Cube Arts is essentially a Minecraft isekai manga. This is surprisingly rare considering just how much isekai fiction gets cranked out and how popular Minecraft is. I’m sure there’s loads of people that would be incredibly interested in a good one. Unfortunately, this manga is probably not what such people are looking for, as it is not good at all.
So this is essentially following the SAO model of isekai. The characters aren’t pulled into another world but rather trapped in a VRMMO. The thing is that the logic behind all this is ridiculous and centered around the game developers being unfathomably terrible. The login button wasn’t removed intentionally, but rather they seem to have broken it, and it’ll take them some time to fix. However, two minutes in game is 24 hours in the real world, so now the players in the game are expected to be trapped in the game for what will feel like to them like six months. The writing also just kind of ignores the real world completely, so issues like what’ll happen if someone just removes their headset just aren’t brought up.
On top of that, respawning in the game is also broken. It never really explains what’s going on with that though. Are players that die forcibly logged out? Are they put to sleep? Do they just sit in a void for the six months until the game is fixed? It never tells you. However, everyone acts like dying in the game is as bad as dying in real life, when it gave zero indication that the two were connected at all. Clearly, the mangaka was trying to go for a SAO like situation where players were trapped in an MMO with life and death stakes, but skipped all the essential world building and simply wasn’t able to write it properly.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg on how the game makes no sense. Despite Cube Arts clearly just being VR Minecraft, the game developers apparently decided to make the game super realistic in terms of player characters. All sensations they feel such as injuries are super realistic and just as strong as in the real world. So just fighting in general hurts a lot and dying looks incredibly brutal. On top of that there are strange non-Minecraft like enemies called ‘irregulars’ who are especially dangerous and do things like spouting acid which is especially painful. And there aren’t any magical healing potions so you just have to live with the inflicted injuries including any lost limbs.
And that’s not where the unnecessarily realistic parts end. See, the players bodies are fully realistic and resemble their real human selves. And there’s no systems in place regarding how players interact with each other. So yeah, there’s obviously PVP as one would expect. But it also allows for more traumatic interactions. The main antagonistic faction is a guild of players that go around kidnapping players to use as slaves. And because the writing in this manga is insane, this of course includes sex slaves, which of course means that there are a bunch of random rape and attempted rape scenes.
Why the hell is a Minecraft inspired manga so goddamn dark? But it’s not even always consistently dark. It’s just really bizarre with loads of sudden tone and atmosphere shifts. A good portion of the manga is just the protagonist and his friends just playing the Minecraft knock off in a light hearted fashion. That makes sense since this is just a game, but contrasted with the parts where it’s dark and everyone is taking everything incredibly seriously it all just feels really absurd.
The manga is also really terrible at handling Minecraft elements. A manga centered around a games mechanics needs to convey what makes those mechanics interesting. This manga however, just essentially throws in a tutorial message every now and them for mechanics, and then has the players suddenly acting like experts. The mechanics in Cube Art are just as basic as in Minecraft, which is pretty basic, but what makes games like this interesting is how they are used. Thus, this manga is overexplaining the simple parts and completely glossing over the parts that are actually fun. On top of that, the vast majority of mechanics it introduces, both ones based on Minecraft and original ones, are only used once and never mentioned again, so it just feels like everything is random and pointless.
On that note, the characters are also completely random and pointless. They have really flat personalities but despite that they often behave incredibly unrealistically. There are no character arcs or relationships. It does at times just dump backgrounds and motivations right before they matter though, which as one would expect feels completely rushed and half assed. The cast is also in general not just hard to get invested in, but also pretty unlikable due to the dialogue being terrible. Especially the attempts at comedy.
Also, the manga was clearly axed, so the plot never goes anywhere. To be honest I’m pretty surprised it lasted as long as it did, even if it did only go on for three volumes. Still, it very much ends unfinished. The vast majority of plot threads are left unresolved and ultimately the manga doesn’t explain anything about anything. It’s just suddenly over and that’s that.
The art quality and style in the manga is solid, though not exceptional. It has issues in terms of design however. Character designs in general are pretty boring. And the world and enemy designs suffer from there being a major clash due to the presence of both cubic Minecraft-like elements and more realistic elements. Such a clash could work if it was used properly, but that is not the case here.
