Everything about the Abyss itself is great and makes you crave for more. The mystery of what lies at the bottom, the atmosphere of the unknown, dangerous monsters, cute fluffy animals, rich fantasy flora, rare treasures and unique relics, each detail of this amazing fantasy world was crafted with love and dedication. Let's not forget the beautiful art, not only it's impressive from technical standpoint, but even less detailed panels are full of life and emotions. The setting is definitely intriguing and raises a lot of questions by the readers, which may be enough for some people to keep following this manga, despite sporadic release shedule.
The problem is that the plot doesn't quite deliever on the level of premise and the hype surrounding this series.
While the concept leaves a lot of space for an interesting worldbuilding and seems like a perfect set up for an adventure, the story mainly focuses on character drama, which isn't a bad thing, when it's done right, but that's not the case. Simply put, Made in Abyss characters are lackluster and even uncompelling, you have basic tropes like a naive girl with a dream to become as great as her legendary parent, an amnesiac nice guy, who wants to protect his friends and does it by magically remembering how to use his powers in the right time, a strict, but secretly caring mentor figure, possessive yandere and bunch of talking plot-devices, some of them died or leave the series when we barely spent time with them. I couldn't even feel anything for them, which was completely jarring. Interactions between characters don't seem to have been enough to generate the feelings they show to each other, a good example is a girl from the fifth layer, who developed a deep connection to Riko in a matter of few pages. If you build a drama on a weak foundation such as cardboard cutouts instead of characters and forced, tropey relationships between them, it is bound to collapse.
However, I wouldn't rank Made in Abyss so low if it wasn't for blatant emotional manipulation. Instead of building up the characters and making me care about them so that when something bad happens to them I get an emotional reaction, author is simply shoving sad tropes down your mouth without realizing what actually makes those tropes sad in the first place. It just throws in a tragic backstory out of the blue, just to make you feel sad, without having the reader connected to the character beforehand. The characters aren't so much characters as they are just sob stories with pretty designs (since lolis are cute and innocent - and will clearly elicit sympathy from readers) and the plot isn't so much a plot as it is a mechanism that allows to read these sob stories, before it throws us contrivances to get some weak emotional pay-off. At which point I didn’t understand why I should give a damn about characters suffering. Normally, empathizing with a character requires first understanding that character as a valid human being, an individual with a perspective the reader can relate and believe in, but Made in Abyss bypass that part by making all participants of Suffering Olympics adorable and pure little girls, often fetishized and reduced to moe fanservice. I started to lose faith with an author once I sensed that he is making bad things happen to a character just as a cheap plot formula and WOW SO EDGY HURTING A LOLI MY GOD ARE YOUR HEARTSTRINGS TUGGED YET?!
That's being said, after certain point the genre of the story shifts from grand adventure to a loli tear-jerker, abandoning all previously estabilished positives and delving deeper in the territory of meaningless mysery porn. The criticism is not that the manga is too bleak and dark. Lots of manga are bleak and gory. The criticism is that Made in Abyss seems to revel in that bleakness like an exploitation movie. Sure, edgy stories can be fun when athours are self-aware and creative enough to entertain reader with their twisted imagination, but when all you can offer is 50 shades of suffering lolis reading it becomes a complete chore, especially when no one of those bloody and disgusting scenes has any impact on the story. Riko's nerve damage and lack of agility in her arm is never used as plot point and Riko herself learned nothing from this failure. Reg lost his arm, but got Dragonball boost and never experienced any troubles while fighting. Faputa lost her arm and ear, but regenerated, two volumes later entire chapter was dedicated to her almost being eaten alive, but she regenerated AGAIN. What makes it worse, 50 shades of loli guro tries to aim to be something more and deeper than is actually is, but the lack of character development is a clear indication that violence and sexual innuendos were written for the sadistic joy of author and some readers. Character progression is basically nonexistant, blink and you miss it all. We are talking about small children here, small children adventuring in the hell pit, where thousands of adults died or lost their minds, children, who went through the loss of limbs, death of their friends and near-death experience, but not a single trait changed in them. By the end of current volume Riko is still a starry-eyed child, who wants to make friends with everyone and totally delusional about her ideals, Reg is no different from any shounen lead and Nanachi is going through the same character arc for the third time. A good author will use a cruelty of the setting to make characters grow from their hardships, but Made in Abyss author uses dark fantasy as an excuse to torture cute kids and show them naked.
Between the rushed pacing of the upper layers, the snail pace of the village arc, disjointed story full of cheap deus ex machinas, shallow characters and their forced drama, the sexualization of kids was just a last straw to the cocktail of disappointment. I've seen some people who are justifying the tittylation of 12 years olds by bringing a good ol' "for the plot and development" argument. Oh, if only Reg's or Riko's quality of writing was equal to the amount of pages where they are displaying private parts. Dostoevsky himself would be in awe of their depth. Ironically, the manga itself is the best proof that you don't need to show off character's erection every 5 pages to make them compelling. The less mangaka sexualizes the character, the better they are written, for some reason a fully dressed villain is the only character who left me in a positive impression, unlike all those poor children that are drawn mainly as a kink fuel.
The simplest way to describe Made in Abyss is unrealized potential: the manga. There are definitely some good parts, a lot of great ideas are burried under the layers of poor writing like a rough brilliants in the mud. I still think that it's one of the most visually impressive manga out of there, the setting itself is really interesting, and does an amazing job making you wonder what's further down and building up a sense of mystery. The antagonist of Idofront arc is also great, he is the closest the characters get to... actually having a character, charismatic personality and plot relevance for more than one arc. An absolute monster, but charismatic one, with his own warped sense of love and care. But as much as I want to love this manga because many of its pieces speak to me, it just doesn’t hold together with the polish it needs. The engaging introduction to this beautiful fantasy world is wasted on a story that makes it difficult to enjoy it. For every great world building element, there is a horny moment which makes you scratch your head. As interesting as the setting is, the disconnect between fascinating dark chasm and the one-dimensional main characters never truly goes away. The greatest tragedy of Made in Abyss is that it tells us the least interesting story possible in this world.
