Blame is a manga set in a really interesting world. It’s essentially post-apocalyptic cyberpunk, wherein there’s what seems to be a city that goes on endlessly in every direction, including up and down, that’s managed by some sort of AI in the background in what is called the netsphere. However, humanity lost control of that AI, so it’s essentially running things on its own based on the parameters that it was given. As a result, the city has functioning systems, but only barely. Within this city there are four main factions essentially. There are humans who are simply doing their best to survive. There’s what’s known as Silicon Life, who are as their name suggests silicon lifeforms that are fully sentient and acting on their own desires and motivations, the primary of which is to access the netsphere and take control of the city. There’s the istration, who are also AI with some access to the netsphere, but only a limited amount, who mostly seem to have the goal of protecting humanity and the city. And lastly there are the Safeguards, who are AI that were basically put in place to protect the netsphere from outside threats unconditionally and seemed to have decided the best way to do that is to brainlessly eliminate all those that could potentially access the netsphere, meaning all humans and Silicon Life. There are also various others in the city, such as the Builders who mindlessly build the city on and on endlessly, as well as various dangerous monstrosities.
The problem with this manga is that all of this is conveyed badly. And furthermore, in addition to it being told badly, the plot of the manga is pretty awful too. It involves a mysterious character named Kyrii and a scientist woman named Cibo going on a search for a human with the Net Terminal Gene which apparently would allow them to access the netsphere. That’s not too bad of a premise on its own, but the way it’s written it flows really badly. Kyrii’s motivations and actions make no sense half the time. He gets some background, but not really enough to establish why he’s doing any of what he’s doing. Cibo is somewhat better in that regard, as it’s established that she’s a scientist that’s mainly just in it for curiosities sake but that helps out other humans when she can, but the lack of any character development or any relationship development results in her not being much of a compelling character either. And that’s not even getting into the wide cast of side characters who are all pretty much pointless. The way the plot flows is that on the search for someone with the Net Terminal Gene, they end up involved in various situations where they fight various others, mainly Silicon Life and Safeguards. But all of these battles seem completely pointless. They generally have very little to do with the overarching plot, and the lower-level plots are pretty much random nonsense. The characters are all terrible and impossible to get invested in at all as well. Thus, it’s impossible to really care about what happens at all with anything. On top of that, it felt like most of the action was centered around the fact that Kyrii’s gun was overpowered and could destroy pretty much everything, which got really repetitive really quickly.
Lastly, there is the matter of art. It’s largely considered amazing, but to be frank I just don’t see it. The art on the covers is great, but the art in the manga itself I thought was of pretty mediocre quality. It seems interesting at first just because the world is really interesting and it does do a good of portraying that. The bizarre designs for pretty much everything do manage to invoke a sense of dread, and things like endless concrete landscapes, human architecture at an imaginable scale, do manage to invoke some level of awe. However, the art is incredibly repetitive, and these feeling started fading by the end of the first volume and were completely gone by the end of the second, and thus I thought that the art and in the rest of the manga was simply dull and didn’t find it visually appealing or interesting at all. I think a large part of why that happened is that a very large amount of s in the manga have absolutely no story purpose and are basically just there to show the world. If the story moved at a faster pace and it was more sparing with its art, I probably would have found the art interesting from beginning to end. But just being bombarded with it just results in being numb to it and thus it not have much of an effect. That combined with how the ing reduces the speed of the manga to a crawl and with how the story is nonsense and characters are impossible to care about, results in a manga that becomes sleep inducingly boring at times.
Also, the master edition by Vertical uses a translation that’s different from the old Tokyopop version of the manga and the anime. Most of the differences don’t seem that important to me as someone with no prior experience with the franchise, though the protagonist being named Kyrii in this but Killy in everything else is a pretty big difference in tone, so I can’t say I’m much of a fan of that.
