Imawa no Michi no Alice
Alice on Border Road

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It is a shame that this is not more popular. The main series did well, but this one has not seen as much attention. I would say the main selling point of this manga is the characters. In the beginning the characters seem a bit cliche, but as the story progresses and more about their past turns up and see how friends turn enemy or vice versa. It is fun seeing how they develop as the story progresses. Do not expect anything on par or better then the main series, but it is not a super long manga and it is fun to read!

Imawa no Michi no Alice, or Alice in Border Road is a spin-off/sequel to Imawa no Kuni no Alice, or Alice in Border Land. Throughout this review, when comparing/refereting one another I'll mention them as "Road" and "Land".
Alice in Border Road is a Stand-Alone story, using the story and elements set on Land and using them to create something completely new. All of the characters are different between stories, and despite using some common elements, the ideia behind Land and Road are incredibly different. In Land a couple thousand people gather every night in hopes of finishing death games to survive longer in Borderland, ... a destroyed Tokyo. When finishing these games they receive cards, which they don't really know the meaning of.
In Road, 12 people find themselves in a destroyed Kyoto, each with a card, and try their best to find themselves a meaning and a objective to what they are doing there.
Road can be enjoyed on it's own, but the consequences of what is happening and why are in direct consequence with the plot twist in Land, which means that if you didn't read that one first, if you read it afterwards your enjoyment may be reduced.
I wouldn't say that this story is overall better than Land, but it does have some points that I think are better. First of all, we are not introduced with a bunch of characters that are only there to be cannon fodder to whatever new game is happening. In here, the entire cast of characters are introduced from the get go, and everything that happens after that is consequence of the actions of one or more of those 12 characters. We get to see friendships be created and destroyed as characters start growing and relationships start changing, trust and doubt ever flowing between them. Other thing that you may notice is that, despite the writer being the same, the artist is different. Now I understand that some people may preffer the art in Land, but I do think that Road's art is better and more clean. It's not amazing, but it's an improvement.
Having that in mind, the single thing that can make or break this story is the characters. And it's here that I think Alice in Border Road loses the chance to be better than Land. By no means are the characters bad, but most of them are decent enough and there's enough variety in them to provide interesting interactions between them, which is the most important, but there isn't really any character that stands out as being particularly good, nor their past that interesting, which is something I did think Land had here and there.
But all in all, to simply say that Alice in Border Road is worst than Alice in Borderland is making this manga an injustice. It dared do something completely different from the original source and it was a risk that for the most part payed off, and on it's own it's a pretty entertaining manga.

I have nothing good to say about this manga. In fact, I can't even fathom that this is the same author who wrote Alice in Borderland.

This manga is just vastly more amateurish, filled with terrible and predictable characters, cringe, and both an extremely predictable plot, and one that's filled with unnecessary "plot twists."

First off is the story. Similar to it's parent story, Imawa no Michi no Alice takes place in in "Borderland." A world where it's fiction or supernatural, there's a lot of flexibility to the setting and scenarios that the characters can be in. The original series used this to great effect, creating ... a fun death game series that had good pacing, characters, and story. Imawa no Michi no Alice does none of that. There's no death games, and it's basically just a pseudo battle royale sort of story that also devolves into some sort of weird "mission for the greater good" sort of deal. It's bland, and there's none of that adrenaline rush or variety that the death games gave. Thus, most of the battle for survival is based purely on the 12 characters that appear in the manga.

Basically, the characters have to carry the story since the story doesn't provide much. However, the characters are just so lacking and cringe despite there being more screen time and development for each individual character compared to Alice in Borderland. You can tell because of all the of the backstories that the characters have. Each character is a soulless husk with nothing to go for them to the point that the author makes it a point to have every character to have some sort of backstory in order for the reader to have a little more connection with the people that end up being killed, or end up being murderers. Alice in Borderland doesn't use this tactic nearly as often, and it's usually just raw character interaction that reveals their personality, rather than flashbacks shoved in your face. The MC is super generic just like in Alice in Borderland, but now there are two of them in this story, which means double the cringe shounen dialogue about the power of friendship. It really gets out of hand near the climax of the story.

The other characters also suck. You have yakuza, edgy sisters, and a wildcard old guy that turns rabid in order to create a dangerous environment for everyone. There's no real rhyme or reason for any of these characters other than to fill in their respective archetypes. They're only there to act as a dangerous element to the MC, and as character development. Then, you got the scientist guy that's just a plot device in order for the reader to get info dumped on what's actually going on, which brings me to the last point: the "plot twists."

There's a decent handful of plot twists in this manga, all of which don't even serve as cheap thrills that make me want to keep reading the story. Now that's when you know the manga is just extremely bland. I can't even get myself to get excited as to what happens next in the story after a random plot twist happens. It's all just so boring because none of the characters actually feel alive, and there's a lack of any cohesion. The story doesn't actually change all that much after the plot twist, it's just an impetus for characters to switch allegiances, gain more information about the story and world, and of course, a way for the MC talk about friendship and stuff. Apparently the author was just too lazy to write a real script, and decided to make extremely convenient plot twists and reveals to keep the story going.

A few characters fall in love or whatever, but it's so transient and lacks any substance or relevance to the story that it might as well not matter, like with all of the plot twists. The characters are just so boring that even after watching some of them return to reality, I don't feel any happiness for them; I'm just indifferent. None of these characters evoke any emotions.

For some reason, Takayoshi Kuroda drew the art for this spinoff rather than Aso Haro, who wrote and drew Alice in Borderland. In this series, Aso just writes the script and story. I wouldn't really care if the art improved, but somehow, Aso's art, which wasn't that great, is still much better than this new artist. It's just adding salt to the already garbage plot that Aso Haro decided to make. It's like this was written by a completely different person. Alice in Borderland didn't rely on cheap plot twists, flashback sequences, random love interests, and convenient plot armor and devices in order to create a death/survival story.