Part 1 (Chapters 1-97) is amazing. It's a solid fast-paced action series with energetic art, great characters, and genuinely well-executed emotional moments. Aki, Denji, Makima, Power, etc are all fantastic characters. The series is fairly short, but very very good for what it is. Easy 9/10. Shit even a 10/10 depending on how I'm feeling.
Unfortunately, this series doesn't end with Part 1. Fujimoto decided to make a sequel series (and yes Part 2 is effectively a sequel even if it's listed as the same series), and it quite frankly... isn't very good. It STARTED extremely promising. The new MC Asa was really interesting and I was excited to see how she developed. But after 30 chapters, the series really goes off the rails and not in a good way. The plot just, like, turns into a total mess. There's some unification church parody for a while. And then suddenly some major apocalypse-tier shit goes down. And then suddenly there's some prison break shit. The story can best be described as "SHIT HAPPENING" with zero central theme tying it all together. Asa, the character who's supposed to be the MC, basically disappears for like 25 chapters (which was almost a full year in terms of weekly publication) and goes through a lot of interesting shit offscreen while the old MC comes back and mouthbreathes doing nothing while interacting with mostly uninteresting characters. I've heard people tell me "Noooooooo you just want mindless action nooooooo Part 2 is actually super deep you're just too stupid to get it noooooooooo" but the thing is Part 2 really ISN'T deep when you get down to it. It has its themes shoved down your throat constantly (muh normal life is said like a billion times), but it fails to actually SAY anything about those ideas beyond all its posturing. It's just flat-out not a good series. It still has good MOMENTS, but the narrative tying those moments together is extremely messy and half-baked. Plus, the art becomes really REALLY bad. To give you an idea of how shit some of the recent arc is, there are moments where the shading literally leaks outside of the panels because they forgot to move the shading down a layer when they were editing. And this happens MULTIPLE times.
Part 2 isn't ALL bad; it has some solid moments and a handful of good characters. But overall, it's a mess that's both poorly written AND poorly drawn that spends way too long shoving uninteresting ideas down your throat while failing to meaningfully comment on any of those ideas at all.
If you're reading this review and somehow haven't read this series, I recommend reading Part 1 and then not touching Part 2 because it's constant disappointment.
