Well, that’s certainly an interesting direction for the series…
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Ryo Yasohachi
Translation: Yota Okutani
What They Say
Karigane adopts Rin’s risky strategy to rescue Snow White from the UN’s Vector containment facility, but not everything goes according to plan. A colleague starts to worry about Rin and discovers her diary, which includes secrets from her past as well as her current mission. And Shige considers early retirement when tragedy strikes home…
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
We jump right into the action this time around, with the rescue operation by our heroes taking center stage. Things seem to go relatively smoothly as they manage to disguise themselves and are welcomed into the building. But when they’re placed in a waiting room, things quickly go south, as it turns out they’ve been detected. And on top of that, their foes show off how they frozen Snow White in liquid nitrogen, so… that’s pretty messed up.
Despite the plan having clearly gone to hell, thanks to Karigane and Kiriko the group decides to plow forward anyway, attempting the rescue despite the massively disadvantageous circumstances. For a second, this actually looks like it’s going well, with our heroes showing off just how strong they are and tearing through the normal guards and the building itself. But then a woman who uses rather familiar slicing ribbons comes onto scene, and things completely and utterly fall apart. Which is to say, the three characters involved are defeated and sealed away in liquid nitrogen as well.
Needless to say, taking out the main character and two other important ones along with her kind of throws off the rhythm of the book. It’s definitely a bold move, and I have to assume it’s not permanent, but it still definitely makes for a real heavy change to the status quo. And at least for now, that means jumping around to several more minor cast members. For example, we join one of Rin’s coworkers who goes looking for her, only to discover her diary. So that starts kind of charming, but turns dark real fast. Kenzaki also gets a moment to himself, which fleshes out his family life a bit, and we even get a look back to Rin’s past. Oh, and we also get the bumbling antics of the two replacement Escape Artists, which is kind of amusing.
The big moment this time around, though, comes at the end, when we look in on Shige, the older dude on the Anti-Vector Unit. I’m of two minds on this story beat because to it DOES largely work, but damned if everything isn’t cliché and foreshadowed as hell. To cut to the chase, his daughter ends up dying due to infection, and it absolutely breaks him. But just what does it mean when a thorough investigation shows that she shouldn’t have possibly been infected in the first place?
In Summary
So, while I won’t actually spoil it here, this volume takes a real crazy twist that’ll have some serious effects on the future of the series, and it certainly affects most of this book. It definitely is cool to see and works well, hitting you with a real punch when it happens. And yet, it also kind of shows precisely why such wild, unexpected turns may not necessarily be a good thing for a series. Which is to say, it uproots a lot of what the series has built up, and leaves everything afterwards here feeling a bit weaker and more detached as a result. So in the end, though I applaud the guts it took to do such a thing, I sadly would say it has a real net negative effect on the book, though fortunately not enough to kill things entirely. And hopefully next time around, we’ll see the series more smoothly moving into this new status quo, as it’d be a real shame if the bump caused by this moment ruined all the cool things that have been built up so far.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: B+
Package Rating: B+
Text/Translation Rating: B+
Released by: Vertical
Release Date: April 18th, 2017
MSRP: $12.95