バイオメガ

BIOMEGA

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
6
RELEASE
January 19, 2009
CHAPTERS
42

DESCRIPTION

Set in the future, the plot follows Zouichi Kanoe and his AI companion Fuyu Kanoe, whose luminous form is integrated into the system of his motorcycle. They are agents sent by Toha Heavy Industries to retrieve humans with the ability to resist and transmute the N5S infection, which is spreading across the world, turning humans into "Drones"; disfigured, zombie-like beings.

(Source: Wikipedia)

CAST

Zouichi Kanoe
Kozlov L Grebnev
Nishu Mizunoe
Eon Green
Fuyu Kanoe
Kardal Spindal
Shin Mizunoe
Higaide
Funipero
Taira Hinoto

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

Bountyful
30/100
Mindless action that refuses to accept its fate as junk food, failing miserably at elevating itself, ends being hideous
Back when the Nintendo DS was released, there was an uproar. Everyone and their mothers went and used the wifi connection to browse all the free apps the console offered to the users. One of them was about animation with very minimalistic graphics.
Many of those videos got lost with time, but the most memorable ones got uploaded on Youtube, and some even got so much attention that they developed into something even more massive.
The most peculiar animated videos were those of fighting stickmen. Millions of people watched them fight for minutes at a time, killing hordes of enemies or just brawling it out between two of them.

This is, without much exaggeration, what Biomega is.

I wish I could speak about the series as a whole, but there's really not much to say. It starts well, with an extremely banal apocalypse zombie premise, and non-existent characters, who all look pretty much the same... and then it somehow gets worse.

As I already stated multiple times, writers should stick to a few ideas, not overcomplicate things, and stick to them. Alas, Nihei couldn't, for the life of him, do it.

Zunichi, our protagonist, is tasked with the retrieval of Eon Green, an important human who's the key to stopping the plague from spreading. This is as much as I'm willing to explain since the story decided to get over convoluted.

Since he couldn't stay on track with the zombie apocalypse, Nihei went full in on cosmic horror/existential dread. He keeps introducing new characters, doesn't explain who they are or their motivations, and kills them pretty much instantly. It keeps going, until, after volume 3, he hard-resets the world and we're transported thousands of years into the future, in a whole new dimension/planet, to fight off... the same enemies as before.

In the end, after a thousand years of time-skip to kill off 11 of the 12 main enemy bases, they kill the main enemy because of a talking bear (!) who has the power to warp reality because he got transplanted an important character's brain into himself.

If this sounds too absurd and childish to be true, I have bad news for you.

It's frankly baffling that this manga is received so well. The story makes no sense whatsoever, the characters are plot devices and look all too similar to even discern, and the author refuses to give information, he'd rather stay vague about it all.

Sure, some overly engaged fans tried to patch together theories and make it all work out in the end by filling in stuff he didn't say or plan out, but I'm just left with one question: why?

What was the point of adding all this convoluted story? It does not add anything. It hugely subtracts from the experience, making it impossible to follow properly without backtracking, writing down names and scattering information.

The main selling point, the drawings, are cool. But the paneling is atrocious, all characters look the same, it's almost impossible to follow what's happening during the fights, and the author... he doesn't care.

He keeps drawing ghastly aberrations and gory fights, over and over and over. It almost becomes comical since we don't have any character development. There's a moment during the end where a little kid meets a blind alien who helps her. He gets his brain splattered over the floor 10 pages later. It's full of scenes like these and I have no idea why.

Again, the comparison to stickmen fights comes to mind. Nihei just wanted to draw sci-fi horrors battling it out.
Sure, ok, it would have been a bit too confusing, but I'd accept that since it's easy to read and he has a... peculiar style to say the least.
Why did he feel the need to add all that complex stuff? I am bewildered. It almost feels like Nihei intentionally sabotaged his own series.

If you want to read a good take on reality-warping dread, go give Fire Punch a try. There's no point in recommending it. It's just insufficient and boring.

Initially, I wanted to frame Biomega as action junk food. But the problem is that it tries too hard to sound like a Michelin 3-star meal, forgetting that he's just barely more than a tepid hamburger.
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