This manga starts off with the protagonist, Toki, deciding to waste time in a net café he passes by so as to delay going home to his moody pregnant wife. There he’s surprised to encounter his first love from middle school, Tono, whom he had always regretted not confessing to. At this point there’s a crazy storm and when it clears up, he’s shocked to find that the world outside the net café is completely different, with it being the sole building in the middle of empty wetlands that go on endlessly. Thus, the story becomes one about the occupants of the net café doing their best to survive this abrupt and strange situation. The core of this is essentially exploring the worst aspects of human nature, lord of the flies style, with the focus basically being on how in the absence of any rules or enforcement it becomes a power struggle where the strong abuse and exploit the weak.
I didn’t think it was a particularly good at this however. It largely felt like everything and everyone was too simple. There’s a very clear villain driving all the vileness and trying to manipulate everyone into going along with him. And everyone goes along with him far too easily. There’s some attempt at trying to explain the motivations behind why the villain is the way he is, but it’s incredibly lackluster, and thus he just seems like a pretty flat villain. Most everyone else is even more simple in that they don’t really get fleshed out at all beyond being scared and just going along with the one in power. The manga does get quite brutal and terrible things are done by characters to other characters, but in the absence of any fleshing out of these characters, it largely felt pretty pointless.
However, while this aspect does seem to compose the majority of the manga, it’s definitely not the most important aspect. Rather, what’s most important is Toki and Tono. The story centered around them explores the themes of past regrets, wherein the past can be an anchor to the present and how overcoming that is what it means to be an adult, in a way that felt pretty natural. This plot thread is incredibly predictable, wherein about a third of the way through the manga I had predicted what the ‘moral’ of the story was going to be and the majority of the major plot points relating to it revealed at the end. And that really isn’t that surprising as it’s the type of story that inherently seems to require what feels like lazy writing in order to work properly. Despite that, it’s still a pretty good story that’s told pretty well and ends in a pretty satisfying manner. And because this is what’s focused on in the conclusion, in the end the manga manages to land the ending incredibly well and the final impression the manga leaves is pretty good as well, even if everything outside Toki and Tono’s story was pretty weak.
I should also note that the art of the manga is really good and used really well throughout. Even the portions that weren’t so great flowed pretty well and weren’t too bad to read because of the art. And during the climax and ending the art really managed to shine and was quite exceptional.
