Manga Review: Eden – It’s an Endless World

Title: Eden – It’s an Endless World
Author: Hiroki Endo
Release: Monthly
Status: Finished
Genre: Seinen, Sci-Fi
Art: A
Originality: S
Story: A
Characters: S
Humor: C
Action: B

Impression: This manga is set in the future where a mysterious virus has wiped out a major percentage of the world’s population and human civilization is slowly recovering from the first outbreak. The story follows various characters throughout the many years that take place over the series and the strange new world that has come out of the disastrous epidemic that struck the Earth. The story is definitely engaging and the overarching plot is certainly interesting but I hate how this guy treats his characters. I’m not talking about the high body count, the dozens of kick the dog moments, the ridiculous amount of squick thanks to the drugs, sex and sci-fi tech. No, those actually made the story more enjoyable. It was the way he keeps switching the focus from one character to another for entire arcs and later completely forgetting about them and their development later. It’s like the author was a total schizophrenic when it came to which characters were actually important. The most jarring instance of this was having the most prominently featured and most developed character in the series set up for his role in the climax only for him to have done basically nothing and other characters who didn’t even have half as much screen time as him taking charge of the plot. While the characters who are involved in the finale do have more significance towards the setting at that point, it still doesn’t help the fact the feeling that you just wasted your time reading about half the stuff in the series. Then there’s the guy’s sense of humor. This is a seinen series set in a crapsack of the world portrayed with a very realistic and gritty art style and yet he still does lame, badly-timed jokes using art you’d expect to see in a comedy manga. Also, what exactly was the point of this series? Life goes on? Sorry, but that’s a terribly weak message. I’m not even sure if that even qualifies as one, more of a fact if you ask me.