Manga 26566 Not Lives

tl;dr: A manga with a good though predictable plot with solid action, but pretty shallow characters. 

This is a manga centered around the standard premise of featuring characters that live in the real modern world for the most part but occasionally have to enter into supernatural battles as a part of some sort of competition. As far as this goes, it felt that it didn’t use this setting all that well, in that it spent essentially all of its time past some parts in the beginning completely focused on the supernatural battles part. These early parts were pretty amusing with good comedy stemming from the strange ... aspects of the main characters and definitely made the main characters more likable, and I think the manga could have definitely used more of such parts during the latter half. I feel that this was a missed opportunity because it may have helped with better developing the characters, who for the most part all felt pretty shallow and didn’t go through any major character development. And while a relationship did develop between the two main characters, it didn’t feel built up to all that well.

Still, I guess in exchange for that the part focused on the supernatural aspect was done well. The plot has various twists and turns that often don’t get explained immediately, but in the end it manages to tie most of them together into a cohesive endings. There are still various things that aren’t fully explained, but they don’t really feel like plot holes, but rather things that in the end simply weren’t all that relevant. The battle system was fleshed out pretty well in the outset, but then it seemed to not use a lot of those aspects all that well most of the time and instead go in random directions. Still, despite that the various mechanics it did continue to use, mainly those stemming from the player-avatar duality, as well as the randomly new introduced ones did make the battle scenes pretty interesting. The ending all around was done pretty well, in that it was predictable, but satisfying. The art was solid and felt high quality, though style wise it was a bit generic. 

So, when I first started reading this manga I found it very cliche, and thought I knew exactly where it was going and what was going to happen. Thankfully, I was totally wrong. Not Lives is a strange name that doesn't get explained until the manga seems nearly over. It never reveals all the tiny details, but I found that to be a positive more than a negative. I like stories where I can make my own theories and try to figure things out for myself.

Are there things that don't make a lot of sense? Yeah, but I was never bored, and I found myself ... gasping in shock at certain plot twists that I never saw coming. I found myself really caring about the characters and what would happen to them, and I really appreciated and loved the ending.

There are a lot of stories that are great the whole way through, but have terrible endings, this was a story that I felt started off kind of average but got much better and had a fantastic ending. And to be able to finish off on a high note is always best.

I recommend this manga most highly for men who like battles and a bit of fan service, and who don't mind if the logic of how the combatants win is a bit fuzzy.

The shining star of this manga is its art. It's polished; there are a lot of great action shots, and the perspectives in many frames are really interesting and impressive.

Perhaps coming in second is the world in which it's set, specifically the game Not Alive. It's a death game scenario of sorts, but a fairly unique take on it, despite the prevalence of the genre. A few things in this area seemed ... weird and arbitrary to me, but they were eventually explained in a pretty satisfying way. The story completely ignores how such a game became possible, which I think is probably best. It wouldn't have been interesting, and I don't think any explanation would have held up under scrutiny.

I think the above two points are the main draws of the series.

The characters are... fine. Amamiya Kyouka is a fun character, and Shigeru Mikami is what he needs to be to drive the series. Amamiya's demeanor is probably her most interesting trait. It's a bit hard to predict how she'll react to things, especially at first. Her reactions are odd, but they're internally consistent, which makes them feel realistic. The only interesting thing about Mikami, apart from his role in the plot, is his use of his own game making experience to strategize in Not Alive. However, this is only mentioned occasionally without drawing any particularly interesting connections between his experience and his strategy. It would be more appropriate to say this could have been an interesting aspect of his character that wasn't really taken advantage of. The other characters are passably interesting, although I personally found some of them annoying.

The story is fairly standard. The main characters have to win to survive, and they have a couple other easy-to-understand motivations that are revealed as the series progresses. There are some twists that I actually thought were impressive and that I enjoyed, but otherwise it often feels like its incoherently bumbling its way down the obvious path regardless of whether it actually makes sense.

The incoherence is probably the worst part for me. It feels like some of the players in Not Alive are straight up cheating, but not getting called out on it, and they're doing so to such a degree that it would be impossible to win against them. The logical conclusion of this is that their opponent would either have to be absurdly good at the game, or they would lose. However, the players who should logically lose in this situation are supposed to win, because that's the plot. What ends up happening is that the players who should lose get extremely lucky, use some nonsense strategy that seems like it would only very questionably work, but it does anyway, or Dragonball Z their way through a fight by being insanely fast or strong. This makes the strategy aspect of the battles completely uninteresting to me. Also, the cheating characters are *extremely* smug, and seem to think they're the best despite being very lucky, which was really annoying.

Overall, I give it a 6/10. Anywhere between a 3 and a 9 wouldn't surprise me from others. I think this manga certainly has an audience, but not a huge one.