Eden: It's an Endless World!

TheMajor5 Feb 5, 2011

9.5

Overview: Corruption, violence, and disease consume the story that is Eden: It’s an Endless World.  Without going into too much detail, the readers travel through time as the two Ballard family generations fall to corruption and are faced with daunting realities.  Disease eats away at the flesh and leaves the living in despair.  No one lives happily in this post-apocalyptic world.  Eliah Ballard is cursed with being the son of crime lord Ennoah Ballard. As the world plummets, what does the future hold for these two generations and the fate of the world? Story: 8.5 Honestly, this story took me about a 5 chapters to get into.  After the hook sank in, I powered through this 18 volume manga like a heroin addict consumes heroin. Yes it is relative.  This manga has a lot to do with drugs.  The whole manga revolves around drugs and power.  How else are crime lords supposed to get money in a poverty stricken world?  Most of the characters and sub-plots revolve around drugs.  With drugs, violence, nudity, and intense plot soon follow.  But that is not to say it’s a terrible manga.  Eden is a super fast paced riveting manga.  The development goes beyond incredible.  You have multiple character stories going on at once.  The mangaka addresses every aspect of this world from political to ethical.  The only problem within this work of art is when the time skips.  The time jumps ahead so many years without so much as a hint.  One chapter the main character is 15, the next he is 19.  As the reader, I had a hard time keeping track of the relevance of each situation.  But this does not slow the manga down.  Once realization has kicked in, I started to figure out how many years ahead and what not.  While the jumping is minor set-back, there were parts where the story did not go in-depth enough.  For instance, a girl is about to be captured.  After about a volume and 4 years in the manga, we finally see what happened to her.  Damn suspenseful I tell ya.  None the less, robots are the future and following Eliah in his wake as he becomes an adult creates an excellant story. Art: 9.5 Being a manga from the 90’s, detail was abundant in this old-style masterpiece.  Everything was drawn with such detail from stray bullets to giant cities.  As the characters aged, their features changed yet they were perfectly recognizable. Eden is full of drugs, so to get it out there, the boobs were spot on and the blood was amass.  I love the old style drawing and as much as I don’t care about the art, this certainly caught my eye and did not hinder the story. Characters: 10 Two words.  Dynamically rounded.  The characters changed so much over the years it was hard to believe.  If they changed for the better or worse will only be revealed when Eden is read.  But the main character Eliah, turned from a hated character to a favored one.  Even his dad changed considerably.  The characters were detailed and all had a past.  There was one volume where pretty much the mangaka delved a little deeper into each character’s past.  Twists are abundant and with something gained, something is tragically lost. War destroys some people yet renews others.  One manga I really liked with all the character developments. Overall: 9.5 Overall, the minor setbacks with the time skips are nothing significant.  The story itself far outweighs any problem with this manga.  The mangaka produced phenomenal detail and nailed the post-apocalyptic theme with his old school style.  With such a deep of a story going on in this manga, I can hardly put a dent with this review.  The story draws the reader in and the characters exceed all standards.  What more can you ask for. Eden has an interesting science fiction concept and ends with a happy ending.