Manga 125732 Manshuu Ahen Squad

Manshuu Ahen Squad is a story set in the historically largely unrecognized puppet state of Manchukuo. It is a story set in the periods of tense war between China and Japan.
To preface my review, I would like to start by saying that I am Chinese, and I had been to Nanjing's massacre museum during my exchange trip there.
I shouldn't have to prove it, but here are some photos I took there https://imgur.com/a/k95bhHA (there are spots where you're not supposed to take pictures out of respect, but these are the ones I took.)
The first reviewer called this Japanese propaganda and a Nanking denier, but I for ... one did not feel so.

Manshuu Ahen Squad creates a gripping story showing it's readers the cruelty of war, authority manipulation, and it is certainly not made for the faint of heart. However, the main focus of the story is not about politics (although it may evolve into such as our MC builds up political power) but the survival of a young man and his family.
Higata Isamu is looking to make some money for his sick mother and discovers a way to create opium by chance and intends to sell the drug. The problem is that the Japanese Kwantung Army and the Chinese Green Gang are already selling opium and are already at each other's throat. You could say that they wouldn't be glad to find out someone's trying to break into their market.
Despite only a few chapters available, the manga has showcased its incredible storytelling through art style and writing.

I would say give it a try as it's still a new manga. I could totally see it becoming a dark horse seinen or going downhill into a mess. The choice is yours.

As much as I enjoy a good historical drama, this just isn't it. While certainly the setting, art design, and context seem to be right, the story does not pull through with the same degree of believability.

The reason being is that despite having aspirations of being a serious historical drama - with its detail into the opium black market trade of the time and attempts for a serious dramatisation of the characters' plights, Manchurian Opium Squad pulls too many tropes from more pulpy genres (the main dude at the moment seems to be building some kind of weird opium-led harem) and thus it has ... a good, healthy amount of silliness thrown in with its weird misunderstood love relationships, opium as magical drug-device, overly sadistic antagonists, occasional strange conflicts (one of them is about cultural misunderstanding, but the way it was portrayed and built up was so silly that it was so hard to take it seriously). As a result, the work settles for a pseudo serious Inglorious Basterds-esque tone that neither fully embraces the Tarantino-esque fun in its pulpy writing nor takes its story seriously enough to be a full-on serious historical drama.

Still, as long as one does not expect a serious historical drama and takes it for what it is, a pulpy, fun manga that occasionally dips its toes into dramatic territory (perhaps to its detriment), this is a very enjoyable manga. The art is great with tons of detail in the environment, and the historical designs in the manga are drawn to a believable extent (who knows if it is historically accurate though) and the narrative broadly explores its historical setting thoroughly - to not let things remain stagnant and stale. In chapter 19, things seem to be going in such an absurd direction that it would appear the manga is going to start embracing its silly approach much more - though perhaps that was its intent to begin with? (perhaps that is why it has such an absurd title of Manchurian Opium Squad.)

Devoid of context, substance and the willingness to be gritty, Manshuu Ahen Squad excels at being a naive and misleading reimagining of a real history. The style and setting is there but with a story so absent that fails horribly in complementing it's own canvas, it's just empty, ignorant, and at times miserably funny. It's a generic wise-guy harem power fantasy with shallow and superficial conflicts pretentiously posing as something greatly sinister through overly dramatized comedic and sentient circumstances that always resolve themselves ineffectively with a painfully obvious lazy writing, case in point, Rin's absurdly convenient "photographic memory", and the damsel in distress scene with ... Isamu's wacky "I outsmarted your outsmarting".

On a related note, reviews that have mentions of this manga being similar to Breaking Bad is just straight-up delusional.