Jul 1, 2020
I recommend this manga most highly for men who like battles and a bit of fan service, and who don't mind if the logic of how the combatants win is a bit fuzzy.
The shining star of this manga is its art. It's polished; there are a lot of great action shots, and the perspectives in many frames are really interesting and impressive.
Perhaps coming in second is the world in which it's set, specifically the game Not Alive. It's a death game scenario of sorts, but a fairly unique take on it, despite the prevalence of the genre. A few things in this area seemed
...
weird and arbitrary to me, but they were eventually explained in a pretty satisfying way. The story completely ignores how such a game became possible, which I think is probably best. It wouldn't have been interesting, and I don't think any explanation would have held up under scrutiny.
I think the above two points are the main draws of the series.
The characters are... fine. Amamiya Kyouka is a fun character, and Shigeru Mikami is what he needs to be to drive the series. Amamiya's demeanor is probably her most interesting trait. It's a bit hard to predict how she'll react to things, especially at first. Her reactions are odd, but they're internally consistent, which makes them feel realistic. The only interesting thing about Mikami, apart from his role in the plot, is his use of his own game making experience to strategize in Not Alive. However, this is only mentioned occasionally without drawing any particularly interesting connections between his experience and his strategy. It would be more appropriate to say this could have been an interesting aspect of his character that wasn't really taken advantage of. The other characters are passably interesting, although I personally found some of them annoying.
The story is fairly standard. The main characters have to win to survive, and they have a couple other easy-to-understand motivations that are revealed as the series progresses. There are some twists that I actually thought were impressive and that I enjoyed, but otherwise it often feels like its incoherently bumbling its way down the obvious path regardless of whether it actually makes sense.
The incoherence is probably the worst part for me. It feels like some of the players in Not Alive are straight up cheating, but not getting called out on it, and they're doing so to such a degree that it would be impossible to win against them. The logical conclusion of this is that their opponent would either have to be absurdly good at the game, or they would lose. However, the players who should logically lose in this situation are supposed to win, because that's the plot. What ends up happening is that the players who should lose get extremely lucky, use some nonsense strategy that seems like it would only very questionably work, but it does anyway, or Dragonball Z their way through a fight by being insanely fast or strong. This makes the strategy aspect of the battles completely uninteresting to me. Also, the cheating characters are *extremely* smug, and seem to think they're the best despite being very lucky, which was really annoying.
Overall, I give it a 6/10. Anywhere between a 3 and a 9 wouldn't surprise me from others. I think this manga certainly has an audience, but not a huge one.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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