The Weakest Contestant of All Space and Time

tl;dr: A really original and interesting manga that was axed before it amounted to anything. Welcome to the Weakest Contestant of Space and Time Championship, where the god of each space time enters their weakest sentient being. First off, they compete in a tournament where they fight to the death. Each match the competitor that dies wins and gets revived to go on to the next round. In the end, once only the five weakest remain, they get thrown out into an enormous wilderness and serve as prey, while all the other contestants serve as hunters. If the hunters kill the prey, then the hunters getto return home. However, there are no more revivals for the prey. If they die, they’re dead for good. The premise for this manga is super original, and though there were definitely some rough spots, overall the execution was pretty great too. The main cast, the five weakest, are pretty interesting. The protagonist, Hitomu, is your average everyday salaryman. Except he overthinks things way too much. And as for his personality, well they say people’s true colors are revealed in times of crisis, and in the case of Hitomu his last actions before imminent death are trying to get in one last smoke or staring at a girl’s boobs. Kind of a girl. She’s actually a slime, but for some reason after sucking Hitomu’s blood she started looking like his ex and behaving like a human. Also, Hitomu has some sort of trauma stemming from his relationship with his ex that seems to be one of the main reasons he’s so useless, and interacting with her replica slime girl seems to be serving as some sort of bizarre therapy that’s helping him get over it. There’s also an overly aggressive war robot that isn’t actually a war robot, a yokai no one has ever heard of and that seems to have no powers, and caterpie. They’re all pretty incompetent as you would expect. And they’re also pretty annoying personality wise. However, the writing feels like it’s using the bad parts of their characters pretty well, and together they’re actually becoming somewhat likable. On top of the interesting cast, there’s also some pretty interesting world building. Mainly stemming around how the gods are all bastards exploiting the weak purely for their own amusement and not caring about life in the slightest. But then there’s some hinting that the tournament organizers, or at least some of them, are seemingly working on a plan to overthrow the gods completely. That plan however, will forever remain a mystery because the manga ends prematurely. Just as it feels like the manga has pulled you in and is really getting going, it just ends. There isn’t even an attempt at giving it an ending. It’s just suddenly over. It clearly got axed, and now all the various plot threads will remain unfinished. This is immensely disappointing to the point I question whether this manga is worth reading at all. Overall, I did enjoy what I read and I don’t regret reading it, but at the same time I really can’t bring myself to recommend it. The art is decent with a pretty generic art style. The designs are also pretty generic, but it pulls generic designs from a lot of different settings and genre’s so in combination it looks pretty interesting visually.