Big Order

I'm kind of surprised that, at the time of writing this, there are no complete reviews for Big Order. The only two that exist are preliminary reviews. I can't blame them either. The manga honestly starts off engaging and strong, but soon fizzles out into a manga of nonsense, time wasting, and idiocy. The story itself spirals into shit almost immediately after like, the second volume. I, however, persevered through the trash, and can proudly say I finished the manga from beginning to end. This is the first "complete" review of Big Order. Though story is listed first in the scores, let's start off withart. The artstyle of the manga is... poor, but average at best. For someone reading and reviewing it in 2020, the art looks outdated. The manga debuted in 2011, yet I've read older manga that have better art styles. Even with this outdated style, there are some choices I can nod to. On almost every scene with Eiji in it, his territory (I will "expand" on this later [pun intended]) is consistently drawn. This was a nice little feature, as it was always a reminder that other order users can always see his territory, and in scenes where Eiji loses his power, seeing there be no territory under him reflected his vulnerability. I did not like how the Orders themselves are drawn. The weird skeleton design they all have looks very bad, and it is reminiscent of the bad CGI of the anime. Moving on to characters, throughout the manga, it is VERY clear that Eiji's companion, Rin Kurenai, is just a mirror of Yuno Gasai (even down to the hair color, which Esuno didn't even attempt to hide). Eiji Hoshimiya's character formula is also not too far off from Yukiteru Amano, except one (in a Powerpuff Girls-esque incident) got a little bit too much of the crybaby and idiot genes than the other. If you didn't already know, Mirai Nikki and Big Order were created by the same mangaka. These character similarities are NOT a coincidence. Big Order debuted only a year after Mirai Nikki, mind you. Sakae Esuno clearly thought, "If the characters are not broken, don't fix them" because reading two volumes of the manga will show you that Gasai and Amano's personalities were just transferred over to Kurenai and Hoshimiya, but then Esuno realized that they didn't fit well with the story, but it was too late to turn back, so their personalities got worse in an attempt to make them better. Main problem is I really hate how Eiji acts. Even when it is clear to literally everyone in the world that the bad guy is [SPOILER], Eiji still has that "they can still change themselves!" mentality that all protagonists have, except this character is proven evil and cannot be turned good. Eiji even goes so far as to want to kill himself numerous times to potentially save this character, even though they don't give two craps if Eiji dies or not. My secondary gripe with Eiji is that he doesn't fully take advantage of his Order. Eiji's Order is Bind Dominator, which gives him the power to command any living being or inanimate object to do anything. Wherever he walks, that space permanently becomes his territory, and if he encircles an area, everything in the circle is under his control. Honestly, when watching the anime (and at the beginning of the manga) I thought this ability was badass. Even though I hate the series, I do still think Bind Dominator is one of the coolest abilities a character can have. Unfortunately, Eiji only encloses an area once in the series, and after learning what he can do, every other character is smart enough to not get caught under Eiji's dominion. The rare occasions they do get caught, instead of giving them creative commands like, "Become my ally and do not betray or try to harm me" (like he did with Rin) or "Tell me exactly where [spoiler] is right now and how to defeat them" he says something dumb and useless like, "Stop shooting". Bind Dominator has so much potential, but Eiji never quite learns how to use it to its full power. It takes him about seven volumes to figure out he can manipulate air too and create shields from air pressure or whatever. I would have loved to see Eiji find out more about his abilities, but as someone who has read the entire manga, I can tell you, there is nothing. Okay, now we're getting into the story. There are going to be a couple of minor spoilers here and there, but if you're considering reading this in 2020 or beyond, then you clearly need to do something better with your life. Big Order starts off making no sense. I only stuck around for the action and clung on to the hope that Eiji would use Bind Dominator in a badass way. After being disappointed in both of those areas, I honestly don't know why I kept reading. Probably because I didn't want to leave another manga on my eternal "reading" list. A lot of the things in the novel could have been avoided if the characters weren't so fucking dumb and one dimensional. Eiji literally has nothing on his mind other than to protect his sister for the entire fucking manga. Esuno even tries to incorporate some romantic elements into the series, but Eiji IGNORES the two women who love him and instead pursues his sister more. There is even a very odd scene in volume 9, I believe, where Sena suggests to Eiji that he loves her incestually (which, if you didn't know they were siblings, is totally plausible) but he denies it. The ending is so, soooo stupid. Like, the story is shit in general, but the last two volumes made me want to put the manga down altogether and delete it from my list. Initially, the plot is: Bad man wants everyone to have their wishes granted (Everyone to have Orders) and Eiji has to stop them. Then, it turns into: Bad man wants to turn the spiritual energy of God into the material world and kill everyone, and somehow Eiji must fight God. Yes, you heard that correctly. Eiji Hoshimiya has to FIGHT GOD. Oh, but get this: Yoshitsune Hiiragi just SOMEHOW predicted that the enemy would summon God, and has the perfect plan to combat him. Seriously? How the fuck do you predict someone is going to summon God and fight with him? That's such a random move that no one could possibly predict, nor refute, it. The story is so incredibly stupid, what made Sakae Esuno even want to write this? Surely, this is a bad April Fools joke. There are a hundred things wrong with the story, but that would deserve an entire review itself. Enjoyment factor is very low, a two. Sometimes it's stupidly hilarious, like so bad it's funny. Other times I just don't want to read it anymore. I won't spend too much time talking about this, because the review is already long as is, but I think you can tell how much I enjoyed it based on the previous paragraphs. Overall, Big Order starts off very actiony and promising, however, it becomes apparent that it is a Mirai Nikki clone and that Esuno just wanted to cash cow out the same characters in a different story. I'd actually recommend watching the anime over reading the manga. At least the anime ends your suffering after just twelve episodes, but the manga drags on for ten volumes (which is actually not too short but not too long, but this story could have ended way sooner than it did). This is probably the only case where the ANIME is BETTER than the manga. I know, shocking. Anyway, if you've gotten to the end of this review, thank you for reading, and I hope you don't read this manga. Like, seriously, don't read it. Please don't. Save yourself from 10 volumes of misery.

tl;dr: Some interesting concepts but writing that overall, simply isn't up to par. The most succinct way I can describe this manga is as one where the writing simply isn't good enough for the story it's trying to tell. There are a lot of things that when looked at in hindsight from a broad eyed view seem like good concepts. However, in practice the mangaka couldn't make them work. The first and most obvious issue is the powers characters have. The characters in this manga have a lot of strange powers as one would expect from a set of powers that stem from wishes themselves, and asin most cases where characters have unique powers, a lot of the manga is these characters using these powers to oppose each other. The thing is that a lot of these powers are ridiculous and the only reason the manga proceeds the way it does is that everyone with powers doesn't use their powers anywhere near effectively, which makes pretty much everything involving powers in this manga seem kind of forced. The most prominent example of this is Eiji, the protagonist's, power. Having the ability to control not just people, but anything in his territory ranging from physical entities like bullets or the air itself to even the laws of physics with control of things like gravity, is absolutely overpowered. The manga doesn't really try to establish rules that limit it either. With a power like that he should simply be able to power through everything in his way on his own. But that would be really boring, so for the sake of the plot most of the time he simply doesn't. To a certain degree that would be fine, but the thing is that Eiji is generally shown to be an incredibly weak character that can't pull of much of anything on his own. That personality is fine too, as it's a part of his character arc, but to put it simply his powers and his story simple do not fit with each other. Speaking of character arcs, that would be another issue. Eiji and what felt like the other main characters, Rin, Sena, and Iyo, got decently fleshed out and once everything was wrapped up and over felt like they had decent character arcs. However, this involved a lot of abrupt changes in the direction of character arcs before it seems the author finally picked tracks to settle on with previous developments just being forgotten. So while where things end up is good, the build up to it felt pretty inconsistent. Furthermore, it felt like the author wasn't very good at conveying the emotions of characters all that well, so there were scenes that I believe were meant to be impactful in that regard that simply weren't. This wasn't always the case as there were some scenes where the author did manage to pull it off, but not as much as were needed. Still, with the main characters it was possible to get invested in them and even to a degree find them likable. The side characters on the other hand were a mess. There were a lot of them and they were all pretty unique in terms of character designs and personalities, but because it was trying so hard to make everyone seem special no one ended up standing out or being memorable. It also felt like the plot had them popping in and out in order to keep using the same characters for different roles which felt kind of forced at times with how it resulted in them being inconsistent. The last major issue is the plot itself. The plot is good in terms of the world it builds up, and in the end looking back the core of its plot it is a pretty good story. What I mean by the core of the plot being good is that it has what I felt like were two really solid twists, one at about the half way point and one near the end, where it reverses pretty strongly what was presented leading up to it. Unfortunately, the buildup to both of these wasn't very good. With the first twist, it feels like the author did have it planned out since the beginning, but didn't want to go immediately from the beginning directly to it so the plot of the manga in the first half is a bunch of random nonsense that doesn't matter with sprinkles of things that matter in between as actual build up for coming events, ultimately leading up to things finally getting interesting and good when it finally really gets into the matters relating to the aforementioned twist. With the second half though, it very much feels like the author didn't have the final twist planned out very well if at all. It very much feels like the twist at the end was something that the author came up with when they had almost gotten there, because the only foreshadowing of it is really close to it actually happening, and it's really not subtle at all. Now the twist itself is really good I think, and ties in really well with the first twist. However, it doesn't feel well built up to at all seeing as there weren't any hints at all of it even though it would have been really easy to drop subtle ones that would have better set it up. Rather, it feels kind of inconsistent from what was happening earlier on. Where things go after the twist though was pretty disappointing, in that the ending was incredibly weak and largely unsatisfying. The art I wouldn't call great, but is solid enough. As a general comparison to the anime, it's nowhere near as confusing, but things making more sense doesn't make it that much better, and the ending of the two is actually really different with the ending to the anime actually being a lot better, so really, it's a wash on which of the two is better overall.