The Best to Worst Ranked Manga: Part Two

Welcome to Part Two, where I tackle the first two series on my list:

No. 50: Girls’ Last Tour / Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou (with a score of 8.68)
No. 14,621: Demon’s Plan (with a score of 5.47)

For the first article in this series, please see here.

I certainly wasn’t expecting to see a Shounen Jump series in the lowest ranked manga on My Anime List, but Demon’s Plan originally was published in this magazine back in 2016. The series is an action fantasy, much like many of the other manga in this publication and follows the story of Boro, who is looking to obtain a miracle from something known only as the Demon’s Plan. Harsh truths are discovered though and Boro and his best friend end up part of something much bigger and darker then they could have ever imagined.

I’d never heard of the series before, and given that the manga got cancelled after only fourteen chapters, that might be why. Surprisingly though, I didn’t find this to be a particularly bad manga and it certainly had a decent enough start and showed enough hints at future plotlines that meant this could have really turned into a decent long-running series. It has an intriguing story concept (demons force humans into a battle royale against one another to achieve their dream), and whilst Boro himself is something of a two-dimensional typical action protagonist full of bluster and honesty, the other characters show more promise. The art style is pretty decent also, reminiscent at times of Death Note stylistically but less polished and detailed.

All in all, it would be hard for me to say this was a bad manga – maybe not a great one perhaps but certainly I didn’t have a bad time reading it. It felt more like a series that just didn’t get popular fast enough and was dropped by the publisher, and now lies mostly forgotten. Plotline-wise I don’t see it being one that I would have stuck reading with but I did like some of the concepts, particularly the few glimpses we got to see of the other demon candidates and the backstory of one of the side characters. Sadly, due to it being untimely cancelled, the series doesn’t reach any real resolution and feels abruptly cut off. The author, Yoshimichi Okamoto,doesn’t look to have done any other work since then, which is a shame as Demon’s Plan, whilst rough around the edges, showed some real promise.

On to the 50th most popular manga on the site – Girl’s Last Tour, and a story very different in tone from Demon’s Plan. This series actually got an anime adaptation back in 2017, which adapted a good half of the storyline from the serialisation. The manga follows two girls (presumably in their teens, but we’re never quite sure), called Chito and Yuuri, who are travelling together as one of the few humans left in a post-apocalyptic world. The sketchy art-style and moe-blob depiction of our deuteragonists, is in direct antithesis with the melancholic tone of the story. Ultimately, Girl’s Last Tour is a series about survival in a broken world and the ending culminates in a sad open-ended fashion, with no real resolution which ultimately can be seen as either hopeful or depressing.

The author, Tsukumizu hasn’t done many other series despite the popularity of this work and at the current time has just one other currently publishing – about a girl who finally leaves her closet to go to school and now has mushrooms growing out of her head. It’s an odd choice and honestly, I found Girl’s Last Tour to be quite an odd series in itself. The characters of Chito and Yuuri are likable enough and their chalk and cheese personalities gives them that odd couple dynamic which usually works pretty well, but I completed the series feeling like I knew them very little. The series could have been about anyone travelling through the post-apocalyptic landscape, and maybe that’s the point. The two girls muse about various things on their travels – sometimes simple topics such as food and other times much deeper philosophical thoughts that go into the meaning of death and life.

Art style wise, the backgrounds are gorgeously detailed and you really get a sense of the scale and utter desolation of the world the two girls are travelling through. The few other characters we see are characterised well, but ultimately don’t stick around for long and it often feels like Chito and Yuuri are the last two remaining human survivors, giving off a theme of loneliness and isolation. The few hints we’re given about what happened to the world and how it used to be are scarce, leaving you only the few mentions we’re given by our protagonists who ultimately can’t remember much either it would seem.

Whilst, the series is certainly unique in it’s theme and execution, ultimately this wasn’t a series which really struck much of a chord with me and I had a lot more fun reading Demon’s Plan, ironically. That’s more just down to my personal taste however and whilst I do like a lot of dark dystopia series, the slice of life elements in Girls’ Last Tour meant it was a bit of a miss for me.