Owari no Seraph

I totally agree with MASTER GUYVER review. The manga itself is great with lots of actions and nice panels and we start with an engaging main cast while focusing at times on one or another.

Now, as the plot thickens there are starting to be some inconsistencies. It's getting tiring not knowing Guren's whole POV and Mika has suddenly dumbed down along with Yu. I mean there have been some really nice twists but there are still way too many things we don't know that make the black demon gang too unreliable (we only see fragments of the human's/Demon's past and they all would totally betray each other for their own interests).

Lastly the reviving all of humanity/angels is starting to have less sense since they decided to make the span of the story too long and it isn't like that would solve anything

I mean if negative feeling is the energy they need to accumulate to revive angels /anything why couldn't they wait a bit more, I mean why were there consequences to the revival of humans in the first place they were just cycling the angels souls and the absolute being abandoned them

Edit: well with chapter 134 it's nice to see Ferid's POV on all this.

What is it with all modern manga going on for a bazzillion chapters/volumes? Trying to get the reader into the sunken cost fallacy, probably. Still it looks ok from the first chapters, will wait until the end to read.

Recommend if you want cool fights and nice art.

Don't recommend if you want characters with at least a millimeter of depth, plot that is not ridiculous, and twists that have some basis or setup.

Mika is hot tho

I've enjoyed it more than Boruto manga (not anime) , it's not all that great and definitely not worth waiting monthly for but the manga seems like it will end soon so I couldn't say it's bad to start now. Old fans will suffer more the new readers, so it best to occupy yourself if you ever bother to wait monthly for these chapters.

I'm not going to give it a bad rating because unlike Boruto being also a monthly manga the artist puts care into their work despite the manga panels being all over the place sometimes and it can get to wordy or confusing because of that but nothing too complicated.

Oh and about the attack on Titan comparison both Mangas had their animes done by the same studio at one point. Also came out around the same time.
6/10/21

It might be almost done and at the time I made the earlier review I really felt that way but I decided to lower the rating from a 6.9 to a 4. Not because of the series but the main character him self. He's been quite manipulative lately and confusing. The main character might not be a good guy at all, the more I read the more I feel this is the story of a villain. He's very chaotic, reckless and crazy but he didn't start off that simple minded.
I like the lore and ideas of the story but I just can't stand the mc theses day not because of his goals but how he selfishly does them. Not even independence but straight up hurting others in the process even the feelings of who he wants to save.
9/9/22

I enjoyed this initially. Nice artwork and an interesting setting. It wasn't exactly burning with originality but it leaned into its genre elements and handled them adroitly. But as the series goes on the characters actions become entirely inexplicable, even within the melodramatic framework of the narrative itself. I won't go into spoilers, the comment below covers most of them. But suffice to say the story basically doubled down on its characters "terrible secrets" to the point where it's become farcical. The secret past of one of the main characters has been revealed and even for this series its just too much.

It's simply inexcusable and it makes no sense that the other characters can get past it. It makes them seem like complete idiots. Literally unbelievable idiots, as in it shatters my suspension of disbelief. It makes the entire series feel like a parody of itself. It also squanders some of what I had thought was subtle foreshadowing but turned out to be nothing at all.

The main character's and their almost slavish devotion to friends and "family" was hinted at being, and one character even speculates, a fairly dark result of their shared history of being involved in various human experiments. Basically that their somewhat exaggerated devotion to shonen tropes was a result of brainwashing. Which would have served as an interesting commentary on the genre as well as a clever explanation for the nonsensical shit they do. Sadly it is not.

It's a shame. What's even worse is how the author seems to expect us to still buy any weight in the melodrama being presented. I can't even say "Read till X" as there's no particularly good stopping point. Honestly I'd either suggest avoiding it entirely or switching your brain off (the latter doesnt even work particularly well as the series is too dialogue heavy)

I don’t really see the dislike on this manga. I enjoy the characters, and the story, though has a flaws like other mangas, doesn’t mean it terrible. It’s basically vampire vs humans, which has been done so manga times. Someone said it like Attack on Titan which I see no similarities to it at all. Experimenting on humans? Been done before? What is Seraph of the end? Well read the manga. My problem with it is that it updates very slowly. But i am enjoying it, and I can’t wait to see what happens. Also, artwork is very beautiful.

Owari no Seraph (OnS) troubles me. I love chuuni stories like these but something about OnS makes me reel and roll my eyes. Perhaps its the fact that the characters are bland, trite, and incoherent. Perhaps its the cluttered setting. Or perhaps its the fact that the narrative twists have little to no build-up (though this is partly due to Kagami Takaya spreading his story over multiple novels). I'll structure this review into 3 parts: (1) characters, (2) setting, (3) narrative that cover my gripe with the series.

1: Characters
The characters are perhaps my biggest gripe and the biggest flaw this manga has. Aside from a few that tickle my fancy (Saito, Felid, Crowley, and Krul; actually most of the vampires), the rest fall into standard cookie cutter molds (i.e. character tropes). Now before I go any further, character tropes are not in and of themselves bad but there is a reason I said "cookie cutter molds" and that's because OnS's protagonists are just that: molds that have nothing to mold. It's as if Kagami Takaya took a character type for a character.

Guren and Yuuichiro are perhaps the most blatant examples of this. Guren's characterization is played out as some dark and twisted hero but the truth of the matter is he comes off as a villainous idiot. And Yuuichiro? Yuuichiro has as much depth to him as a toilet bowl. He's entire raison d'être is to protect his family and leaving aside whether or not that is good (I think it's admirable and a great quality to have) the way it's developed and shown is just painful. For one, Mikaela and Makoto have good arguments why they shouldn't do what they're doing (i.e. trust/follow Guren, Felid, Crowley, etc.) but this is waved aside because (a) the character in question is not entirely bad and (b) they must have had their reasons. The problem with this sort of reasoning is that (a) fails to hold up as a defense of a character prima facie because no one is entirely something (unless you're some sort of reductionist). So Yuuichiro can't coherently defend the characters he does without considering the arguments Mikaela and Makoto present but he doesn't do that (but to be fair Yuuichiro is presented as a sort of an idiot with a heart of gold but idiocy has its limits and stretches our willingness to cheer for him; even Luffy and Goku knew where to draw the line). (b) is just plain bad. Again prima facie there could be said there is always a reason for something but the mere existence of a reason does not necessitate a character as good/just.

So we have it according to Yuuichiro's logic, Guren (or any of Yuuichiro's comrades) could genocide an entire race and as long as it is for a reason then it is okay. I'm not sure about you but that isn't a character I'd like to root for (unless the author makes him enjoyable to see onscreen though Kagami Takaya doesn't do that here). So we have it that Yuuichiro's modus operandi is that the "ends justify the means." More specifically, the protection of his comrades come before anything else which is typical shounen manga values but that's about it. There's nothing really else going on. All actions taken by him are to that end and that's what I mean by Kagami Takaya mistaking a character type (the standard shounen manga hero) for a character.

Guren on the other hand is a hard case. It's hard to root for Guren not because his actions are what led to the start of the series but because his characterization makes it so hard to root for him. There is little remorse or guilt for his actions shown early on and we only see a tinge of this maybe 30 chapters in so it sort of dehumanizes him even if the reason for his actions are entirely human. Finding out he's been manipulated since the beginning and he's fighting back against that does very little to make him admirable. Hell Berserk's Guts is much easier to root for even if he has killed children because even though he commits such obviously heinous things, his remorse reminds us that he is human (though that remorse can not in and of itself justify his actions). Guren on the other hand is a hard-ass pragmatist with a sourness on top. He's rough, ambitious, and full of cockiness with no charisma. Setting aside his fantastic character design (hell the majority of the characters have great design), his lack of charisma is perhaps his second greatest flaw. For a leader character like him, I fail to see him like a leader and more like a puppet (albeit true in the sense that Mahiru more or less directs his actions). So he talks big but acts and looks like a dick.

Mikaela is as bad. He has little character other than trying to protect Yuuichiro and drag him away (though current chapters indicate he might be hesitant in continuing this). (Refer to Part 3 of this review in case of the argument that his character is explored in the spin-off.) The rest of the gang also suffer from a lack of characterization (lol Mitsuba) as stated by another reviewer (again refer to Part 3 of this review). Shinoa is probably my favorite character because although she fits in the kuudere mold she doesn't fit it to a tee. She's playful, smug, and a tad mysterious; in other words its fun to see her on screen. The only aspect I wish was better with her is the romantic subplot between her and Yuuichirou.

2: Setting
A lot of people seem to enjoy the worldbuilding and I can't exactly deny them this. The setting is interesting and the beautiful art helps to convey it (something about dilapidated and destroyed buildings, ruined oceans, and monsters running amok make me remember some of Godspeed You! Black Emperor's albums) but the thing is it's cluttered when we begin. We have (1) vampires, (2) a virus that threatens extinction, (3) angels, (4) monsters, (5)demons, (6) God, and (7) magic all from the get go but the biggest issue I have is between (1), (3), (4) and humans. You don't get a clear sense of who is fighting who and what caused what. We have it that (a) the world is ruined, (b) vampires and humans are fighting, and (c) monsters are wrecking anything and everyone they see. Well okay; I can take (a) at face value but what about (b) and (c)? What is their relation? Is (c) related to the vampires or humans? Who do we root for in (b)? In stories like these, it's good to clearly demarcate the side we should root for because it helps the story move along easier and tightens the narrative focus. Instead we get a cluttered and episodic focus that makes it hard who to root for until, maybe thirty or so chapters later (or at least until Krul, Felid, and Guren's machinations are partly revealed). It only gets worse once they introduce "God" as some sort of antagonist for the patriarch of the vampires. It screams of triteness, of a typical JRPG story that fails to leave me with bated breath.*

3: Narrative
This is less of an issue than the first but still a major one. Kagami Takaya clearly set up a complicated narrative for OnS but he split it up between several spin-off series that ended up taking away from the main series in terms of narrative build-up. In other words, the build-up isn't in OnS but in OnS's spin-offs. Now I can see why he would want to do that: (1) he can easily reduce the amount of time the series is running in a magazine by offloading critical plotlines to other side-stories and (2) potentially increase revenue. (2) is trivially easy why he would do so but (1) makes it a bit harder to justify because it impacts the main series which is the series most read and the series the anime aims to advertise (i.e. the series entry point). So you get things like Mikaela's time spent between the start of the series and the time he met Yuuichirou cut out out where in fact it could have helped establish his character and flesh out the world. Same thing with Guren and his backstory and even the vampires. Hell Shinoa is revealed to have some sort of demon but that isn't revealed until 50-60 chapters in. I mean we know she has some sort of relationship with her sister (who is revealed to be Guren's lover and reason for him being so fucked up) but this isn't really elaborated. Dropping plot points without foreshadowing them (Saito isn't really foreshadowed, just sort of dropped onto us) makes it hard to feel the weight of the twists Kagami Takaya employs.

Overall, it's hard to like OnS on the grounds that it's characters, especially its protagonist and deuteragonist, are so poorly characterized, and its narrative so splintered. If you enjoy typical chuuni narratives with a shallow protagonist and poorly developed characters but with an intricate plot, OnS is a readable (albeit tedious) choice.

*EDIT: While I might have been dismissive in my earlier comments, I am still open minded to seeing what Kagami Takaya has in store for us.