Sidonia no Kishi
Knights of Sidonia

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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.

From chapter 1 to 78 a 4/10.

Wow! that was very disappointing.
Especially the final arc. Characters were thrown in the trash along with their developments. Only for a horrible romance to happen, then die, then came back again to life. The plot is all over the place in the final half. The worst plot point and holes (little robot killer?). The first arcs had some very bad artistic decisions, that made the art descriptions and scenes very blurry and hard to understand, everything was always in a dark tone. But that was just the first half of the manga. After that someone must have called ... the author in the back and said "I don't understand these arts at all, bro", couse they all look bright and clearer and more easy to understand/appreciate at the final arc.
in short, the art is good, especially the backgrounds and objects in the background.

Plot is messy, the end is horrible (and bizarre).
What a shame for a manga with such a good start (plot). The romance created between the chimera and tanikaze is bizarre, forced and often disgusting. It is just... strange.

To summarize everything in the phrase of a great sage:
"My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined"
Bad manga 4/10.
Waste time with it.

It started so good, I was really into the story and characters until the entire manga became two subplots: shipping and combat.

The artstyle is really unique, the scenery and the characters were so great drawn, the character design is a little confusing at the beginning, but after some chapters you get used to it. The jokes were really ok and the characters were interesting, until I got to the last arcs of the series...

Beware I made a whole rant and it contains spoilers.





...
The story started pretty good, presenting the cast with our main character being Nagate in his fight against the mysterious beings called Gauna. I really liked the interaction between the characters in the first arcs, it was fluent, you got to know them well, and there was also a very scientific background to everything that it was being added to Sidonia, the experiments they conducted on Gauna.

The part where the plot started to decrease was when the first chimera was introduced. Tsumugi was not a bad character since she was there to show that in some way a Gauna with human mind could be helpful to Sidonia.
Why didn't the story focus on that?, explaining what were the Gauna to begin with, what was their purpose, how did the Ochiai's mind work, why the Gauna were attracted to the Higgs particles! nothing was explained in the end! it was a whole mess!
The subplot of romance between Nagate and Tsumugi was so disgusting and horrible, she was a newborn child! and she was the child of Hoshijiro's mutated Gauna's placenta!! come on! it was extremely forced, if the Gauna ended up not being bad but beings trying to learn from humans or something, maybe the shipping could have worked; but it was not like that.

Nagate is such a horrible MC, I mean he felt in love with Hoshijiro and was sooo into her as to fell in love with the placenta that resembled her. When she was abducted I though he would react like a normal human being... but nope, he forgot about her and focused on Tsumugi. He was the best pilot of Sidonia and it was obvious, he never failed. Every reckless decision he made was considered ok and always ended up in victory. He was too perfect!

Ochiai was the bad guy just because! I mean I would have prefered to ended up with humans contacting the Gauna and learning more from them, understanding or even decided to leave the energy resource to stop them from coming. But no...

Suddenly the story became a harem where every single girl was fighting over Nagate's attention, even the AI robot. After episode 45 or something the series stopped being interesting, it became a chore to finish it. The pages were all explanations of how the weapons of Sidonia were made of, whole chapters focused on destroying a single Gauna (with too many shots from the information HQ received) and the ending was the worst of all. Nagate ended up with Tsumugi, who suddenly didn't die (not even by being totally incinerated by a star's energy) and ended up turning human. Izana (who became a women for Nagate) ended up with a Yuhata who decided to turn into a boy for some reason, I mean she was always showed to have interest in man.

Ughh it was horrible! wouldn't recommend the series at all, that ending was the worst. After it started being realistic and scientific, it ended up being like fantasy story where everything works, killing the villian saved everyone and even the imposible ship was made canon.

Nihei's works consistently fail to produce any interesting characterisation, or offer much of substance in terms of commentary, or really have any merit past their visuals.

I really did try to like this work, or at least finish it, but it was just not engaging, and there was nothing to suggest hope of it improving.

More specifically to this work, pacing does not seem to be a concept -- it's like the reader has been forced to skip the first ten chapters of context, except all the time. Characters just show up whenever they please.. Why would anyone care about what they say or what happens ... to them when they're unknown to us? Personalities are an afterthought, but that suggests that there is a particular other area where he is focusing his efforts.. Which leads to the broader issue:

Obviously, Nihei is known for being abstruse but this is just too much. Perhaps he should consider making an encyclopedic work instead because he clearly doesn't care or is unable to leverage what narratives as a form have to offer. Having trudged through APOSIMZ, BLAME!, and now some of Knights of Sidonia and Biomega, the "mysterious reason as to why things ended up the way they did and there's probably zombies" has gotten real old - there's no real difference in how it's presented or implication at anything philosophically to chew on, in the absence of character appeal.

!MILD SPOILERS IN THE SECOND HALF!

This was my first real foray into the mecha genre, a genre I had actively avoided like the plague. It just never felt like my cup of tea; I haven't even touched Evangelion yet. The initial chapters didn't exactly lock me in, but they show something so promising that dropping it was never an option. The first thing that grabs you is the art. I’d never read Tsutomu Nihei’s legendary work, Blame!, but I’d seen panels and now I finally get it. There’s a distinctive emptiness in his vision. The cavernous infrastructure, the vast and lonely panels, the sheer scale ... of the world. It’s a unique aesthetic. (really reminded me of the art in Girls' Last Tour which is one of my all-time favorites.)

The concept itself is… nice. It’s also confusing as all hell. You are thrown directly into the deep end with zero explanation. What are these mechas? What does it mean for people to be able to photosynthesize? Who, or what, is the protagonist, Nagate Tanikaze? The story immediately establishes that he and another character are ostracized as "freaks" but the narrative doesn't bother to explain what that actually means.

But like I said, the core concept is great. You have the mysterious Gauna as the enemy, you have the giant mechs, you have this fascinating, half-explained world, and you have a cast of genuinely great characters. The problem is that the manga consistently stumbles in the execution of every single one of these elements. I still really like the main character; his weird, uncomfortable, and antisocial nature makes him feel incredibly realistic. Izana is a fantastic character, and her dynamic with Tanikaze is a highlight. Then there was Hoshijirou Shizuka, who was easily one of the best characters in the series and her connection with the MC was amazing.

But this is where the cracks really started to show. The art, while still wonderful in its atmospheric shots, remained a massive hurdle during the action sequences. The mecha fights are just so damn hard to follow. I don't know if I'm just stupid or if the panels are genuinely incomprehensible, but I’d very much like to believe it’s the latter. Beyond that the plot itself is a fucking mess. It’s disjointed and chaotic. Half the time I couldn't even tell which character I was looking at or who was talking to whom. A character would appear and I’d have no idea if I’d seen them before in the last six volumes because the designs would shift just enough to be confusing. Again, am I just an idiot, or is this objectively messy storytelling? I had a hard time following why some guy is a hybrid, what a hybrid even is, why some people are okay with it while others aren't, or what anyone's motivations are for doing anything. The story explains things, technically, but the narrative is so disjointed that you immediately lose the thread. It’s a fast-paced read with some good comedy, but it’s just so disappointing to see it stumble in so many fundamental ways.

I used to think this manga was great in its art but sucked in its story. In second half, I think it sucks at both. Characters and major plot points just disappear without a trace while new ones appear completely at random. Nothing feels connected. Things just happen, and you're left wondering what the fuck you just read. Even the art, the one thing I could consistently praise, took a nosedive. It feels like Nihei got more confident with his lines but they became so much worse. The first half of the story was clean and detailed; the second half is messy, less detailed and just doesn't hit the same way.

But the real reason my opinion shifted from disappointment to outright hatred was a single plot development so monumentally stupid it made me want to drop the whole thing just a few volumes from the end. This manga features one of the worst, if not the worst, romance plots I have ever had the displeasure of reading. There’s a hybrid character named Tsumugi, who is… fine, I guess. She has some nice themes about loneliness and being different. But she appears out of nowhere and is immediately intensely clingy. Her mind is kinda like a child's and it was a bit off-putting but whatever, she had fun chemistry with Tanikaze and Izana. It seemed like the story was finally going to develop the romance between Tanikaze and Izana. Hell, it was set up from the beginning! They had amazing chemistry and everything pointed toward them getting together.

NOPE, FUCK THAT. Out of fucking nowhere, for no reason, Tanikaze becomes romantically interested in Tsumugi, a 15-meter-tall, weird-looking, Gauna-esque hybrid. He confesses his love to her, somehow. They kiss, somehow. It is pure, unadulterated garbage. This isn't some grand, amazing message about love transcending species. It's just awful, nonsensical, and it completely invalidates all the character development that came before it. I know people praise this mangaka but after pulling a stunt like this, I’d say he’s a shit-ass writer. I only decided to finish it because I was so close to the end, but my God, I would have dropped it on the spot if this had happened earlier.

I am done. Finally and thankfully. I hated this. It's a genuine shame because the first half was so good and held so much promise. But the second half took a nosedive in absolutely everything; the art, the characters, and the story. The ending we got was terrible, literal bullshit. The final boss fight happens but there are no stakes. The tension is built so poorly that I felt nothing. Tsumugi sacrifices herself to save the MC, blah, blah, blah, we're supposed to be sad, it's supposed to hit. But then, whatever, the very next chapter she’s somehow reborn as a human. That’s it. They live happily ever after. I fucking hated this entire second half. This manga had so much potential and it was all squandered on a messy plot where things happen for no reason and important setups are completely abandoned. It has some redeeming qualities in its initial art direction but that's about it. What a waste.