Reviews

Yakushoku Distopiary is... interesting to say the least. It presents a fantasy "video game" world where every person is assigned a class. Anywhere from being a "gunner" to a "cook" to a "puppet master," and how everyone living in the world must contribute to keep this world going. Like any fantasy game world demon lords are brought in to the world and heroes must be created in order to stop them. The dream of a lot of of fantasy game lovers had in some point. Except that the in this world it presents a much more dark and grittier presentation of how such a systematic world would be and how such a world would become oppressive to people who are not the "heroes." People are manipulated and the heroes of the story are willing to toy with their allies to achieve victory.

Distiopiary subverts the typical video game hero and for the first few chapters it becomes a huge hook driving you to read further. But as the gritty gore, dark comedy, and continual death of characters goes on it quickly turns tedious. At some point it just becomes edgy for the sake of being edgy where chapters are dedicated to seeing random NPCs slaughtered.

Perhaps that's what the author of the manga intended. That as you start to grow more desensitized to all the violence and gore, you become like the "heroes" or "watchers" in this manga. Whichever the case the manga ends abruptly and it's pretty clear the author was running out of idea to continue the series on. At the very least the abrupt ending is done better than most other series and keeps the central theme of the manga intact.

But by the end of the manga you can't help but feel that there just could have been more to this series. It feels unsatisfying and incomplete.