Is it really that hard to make a manga about humanity fighting against monsters and then actually keep it being about humanity fighting against monsters?

Look, I understand how tempting it is to go the “humans bad too” route. Betrayals, deranged individuals, abuse of authority, abuse of strength, government being useless and perfectly okay with sacrificing common citizens, I’m not saying it’s not realistic, I’m saying it’s boring to get this very shallow take when you could instead get cool monster fights. Is it too much to ask for to have a story about an alien threat and the focus not being on infighting between humans? I mean, the whole finale is fight between humans, technically, which makes the conclusion very underwhelming and non-concluding, not to mention putting one of the most obnoxious characters in a big spotlight.

Talking about characters, the protagonists get shifted without much warning through the story, not giving much conclusion to the previous one and not giving much introduction to the new one, so you quickly learn to just not care. As usual with horror manga, the secondary characters are mostly just folder to kill off, so don’t expect much fun there too.

One thing that’s great though is the art and design of the monsters. The design is creative and the art is detailed. It’s pretty much the only aspect that makes the manga still readable. I only with the monsters appeared more often, especially in later parts of the manga.

One benefit is also that there’s not much dialogue, so although it’s 21 volumes long, you can actually read through it quite quickly.

Overall, it’s a generic monster apocalypse manga with above average art.

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Everything begins at a high school where a normal student, Akira Takashiro, is getting ready for a basketball game against his friend Eiji Kudo, the winner will ask a girl out. When he goes to get a ball there’s a very strong earthquake and he loses conscious, when he wakes up he realizes the school is full of monsters eating people, he joins those who have survived and escape in search of a safe place, just to see the monsters are everywhere and there’s no place to hide.

From the first moment this manga looks like another sports manga of two friends who are fighting to be the star of the team and for the same girl, but soon it becomes in a horror story full of unexpected moments, of people trying to survive and get answers of what’s happening. As the story advances we get to know more survivors and their stories of what they were doing when all started, some of them are ready to help and others are already mad thinking they can beat the monsters by themselves. In the last numbers the story becomes in something weird, with special stormtroopers looking for monsters to take to laboratories to study them, or people who has been infected by the monsters and now they’re one with them, but never trying to help survivors to get to a safe place.

This manga becomes very repetitive like the author was running out of ideas after the first three or four issues. On the other hand, the design of the characters is really good and especially from those places of Tokyo we always see on pictures like Shibuya, Shinjuku or Akihabara. But not from the monsters, although there are plenty of them, you can see this is not the author’s specialty, let’s say they’re “simple” in the way they look, like those monsters seen in the Japanese films of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

I have to say the author and artist, Shingo Honda, has made a very good job after all, make something alone like a manga on thirteen issues has a lot of merit. Don’t expect to find as scary as other mangas because the story is in some way predictable.

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