7 Seeds

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If you woke up from a cryogenic sleep in a hostile dystopian world with the order to rebuild mankind from the ground up, what would you do? Within that question lies the foundation of 7 Seeds. What would a person do under these circumstances? Even more, what would a person without any survival experience handle a more primitive lifestyle with dangers around every corner?

As questionable as it would be if the government chose inexperienced and traumatized people to save mankind, it’s interesting from a psychological perspective. Because some of these people can barely take care of themselves, and now they have even more weight ... on their shoulders. Every character belongs to a group of seven, hence why it’s called 7 Seeds. With all the existing groups comes a large scale of characters, and it’s handled well. Most if not all of them get some amount of development, with the ones mainly focused on ending up as multilayered and have experienced some sort of growth. Each group is also very diverse with how they tackle survival which I liked. It created conflict between the groups which makes it feel all the more satisfying when they finally put their differences aside to instead work together.

The characters are the center point of 7 Seeds, it’s core. But that’s not to say that a good story becomes insignificant, and here is where the manga stumbles quite a bit in my opinion. It ends up being very formulaic, with a format it continuously uses over and over again. With few exceptions, the whole story of 7 Seeds can be summed up as follows. Find a location, learn something new, overcome some sort of hurdle and then leave to find another location. Any sort of progress towards rebuilding humanity takes a backseat, for most of the manga that is. There are attempts for sure but for one reason or another it never works out in the end. So it’s back to square one which I have to admit that I wasn’t very enthusiastic about. It can also drag on for far longer than it has any right to. Making some parts feel very sluggish and uneventful. The different formulaic arcs have at least world-building and character growth coming with it. So it wasn’t too much of a waste of time. But I personally would’ve loved to see any progress or at least something to spice up the story structure a bit.

Art-wise it was pretty polished with the character designs being pretty consistent (although hard to tell apart sometimes) with some very solid environmental art here and there. It’s not always consistent however. It could often be simplistic with plain white backgrounds and things like hair and clothing lacking detail. However, at its best it is solid, but dips in quality more times than I think it should’ve.

All in all I think 7 Seeds is at least worth a chance. While at first I found it to be extremely mediocre, my opinion has now changed to a more positive side after reflecting on it. Even though I didn’t find all the characters very memorable there’s some genuinely great development for some of them which were definitely a high point. It’s a solid cast overall and made this an alright read. It’s just when the story comes more into focus that it loses that appeal and boredom seeps in. The slow pacing and reused formula definitely didn’t always help either, but that’s a very subjective critique that might not affect you the same way. I can see why so many praise it, but that’s not to say there aren’t flaws to be found. If you don’t like your manga being slow paced or mostly character driven with weak story progression, then look elsewhere. Everyone else, take a dive in.