by Akinari Nao (manga) and Yuya Aoki (story), 381 pagesWhen Kakeru wishes aloud for a less boring life, he doesn't expect to get one. But then he meets astral projecting Ayano--and gets more excitement than is probably good for him.
Ayano is one of a handful of psychically gifted teens who've escaped from the Greenhouse, a shady experimental laboratory. One of them has had an apocalyptic vision of the future, at the center of which is Ikushima, one of the lab managers who has been chasing them all down. Moved by their plight, Kakeru decides to join them, even if he doesn't have any special powers himself. As they defend against attacks, however, Kakeru more than once miraculously avoids death and disaster through what appears to be sheer luck. Perhaps he has a power, after all? Can the kids all work together, defeat the other Greenhouse assassins deployed against them, and save the world from destruction?
It has been a loooong time since I read the first five volumes of this series in a chunk, but I remember enjoying them well enough. Sadly, I did not find myself as invested in this concluding dual volume. Part of that I'm sure is because of the time gap and all the details I've lost to it, but I think part of it is also just that these last two volumes don't work as well. The world has to be rebooted to an intact saved image, but to get to the backup records needed to carry out that process, the kids have to ascend the Tower of Time in the crack in time, going floor by floor and meeting various skill-specific challenges before progressing to the next level. It's just silly. The heroes have, by this time, amazingly converted most of their surviving enemy Greenhouse subjects to their cause through empathy and goodness and light, so they conveniently have a lot of skills in their group arsenal. Suddenly, this feels like a video game. And while I suppose that ties in nicely with the first volume where we see a bored Kakeru fill his ample free time lost in the virtual world, it takes away from the more human drama set up by the intervening volumes. I miss the days of watching the gang all try to live together under one roof, their personalities surfacing as they get to know one another. Here, the action comes too fast to play much with the quirky group dynamics. And the schmaltzy, convenient melodrama of the conclusion, in which true identities and purposes are revealed, annoys me. I'm probably just being a grumpy gus because I've forgotten too much, but I think a little more characterization and a little less Tower action would have made me happier.
The art and character designs are clean and sharp, but nothing so stand-out that I would recognize them if I saw them elsewhere. Overall, this is a decent short action series; just don't expect it to be more.
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