sidonia manga was Tsutomu Nihei's take on the Mecha branch of Sci Fi genre. All of Tsutomu Nihei's works are Sci Fi, he is a Sci Fi / Cyber Punk mangaka. All of Tsutomu Nihei's works are connected, they share the same Universe, but the characters and places in each of his mangas are different.

If you read one of his works like The Blame! before reading Knights of Sidonia, you have seen familiar names like Toha Heavy Industries and Graviton Radial Emitter in the manga. Toha Heavy Industries was the big corporation which developed all kinds of technologies from mechas to Graviton Radial ... Emitter, super weapon (which was the most powerful weapon in Nihei Universe) in Nihei's mangas. Knights of Sidonia's story was about some of the remaning humanity's existential survival against a no negotibale, bearly sentient alien beings called Gauna and a human scientist. I liked all the characters and wanted them to win against Gauna and the mad scienteist Ochiai. Ochiai had his convincing reasons to do what he did as he explained his motivations and purpose in the end of the manga, he wouldn't shy away from any kind of immoral act to achive whatever he thought necessary including inhumane experiments which could be considered taboo, murder and even mass murder... You know, the kind of personality that comes with being a mad scientist... HA HA

The Manga was Lgbt community friendly in a futuristic way. One of the main characters, Izana Shinatose was a geneticly engineered person with both male and female genitalia. He/She could swing both ways according to male or female person, he/she liked and could even give birth to a clone of his/her self without needing any partner. he/she was one of the 3rd gender persons in the fictional future of Knights of Sidonia. All the people on board of Space Ship Sidonia were geneticly engineered, (it was necessary for the survival of humanity at some point in the Sidonia's history.) most of them could photosynthesise and eat only once a week.

The Protoganist Nagate Tanikaze was the ace mecha pilot of The Space Ship Sidonia and he had a harem... HA HA I don't think i can name all the girls in his harem but i will try, Izana (3rd Gender), Teruru (a cybernetic girl), Tsumugi (a gauna, human hybrid), Yuhata, Captain Kobayashi and even some of the Honoka sisters (who were like 8 same looking clone girls or something). I think Nagate nailed Kobayashi at some point (high five), there were hints but it was ambiguous.

I tried my best to give a review to the manga without spoiling it. hope you liked what you read and give a shot to the manga.

Years. For years I had an idyllic vision of how Knights of Sidonia would end. Heroic sacrifices, ruminations on loss, heartbreak, and the futility of a never ending battle, an epic, possibly tear-jerking conclusion to Sidonia's story.

But no.

Knights of Sidonia might have the most disappointing ending in all of manga. Characters arcs are thrown in the trash; plot lines come crashing down in flames. Carefully cultivated motifs that run throughout the entirety of the first 2/3rds of the manga are jettisoned in favor of a long, hard to follow action scene and a generic boss battle. Then, tragedy. We're subjected to the most sugary, cop-out, ... series ruining ending ever. The last 10 chapters reduce Knights of Sidonia to a mediocre manga. The last 10 pages reduce it to a dumpster fire. I...didn't understand. Did Nihei lose interest in the series as time went on? Was he told he had 6 days to complete the last 30 chapters? WHAT HAPPENED?

I usually loath reviews that try to utilize some sort of math or algorithm for the score, but I just can't resist it this time: Knights of Sidonia Chapters 1 through to whenever that dumb robot randomly shows up for no reason - 9 out of 10. Knights of Sidonia dumb robot through to opaque, tensionless action scene - 6 out of 10. Knights of Sidonia ending - 1 out of 10.

16/30=0.533X10=5.33.

For nostalgia's sake I think this is a fair score. I see now that my dreams of a 3rd season were woefully misguided.

You might look at this and say wow, it looks pretty good not to mention the artwork looks amazing!
But holy Christ I can write a paper on why I hated the story (and how the ending completely ruined everything for me).
I'll save that for the last part because I can rant on that forever.

Art:
It looks great, down to earth and rather realistic in some cases. The detail goes down hill a bit for me as it continues on but overall it's rather great. Not the best as it tends to get sloppier in fights or even towards the final few chapters. It isn't the ... most beautiful, but it isn't horrendous either. Bonus points since I like Mecha.

Characters:
They have good flow and interaction with each other as time goes on, and the impacts they have on each other is very great. The MC with his first love interest was great, and throughout the entire story made sense why he was so focused on here. Even if it was obsessive at one point. The characters feel somewhat alive with the doings and personality. Later on, towards the ending, the MC's obsession with his first love interest in my opinion goes way too far. I'll touch up on this in the story section of the review, but overall most of the characters don't seem too bland or awful.

Enjoyment/story
"Why did you give enjoyment a 10 outa 10 if you rate it so poorly? Then give the story a 1/10, what's up with that?"
This ending of Sidonia no Kishi is the biggest joke I have ever seen. I remember being excited to continue the story, wondering where it was going. Then, it started to take a turn for the worse. Where my enjoyment started dying out because the story WAS a gritty story, those who are dead remained dead etc etc. There was no dues ex machina like anything I've seen in this ending. All the love that the MC puts into the secondary love interest and all their interactions and the secondary character's eventually decision to love him is COMPLETELY THROWN OUT IN BASICALLY ONE CHAPTER. Not only that, but a person who was (and by all regards should be) dead comes back to life for the MC to screw and have kids with. Which, as stated in the story, was biologically impossible. Did I mention that the thing he screws is basically his daughter?
Yeah, I'm not screwing with you.

In my opinion, this manga is great until the introduction of the "daughter-like" character and the final "dues ex machina" like character in the final chapter (I believe, I had to legitimately purge this story from my mind it angered me so much.) It was great, and semi-realistic while being entertaining. The ending however, ruined what I had loved about the story so much. It had killed all enjoyment I had in the story because of it, and two characters who clearly were dead had suddenly come back to life marked the final disappointment for me. It felt as though the Author needed to come up with this to please the Shipclubs or something, because it came so out of left field and awfully compared to every other part of the story.

To sum it up, read about all the chapters until the final battle. At that point, imagine your own ending because it is almost guaranteed better than what I read.

The ending is that bad, I am not kidding you. It was great until the horrible cop-out ending that was not only DRAWN with very little effort, but also dialogue with very little effort. It's like an M Night Shyamalan movie, another man who cannot end a story to save his life.