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REVIEWS

• 

  DatJuno

  72/100
  Sci-fi futuristic world is crumbling 'cause mysterious virus. Also drugs, prostitution, politics, religion and war.

  One thing should be clear: I wouldn't recommend Eden to everyone. While I can't deny that it has a really good setting and some pretty interesting concepts, the pace and the dozens of badly used side characters can be annoying after the 9th cool character comes out of nowhere, introduce a new concept and dies literally 1 chapter after. But let's go for the story.

  In a near future, a virus that transforms people into minerals appear and starts to take over the world that is already crumbling from wars and a misteryous extremist religious organization. 2 kids that are immune to the virus are growing up in the facility Eden, isolated from the virus, and scientists starts to study them. The so called organization appears in the facility bringing havoc and is quickly wiped away by the guard robot Cherubim, controled by the boy Enoa (Did I mention that a lot of characters have religious names? Yeah, that's cool, I know). Fast forward some years and we have the main character, Elijah Ballard, a teenager son of the most powerful drug lord from South America, Enoa Ballard (!). The religious organization from before? Called Propater, they rule half of the world and have complete authority over it. I'd like to go through some of the major points of the story so you can have your own conclusions.

  The good points:

  • The Ballards development: This is one of the things that I find really good in the manga. For Elijah, we start with your average teenager that doesn't have a good relationship with his father and follow his path to being a determined grown up, terrorist hunted by the Propater with strong convictions. We get to understand a little more about Enoa's feelings, why he acts the way he acts and do what he do. We even see the Ballard sisters way of seeing the world, the family traumas and everything in between the love of parents and dysfunctional family bonds.
  • The politics, religious discussions and the decline of our way of living: For those who like to see political conflicts between people with differente world views, the way religion can bring the best and also the worst of people and the way humanity starts to decline after a crisis, this is a full plate. In Eden, drugs and prostitution in the decaying Earth are common things. As a product of globalization and late capitalism, most part of the characters are of mixed race and it gives a touch of reality to the manga. Also, the discussions around drug abuse are quite shocking and have a real effect on history, with Elijah's older sister being a heroin addict (and later in the manga Elijah becoming one as well). Main characters doing casual sex just for relieving the tension of war or pure pleasure and Elijah's first love being a prostitute herself.
  • The virus: The virus starts as something that turns people into a mineral form. After some time surviving, humanity finds vaccines and ways to contain the virus, and seeing partially disabled people because of the Closure Virus. The thing is: eventually, the virus mutates to a new form, the Disclosure Virus, which transforms people into a liquid form, then solidifies, then liquid, and then solid... turning them into strange crystals in the end of the process. What the scientists discover is that the virus' crystals, that start taking the world again (because is something entirely new, an evolution of the old virus), is actually a form of collective conscience of those affected by it. The concept is so original and mysterious that you don't know what to expect of it. If you like to read about theory of areas like biology, physics and chemistry then you'll like this as well (even though I couldn't understand most of the theoric concepts).
  • Philosophy and religion: I can't extend too much on this since in the end the manga is about the merging of these things, but a lot of philosophical questions about good and evil, the value of life, human and nature intentions and the purpose of humanity's existence in the big scheme of things are addressed in Eden.
  • Morality being real: It is awesome to see some gray things and the representation of different cultures not as the bad people, but just as... people. Muslim people fighting an evil christian organization that has people with good intentions, local conflicts between africans, and all in between. The manga portrays the world as it is: people acting as people.

  Now, for the bad points:

  • Side characters: As I said before, the author's use of side characters can be... disappointing, to say the least. The feel I get is that no one really matters aside from the Ballard family and maybe Lethia and Maya. Literally dozens of side characters are presented just to die some chapters later after introducing something new or explaining some concept. You could say that it's just a way to show how death is something trivial when you are involved with terrorists and powerful fascist organizations, but I don't think that's the case, it just looks like the author doesn't know how to handle his characters. It is frustrating that characters full of potential die like they don't have any weight on the story and totally random people just live until the end.
  • Lack of explanation: Ok, some things don't really need an explanation cause it wouldn't make a difference. And it can be that I'm just dumb, but I felt kinda lost in some moments, especially regarding theoric concepts in the second half of the manga. They just kepting adding more and more concepts, each time more complicated, without properly explaining old things. A lot of concepts aren't even meant to be understood by everyone since it has some hardcore applied science, but in the end I just felt that it had some loose ends.
  • The pace: To simply put it, the constancy of the pace is close to 0. Sometimes things are going so smoothly and good to read, and 1 chapter later it looks SO rushed to some chapter later it be so slow that it's boring. As it happens with the characters, it looks like the author has a problem with pace as well.

  To finish it, some points unrelated to those things above:

  • The setting: As a brazilian, it's really nice to see some things happening in my country, things of my culture and/or environment that I can relate (for those who don't know, Brazil is HUGE so the cultural differences between north and south, for example, are so big that it doesn't even look like the same country except for the language). Also, it's fun to see a lot of names common in Latin American. I was like: "Hey, that's my friend's name!". It can be something silly, but it's really nice.
  • The art: I don't usually care if the art is said good or bad, but I guess it's valid to talk about this here. While yes, I say that the art is good in the manga (especially with the robotic things like Cherubim or the androids and cyborgs) it suffers from the same face effect. The style is realistic (maybe because it's a 90s manga) and can be really detailed sometimes with beautifully drawn faces with a normal human proportions, but everyone looks exactly the same. My guess is that it's probably because of the huge amount of characters, it should be hard to draw a totally different human being each time a new character is introduced (like every 5 chapters). Again, something the author doesn't know how to handle.

  Concluding, it isn't a manga for everyone but I guess it's worth a chance, even if it's frustrating sometimes. The 21XX Earth is well constructed, consistent and realistic with destroyed landscapes and nature taking back some parts of the world. If you're a fan of sci-fi, apocalyptic settings or the type that likes big brain endings, then you MUST give this a chance.

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• 

  Hopesfall

  75/100
  a brilliant yet inadequate insight into a plausible near future and the contrast between familial love and altruism.

  this review contains a fair amount of spoilers. reading it ahead of the manga may very well sour your experience so it's thoroughly advised that you go over at the bare minimum three quarters of the material beforehand. you have been warned.

  i have always been fascinated by the prospect of dystopias, especially those with a particular emphasis on the potential for technological advancement the further we plunge our necks into a convergence that never comes, or at least isn't prescient enough to warrant a look back at certain bygone epochs. you know, works of such sophistry and wonder that you can't help but get lost in the possibilities that may come true many years down line. hell, you may live to see them play out before your very earthly visage. the feeling of knowing the unknown will incontrovertibly morph into what's in the now and consequently known, is one that parallels few others. Eden is a manga of that such ilk, with brand-spanking highlights of the technobabble of future civilizations manifesting themselves as narrative, it harbors no shortage of idealistic navel-gazing for pompous geeks such as myself. teeming with applications of cyberization and basic tenets of the proliferation of inorganic matter and life alike, it lacks nothing in terms of what may be explored in hard sci-fi -- or perhaps that seems so.

  uncapping my verbatim reflective of Endless World, one takeaway i've periodically had with respect to the ostensible “what is lacking" happens to be what isn't retroactively shown in further depth. sure, many of the theories and machinations seem plausible at a glance, but that only really scratches the surface of what can be parsed within a web of congregating vignettes, each of which encloses a facet of post-modernity as a focal point of the uncollated tale's significance in the grand scheme of things. the reason i say "a" instead of "the" is simply that there's greater thematic depth to Eden than mere photon beam emitters that penetrate even kevlar-reinforced armaments. like, is that all? what is aptly annotated superseding this markedly shoddy attempt at textual digression is the following soliloquy i had when blazing through some of the more middling chapters smack dab bookending continually fracturing episodes starring a throng of relegated cannon fodder that also somehow take comparatively major precedence to the progression of the underlying subtext of neverending despotism:

  "i hope more of the inner workings of this phenomenon is explained later on but for some out-of-touch reason, i keep getting the irreverent hunch that deluding myself into believing i'll get more coverage of that as i make ordinate progress across the manga's run is conceited and asking too much of the author."

  Endo, if you knew this was going to become a bump on the road in the long run then why opt to make this so heavily mired in the fauxscientific. a fine example of balls-to-the-wall cyberpunk would be Shirow Masamune's Ghost in the Shell, wherein he goes into dizzyingly succinct depth about how he envisions a japan that's not grounded in present times and tries to convey the silliness of sudden drastic changes in modern society that would entail either mass skepticism or unanimous acceptance, each depending on the sign of the times to determine which is more amiable and attuned to the world as it is at any given fixture. Hiroki Endo's Eden does not do this at all. He tries to capture the dreary aesthetic of post-economic bubble japan circa the late 90s through a bevy of variegated stances, for one there’s the political framework of a slew of governing bodies that reeked of unbounded corruption and bore a tint of manipulative mannerisms that those in charge of running the country at the time never admitted to. similarly, the globalist faction Propatria does this albeit to much broader degrees. now, its discrepancy in relation to GITS' is as follows: GITS has every reason to wax philosophical while not needing to go ham on the technobabble throughout its runtime whereas Eden plays into the conceit that it may be obliged to do the same. this is where things begin to go awry. GITS has few unchanging rules to its structural components so working with those rules all while revelling in self-indulgence is fair, but in the case of Eden you’ve got so many different tenets that often act disproportionately to one another so they clash. a lot. hence creating an induced fear of imbalance, with contradictions and inconsistencies becoming increasingly prevalent as more and more of the world therein starts to unravel.

  with that being said, the other thing i can ceremoniously praise Eden for is its handling of core thematic threads and messages that weave into the narrative at large. one such theme is the importance of familial bonds and the curious ways in which they ultimately transcend innately altruistic worldviews. now i know what may be suddenly crossing your mind? what does altruism have to do with family ties, especially in as majorly complex a narrative as Endless World? well, the first of my points has to do with the Ballards, the main provocateurs of each of the stories. Comprising 5 members, each replete with distinct backstories and moments of clarity, all of them are tied by the events that transpire around them, whether they be the perpetrators or unwilling participants in them, they inevitably seem to be latched firmly in place by the world over, never once being granted control over affairs regularly galvanized by them. yes, they serve as catalysts for the dozens upon dozens of botched operations and devious schemes devised by the higher-ups of Propatria or as stated, them.

  Enoa comes off at first as this idealistic child commanding this sense of anti-nihilism as he grabs whatever opportunity that dangles in front of his face by the hand. a naive opportunist, he appears readily adamant about jettisoning the paradisiacal eden that both he and his future wife Hana are stranded on. Later on, as he redebuts as a jaded revolutionary assuming responsibilities in the form of orchestrating a large scale coup’d’etat against Propatria that takes ages to reach some semblance of a conclusion, he wavers and grouchily catapults back and forth between sabotaging Propatria from within and caring for his family before settling on a definitive calling card. and thus winding up choosing his family over downing the megaestablishment douches. how very admirable. it sugarcoats the thin facade of fickle relationships and immortalizes it as something that transcends even time. who you are in the present, what forms of treachery and deceit you dare commit out in the open, how much you value everyone else more than you do your birth parents because of how much insurmountable grief they might have caused you for not having been there in your most vulnerable hours, it all doesn’t matter. family comes first and should any bad omen come their way, you must act expeditiously to endeavor and deflect whatever that imminent danger is.

  kicking back the dilemma of parenthood for a bit, Eden also spares no mercy on the part of the reader as it constantly inundates them with fleeting passages of fornication. in this context specifically, prostitution. Enoa’s son, Elijah, is a disenfranchised youth. he yearns for a place to belong since losing both his younger sister and mother to a remotely spearheaded division of Propatrian lackeys imparted a toll all too hard for him to cope with. so he wanders the incan mountain range aimlessly, happening upon barren cities every so often, reminding us, the audience, that this is a war-torn future full of callous decisions and hasty science-y shenanigans condoned by glory-seeking scientists that teeter on the very brink of collapse and failure every time they experiment on a newly discovered strain of virulent microbes. that is, until he crosses paths with the mercenary group Nomad and is blackmailed into doing their bidding lest he barrels off in the opposite direction when they’re not monitoring his every misstep. fast forward some odd four years later, Elijah is now a proficient contract killer worthy of the mantle "Lecherous MacGyver”. he is serendipitously tasked with investigating a lead discovered after some of the Nomads discover a trail of blood within an Australian bioelectronics firm that indirectly stems from Propatrian soil, and so he, along with a ragtag crew of misanthropic and disgraced law enforcers plus an incubated a.i. that takes corporeal form, sets out to find what it is that they have decidedly chosen to associate themselves with. and now, for the reason as to why all of this is lost on me: the sex interspersed throughout. yes, you heard me right. there are way too many sex scenes accompanying a majority of the events i have described above, and sometimes you may even spot some instances of recreational drug use, though not for meditative purposes, mind you. the people in this manga all happen to be debaucherous animals who crave carnal pleasures and Sabbath-like epiphanies where they rather waste their lives living from one moment to the next without care for anything that does not inherently concern them. selfish, and above all, blind to the crushing realisations and expectations present only within reality. what they are and who they were before are not two inextricably linked concepts as far as they’re concerned.

  i do not reserve the right to riff on about the art as gushing about manga aesthetics from a strictly technical point of view does not fall within my area of expertise, i'm afraid. although, i will comment on the general "feel" of the style Endo fosters throughout. it is predominantly consistent, and while it does dip at points, it stays very much in line of the scope of ambition and range of prose and constructs that it postulates. smooth as silk at times, and rough as sandpaper as well as soulless at others, it is truly commendable that Endo managed to work up this much of an appetite for consistency of delivery over the 10 or so years he spent writing and illustrating this wondrous piece of dystopian sci-fi.

  additional notes: does anyone else feel that the exact genre that Eden is supposedly classified under should be be up in the air rather than be defined as plain cyberpunk? this does not read like how conventional cyberpunk would. rather, i infer that it jumbles up and decompartmentalizes subgenres across all basic gists native to storytelling and bastardizes and pokes fun at them individually, and one at a time. for closure, volumes 9 and 10 read like something out of a flick centered around a geopolitical turf war between unruly occupying forces and those who seek to wipe their lands clean of the aforementioned scourge, so to speak, with a backdrop incumbent on a non-specific locale, much akin to how a game of cat and mouse would unfold but only with no intentionally divulged number of sides to the unending pursuit. conversely there's nonsense like volume 14, where the better half of it is spent on a bunch of random field agents pursuing a duo of schoolgirls, one of which is a trained assassin unafraid to exercise lethal force on her foes. the thing with its tone is that it's almost school comedy-esque, with many of the shenanigans happening over the course of it being reminiscent of tacky self-aware comedies with school as the main focus a la Cromartie High School. yeah, it's kooky, i know.

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• 

  JoaxKun

  77/100
  Eden: A masterpiece's first half undone by a convoluted, apocalyptic finale. Still, an unforgettable journey.

  Eden is a manga I started reading almost 13 years ago, as of writing this review. Back then, I had to put it on hold because editions in my language were unavailable, and it stayed on pause all this time. This year, I made a point to pick it up again, and I must say the experience has been just as good as I remembered. Unfortunately, that only holds true for the first 80 chapters or so.

  The manga introduces us to a cyberpunk world devastated by a virus known as the "Close Virus." The story begins with a group—specifically Ennoia and Hannah, the characters who kick off the narrative. They possess an immunity to the Close Virus due to multiple experiments they were subjected to on the island where they lived. The plot gets a bit confusing early on, involving the foundation of an organization called Propater and a scenario where Ennoia kills his father under murky circumstances. It's never entirely clear if he knows the identity of the man he kills or if he does it consciously. After this, Ennoia and Hannah leave the island.

  From here, we jump into the future and connect with who will be the main protagonist for most of the story: Elijah Ballard. Elijah is Ennoia's son, lost and fleeing from Propater's mercenaries—the men who kidnapped his family—in an abandoned city. This marks the start of a years-long odyssey where Elijah will try to rescue his family from their captors. Throughout this journey, he undergoes a coming-of-age process, exposed to the world's injustices and forced to develop his own response to them.

  My favorite part of this manga is encompassed in the first 50 chapters, which essentially cover everything I've just described. This is the section with the most potential. After this, there's an intermediate period highlighted by a small arc focusing on Kenji, one of the characters who could be considered a protagonist. This arc isn't bad, but it doesn't contribute much to the overall narrative beyond making a single point.

  However, one of this manga's core problems is that many of its premises are built on mysteries and questions that seem destined to be answered later, but as the plot advances, the answers are often disappointing or simply never arrive. For example, early on we're told that after killing his father, Ennoia decided to collaborate with Propater again, but at some point, he betrayed them due to ideological opposition to their goals. The issue is we never learn the specific reason for this rift. Ennoia himself remains largely an enigma, an overly stoic character which becomes confusing when the narrative suddenly gives him a predominant role in the final story arc.

  Nevertheless, the real and main issue I have with the work is how it shifts from an intimate story portraying human nature's inequalities, ambiguities, and moral gray areas, along with its social conflicts, into a story about saving humanity. At a certain point, the virus returns—a mutated strain called the "Open Virus"—which transforms the infected into a kind of intelligent crystalline structure called "colloids."

  This is where I believe the manga's decline begins. Generally, there are two major stumbles from this point onward:

  1. A pair of Propater scientists, Ravi and Kate Mishima, are introduced. They are tasked with guiding the plot related to the virus mutation, but they feel more like narrative vehicles for a subplot where the true focus is the virus itself. They are fairly flat and uninteresting characters overall.

  2. The second major problem is a timeskip where it's revealed that Helena (one of the main characters) has left Elijah. A new character named Pessoa is introduced out of nowhere; he is now engaged to Helena and has been working as a double agent between Propater and Ennoia to sell information about a type of nanomachine being used to kill the organization's dissidents. Besides the strange and counterintuitive notion of Latin America being a focal point for advanced espionage plots—when it doesn't appear to be a real technological or political center in this story's world—this plotline is extremely tedious and confusing. It drags on for far too many chapters in an endless mystery that ultimately goes nowhere and has no payoff. Even the revelation that Propater is using these nanomachines has no impact on the narrative afterward.

  3. Elijah's general attitude changes. A significant amount of the character's introspection is lost, and his personality becomes oversimplified into a guy who is happy all the time and constantly cracks jokes. While the story seems to want to convey that Elijah uses this facade as a coping mechanism—a idea hinted at by his increasing reliance on drugs—the post-timeskip character feels strangely disconcerting, as if he has lost much of the depth he had in his initial arcs.

  The resolution to plotline of Elijah trying to save his family is, for the most part, unsatisfying. Worst of all, it doesn't even feel like there's a point to it. The way the entire situation is resolved comes off as extremely random. In fact, it seems that past this point, the author no longer knew what direction the story should take. Consequently, the plot begins to spiral into a series of apocalyptic events, one after another, whose occurrences are utterly bizarre. Not only does the Open Virus appear, but it is preceded by a series of super earthquakes that happen for no reason, followed by a ball of dark matter that, for no particular reason, approaches Earth, nearly collides with its atmosphere, and releases a massive amount of gamma rays. If this sounds random to you, you're right—it absolutely is.

  By the end of the story, the author has become too comfortable with killing off characters. While this isn't inherently bad and did happen early on, the deaths eventually lose their narrative purpose and start to happen just for the sake of it. In addition, new characters start appearing whose inclusion is strange and seems to respond more to flaws in the overall plot structure and a lack of planning. Suddenly, mercenaries connected to a minor character appear to forcibly kidnap someone, or a secret member of Propater is introduced who had never been mentioned before, seemingly because the author was no longer satisfied with the antagonists that had been established up to that point. Likewise, towards the end, certain characters are suddenly given a disproportionate importance in the narrative. This prominence is conferred without any prior anticipation and feels thematically unjustified, as these characters are underdeveloped or their core traits simply don't align well with the pivotal roles they are forced into in the finale.

  At a certain point, I have to say that the plot had not only strayed from what initially interested me in the story, but many situations felt arbitrary and devoid of thematic meaning. They became extremely messy and lacking any interesting direction. Nevertheless, the story's final note—about the need to find meaning in life despite the world's inequalities and injustices—is where I believe the central theme is perfectly summarized. It's an aspect that, unfortunately, I don't think the author knew how to execute very well, ultimately leading to a rather poor conclusion for the story. Even so, I must say that its first part is an impressive manga, and even if it didn't fully meet my expectations, I wouldn't call the final part catastrophic or terribly bad. With all its flaws, I believe "Eden: It's an Endless World!" is a work I would undoubtedly still recommend.

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