Is this a Zombie?

tl;dr: A manga with decent comedy and an amusing cast but that feels too rushed and random to properly develop anything. This is the manga adaptation of a light novel series. There’s also a two-season anime adaptation of this light novel series, though this manga goes a bit farther than that but not by much. The core of this manga is playing with common tropes and themes in ridiculous ways. I won’t go as far as saying that this is a parody or satire as it doesn’t seem to be trying to critique or deconstruct the tropes it’s working with. However, it does seem to betrying to throw in an extreme number of tropes solely for the purpose of having as many as possible and exaggerating them to an extreme degree while also using many of them in ways they aren’t traditionally used for the sake of comedy. The story ends up absolutely ridiculous, but it’s pretty funny so whatever. This is largely carried by the cast of characters who are almost all pretty bizarre, but mesh pretty well for humorous moments. In terms of something with more substance, there does seem to be an attempt at trying to flesh them out with backstory and such and there are some impactful moments. However, it largely feels like things are rushed too much and most of these moments don’t land as well as they could have. The same applies to the overall plot. The plot in general is supposed to have a very spontaneous feel to it where it’s constantly getting pulled in random directions as that contributed to its comedy and general atmosphere. However, I feel that this manga took things too far and if I hadn’t already watched the anime I think a lot of it wouldn’t make all that much sense. Just in general it doesn’t feel like there’s enough background provided and it largely doesn’t seem to flow all that well. That isn’t an issue for the comedy which is still pretty good, but the more serious aspects like character and relationship development suffered significantly. The ending of this manga is solid enough, occurring after the end of a pretty significant arc, though with the story clearly incomplete. Though at the same time, with this kind of bizarre story I’m not sure what a proper complete ending would really look like or whether it would really have all that much value, so this feels like a perfectly solid and satisfying ending. The character designs and general sense of style and framing is pretty good, but the quality of the art overall felt pretty mediocre. Overall I’d say it’s worth reading for how it goes past beyond the anime a little, but I would definitely recommend watching the anime first.