Terra Formars

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The essential balance that decides if an action oriented manga/anime is good or trash is essentially the ratio between how much you "buy" into the actions and plot, and thus how much triumph and adulation you feel with the characters, and how much the the stretching and bloating (of the characters and plot) that's required to bring about said highs make your eyes roll.

Terra Formars manages this parity pretty well, with a few exceptions, and this is coming from someone who likes their manga/anime as "realistic" as possible. All the essentials are there: good, sometimes great art, a productive premise, and a good clip ... to the pacing. What weighs it down is the drastic case of same-face, entirely too many characters ('cause this is a VIOLENT manga, and characters DIE, usually just characters we don't know or care about), and a lot of solutions coming down to deus ex machina, the plot saying so, or the infamous power surge through yelling. The last (current) part is a real slog, and I don't have a huge interest in continuing.

But enough about the bad stuff! I enjoyed the plots attempts, even if not always successful, to branch out into geopolitics and greater themes of our place in the universe and the uniqueness of humanity. On a personal note, the score is probably a bit inflated because I love all the taxonomical and biological information and art that is central to the idea of the manga. Also watching roaches, dressed like 60's gangsters, doing kamikaze air plane assaults.

Final score: 6.5 out of 10.

Terra Formars's quality drops massively after the first major arc: the Mars arc for a single reason.
It's no longer a survival manga. Terra Formars devolves to a pure action/shounen sort of fighting manga rather than a survivalistic horror. There's no tension anymore. I just feel like I'm reading DBZ or something.
It's true. Terra Formars does make me want to kill all cockroaches, but to what end does this result get achieved? It's simple. BS story telling elements. I looked passed the glaring plot holes in the earlier arcs and in the anime because the focus was more on the survival and action rather than the ... scientific jargon. It did not dive too deep into the political aspects: just enough for the viewer to understand that a proxy war was happening, and what happens on Mars would shape the future of mankind, whether it be politically, scientifically, or medically speaking.
However, the further you progress through the story, the garbage world building and scientific jargan the manga throws at you to try to salvage the plot.
That's not the worst part. The worst part is the story itself. Seriously. The manga tries really hard to convey a two front war: the political, and the actual cockroach threat, yet fails to do it in a meaningful manner. Japan, one of the leading superpowers in the story, only sends four members on a covert mission...why? Yeah, so there can be a feeling of tension and danger for the main cast of characters. There's really no rhyme or reason to the story: whatever makes Akari and his gang the most vulnerable, or whatever makes the fights the most evenly balanced, the story is going to make that happen, no matter how ridiculous it seems.

terra formars is a comic that you know you should hate but can't help loving. it's like a cheesy romcom or some stupid 90s action film. it's really not good but you can't help but smile and have a good time.

insect based zoomorphism might seem like a completely ludicrous idea at first but it works somehow. not that you're gonna pay a lot of attention to all the various insects. what really makes this a fun reas is the battles. whether against the roaches or among humans, the fights are exciting.

it does have it's faults. a flashback every 10 pages isn't helping anybody and ... it could stand to flesh out characters a bit more, among many various problems. but it is a pretty fun read and i think that's what it's meant to be.