World Embryo

This is a manga that really just loves to pull on your heartstrings. There are few truly evil characters, a majority of the cast has a somewhat tragic backstory, the main cast goes through a shit ton of pain and suffering... it's the usual stuff. Though good for me, the usual stuff is written very well, outside of the incredibly convoluted plot that loses all sense of grounding by the end, like 80% of the battle manga I've read in recent days. It's what keeps this manga at a score of 8 instead of a 9, but it wraps up nicely at the end, nocharacter feels underused, and I didn't hate the protag this time, so I'm willing to look over most of it. The art is pretty good as well.

World Embryo is a manga set in a modern Japan that involves a ‘virus’ spread through phone calls that turns the receivers into monsters known as Kanshu. What makes this virus especially dangerous is that most people’s memories of anything having to do with the virus or Kanshu are somehow being erased, with the victims typically being completely forgotten by the rest of the world as if they never existed. The exceptions are those that can wield mysterious weapons known as Jinki which they’re able to summon when they’re attacked by Kanshu. The phone company, NEFT, gathers these Jinki wielders and created the organization FLAGwith the goal of protecting humanity from the Kanshu and hunting down the source of infection. The focus of this manga is specifically Amami Riku, a high school boy that ends up getting involved with Kanshu and becoming a Jinki user. However, he has goals beyond just defeating the Kanshu. His story begins with him receiving a phone message from Amane, a girl that he was in love with but that had already passed away. Looking deeper into that message is what gets him pulled into dealing with Kanshu, but it also gets him a cocoon with Neene, the reincarnation of Amane. Furthermore, it’s very likely that this reincarnation is heavily rooted in the origin behind the Kanshu. Thus, because he’s worried that FLAG could take away Neene, Riku keeps her a secret but still works for them in order to discover the truth behind the cocoon and Kanshu on his own. The plot of the manga was really interesting. It’s pretty well paced and used the core concepts and themes pretty well. The phone aspect is mostly just aesthetic, but it commits to it pretty well. As a result, there are some definite denpa vibes. The memory mechanic is also interesting and pretty well fleshed out with a lot of interesting mechanics to it. The origin behind the Jinki and Kanshu is pretty interesting as well, though as things progress this end up getting pretty convoluted. In a broader sense, that’s the biggest problem with this manga. As is the case with most battle manga, things are constantly escalating. And as the mangaka goes for higher and higher stakes, he keeps building up more and more story elements and adding more and more mysteries, which ends up making things more and more complex. And in the end, he has to tie himself up into knots in order to wrap everything up. Still, all in all I’d have to say I was satisfied with the ending because even if the plot ended up a mess, at least the writing did well by it’s characters. Riku and the main heroine Rena are both great characters. Riku has a pretty good character arc centered around him being a liar, with a focus on how he became that way and how he fundamentally needs to change how he relates to others. Rena is a bit more complicated in that it’s less that she has a character arc, and more so that due to her past she’s mentally a mess and she needs to pull herself together. The two also have a solid relationship arc, with the highlight being how Neene serves as the glue. Neene on her own is also great in that in she’s just being a cute kid doing her best while slowly growing up. I wasn’t much of a fan of where the story went in regards to Amane however, though its not really possible to discuss how without major spoilers. There are two other characters that I felt were supposed to be important, Takao and Tougo, but the writing was pretty weak with both of them. With Takao it felt like the mangaka wasn’t quite sure how he wanted him to be portrayed so he ends up pretty inconsistent. With Tougo, he just wasn’t fleshed out well enough despite how critical he is to where the story eventually ends up going. There are a bunch of side characters, with a lot getting a decent amount of background and some even some light character arcs. On the whole they were mixed, but overall, I’d rate them favorably. The art was pretty good. The action came through well, though I would still have to say the action was on the weak side for such a battle focused manga. This was heavily in part due to how there was very little in terms of ability growth or power ups, and what there was wasn’t portrayed all that well. The character designs and monster designs were good too, though they were also somewhat generic for the setting. tl;dr: A battle manga that’s very interesting but also very messy, especially towards the end.