”I’m alive and that’s wonderful!!”
Creative Staff
Story: Kaiu Shirai
Art: Posuka Demizu
Translation/Adaptation: Satsuki Yamashita
What They Say
Life at Grace Field House is good for Emma and her fellow orphans. While the daily studying and exams they have to take are tough, their loving caretaker provides them with delicious food and plenty of playtime. But perhaps not everything is as it seems…
Emma and her new allies have successfully taken down many of the demons of Goldy Pond. The last one standing in this demonic hunting ground is Leuvis, but he’s the most powerful of them all. None of the children’s tactics seem to work on him, but some unexpected last-minute help may turn the tide of the battle. Can the children of Goldy Pond finally put an end to their despair?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
This final entry of the Goldy Pond arc is a solid example of Shirai’s writing style, both good and bad.
On the one side, Shirai is able to expertly craft a fight around the demons. The sheer amount and variety of demons the kids have to fight, eventually building up to the final showdown with Leuvis is everything you would expect from a finely crafted shonen series. Leuvis is oddly fleshed out for a character whose sole motivation is to eat these innocent kids. He’s the type of villain that could have easily gotten away with a flimsy character motivation and yet Shirai goes as far as fleshing out their personality to the extent that I would go as far as say he was written far better than some of the new cast of kids. Leuvis goes as far as partaking in an elaborate setup such as Goldy Pond all for the sake of reliving the thrill of the hunt. He fights with honor and has a twisted sense of code when it comes to facing each child on the battlefield, and yet he still has enough of a demonic aura about himself that you wouldn’t put it past him to throw out all his self-induced rules if he must.
Meanwhile, everything else about the current volume begins to fall flat when taking even a second to really start digging into the details. Like volumes prior, Shirai doesn’t exactly use the most finesse when it comes to large casts of extras. The Goldy Pond kids still feel like accessories to Emma’s character development rather than full-on characters in their own rights. And even with exceptions like Oliver and Adam, it’s less that they’re able to support a story and more that they have the one fun tidbit about them that at least makes things interesting when they’re in a scene.
Additionally, sheer story structure is clunky at best. As the current arc wraps up and the cast figures out what to do next, there’s this odd moment where everyone speaks as if they’re on the same page with each other and yet you as the reader still feel lost. It would be one thing if this were an intentional decision on Shirai’s part, but the cast simply ends up parting ways as if setting up for the following arc being their trip back to base only to immediately be reunited within the span of a few pages. It’s a strange writing decision only made stranger when the following chapter ends up serving as the true function to the standing “what happens next?” question bookmarking any story arc. The cast regroups and systematically compares notes on what’s known and what should be done next. It makes for this incredibly dry content to sift through, but at least Shirai is clear about objectives and what to expect in further volumes.
In Summary:
The Promised Neverland volume 11’s action serves as a spectacular ending to the Goldy Pond arc that’s undercut by Shirai’s paint-by-numbers format of storytelling. While action scenes speak for themselves, it’s in the later chapter’s more dense word-heavy panels that the story begins to slow down to a noticeable degree. It’s not enough to dampen my enjoyment of the volume, but it is enough to make me question how Shirai will handle similarly dense lore come later volumes.
Content Grade: B+
Art Grade: B
Packaging Grade: A
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: Teen
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: August 6th, 2019
MSRP: $9.99
