Creative Staff
Story/Art: Keiko Suenobu
Translation/Adaptation:
What They Say
Mizuki has found herself in a position where her not only her social life is at risk, but her survival rests in the hands of the young women she was desperately attempting to avoid. In the wild the strong survive, and while Alisa may not be smart or cute, she is physically strong. She immediately takes command by gathering anything that may be used as a weapon to threaten the lives of anyone who may attempt to usurp her new-found authority.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
After a first volume that presented a somewhat strange situation, events feel like they settle down here a bit more. The opening volume had a lot of foundation to lay with how the few kids survived the crash and came together but it also had to explore some of the social issues as well. We got a fair bit of the way the survivors makeup was dealt with as some took a position of power, some subservience while others are just trying to survive, but it had to get explored in that present situation as well as the past to show what it was like in school. All the socialization really hits there when dealing with the high school aged kids and seeing what they went through, either by being on top, following or on the bottom, plays into how roles are changing here and how these kids have dealt with.
Thankfully, one of the things this volume does is actually explore a bit what happened to allow the situation not to catch the eye of anyone in a position of authority. It’s not completely smooth in a way, since it requires some coincidences to hit as well. With the adults back in the city, either at the school, the bus company or where the kids are supposed to be, you have to suspend disbelief just a bit in order to make it work where you know that nobody would really make that extra call to find out what’s going on, especially where a bus full of kids are involved. Still, it does work overall even with these issues and seeing how it can set the kids on this path for survival on their own for a duration makes sense and allows you to focus more on what they’re going through rather than wondering where all the adults are.
Unlike the first volume, the time spent with the kids is a bit more relaxed in a way. They’re surviving, they’ve got their structure in place through the dominance aspect, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as rushed as it was before. The search for food is a big part of the story at this point and one of them teaches the others a trick to fish that works pretty well and it’s welcome to see that explored since food is a big issue. There’s more exploration of the psychological issues and it definitely makes sense that at least one of them would start to have a psychological breakdown. And not just from the situation with the bus, surviving that and seeing the dead there, but from their position in the social rung now where they’re lower than ever before after being a follower. There’s a lot of small moments like this throughout that build up to some fairly intense moments.
In Summary
Limit kicked off with a good if chaotic first volume as it threw a lot of things at you and really left a lot of questions unanswered that I felt needed some touching upon there. We get more of that here spread across the volume with what’s going on with the adults in the picture and it helps to set things up well for the most part. With that adding more to the bones of the series, we get to focus a lot more on the core characters that have survived from the first volume and we see how their social structure is coming together, but also the fraying edges that are becoming more apparent. The tensions are rising and there’s some real darkness under some of the seeming “pleasant” aspects of some of the characters as they’re doing whatever is required to survive. In some ways it feels like they’ve gone this route far quicker than should be expected, but with all of them in a state of shock from the accident and coping with it in different ways, it’s something that you can overlook for the most part. With a dynamic change coming in the next volume based on what we get here at the end, it’ll be curious to see where it goes.
Content Grade: B-
Art Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Vertical
Release Date: November 20th, 2012
MSRP: $10.95
