This manga is centered around a high school boy named Ayumi who’s the solitary logical type, but beyond that it changes quite a lot over the course of its run. It starts off with simple whodunit murder mysteries. These aren’t all that great but aren’t particularly bad either. As it moves forward, it transitions more and more into more straight forward battles of wit between Ayumi and the mysterious Blade Children. These actually started off pretty well written and although simple were interesting. As things progressed and continued to escalate, the writing got much messier and more ridiculous and involved a lot more absurd deduction and such during conflicts. Still, it also amped up the action and kept things moving pretty fast so even if it wasn’t realistic, it was still reasonably exciting and interesting.
The manga goes through a very abrupt shift two thirds of the way through, when it finally starts delving into the core of the mysteries that had been touched upon throughout the manga. This phase starts off pretty badly with what is essentially an entire volume of characters just info dumping explanation, though it doesn’t really get much better from there as the rest of the manga is also much slower and lacking in the excitement that made the previous parts enjoyable. The atmosphere in general is much drearier and more depressing. However, despite that the writing is even messier and nonsensical than before. It jumps the shark in all sorts of ways, with a heavy emphasis on half assed science and supernatural elements it bizarrely tries to force into the mold of Christian mythology despite really not fitting. Manga majorly escalating over time isn’t all that strange, but the transition was handled really badly from a tonal and thematic point of view. Furthermore, it just overall makes very little sense with supernatural rules and mechanics that feel completely arbitrary and changing on a whim. If this was a battle shounen or something like that then this level of writing would be okay, but when it’s a thriller centered around a central mystery and battle of wits then things like this just make the whole thing feel dumb.
It also doesn’t really help that the manga is really weak in terms of characters. Ayumi feels like he’s having somewhat of a character arc over the first two thirds. However, the the final third essentially crushes that in being really wishy washy and all over the place while also being overtly melodramatic about everything. The main heroine, the president of the newspaper club who is seemingly able to sniff out information on anything, also seems interesting and there seem to be some level of a relationship arc going on between her and Ayumi. However, that completely falls apart towards the ending. The twist was pretty predictable and I didn’t find it all that shocking, but how it handled the aftermath was atrocious. As for all the side characters, it didn’t really feel like it handled anyone properly. There were characters that felt like they were interesting and worth getting invested in in the first two thirds, but the final third minimized their role tremendously in favor of new characters that were nowhere near as interesting. All in all, by the end I wasn’t really invested in any of the characters or their fates, and as that’s what the core of the finale and epilogue are centered around, the ending had very little impact and was overall pretty dissatisfying.
The art I also found pretty mediocre. The style I wasn’t particularly fond of and I thought the quality wasn’t that high, even for the covers and color pages. I also thought that the character designs were pretty boring even for the setting.
