Blame!

Blame! is renown for its gritty and dense atmosphere, deep worldbuilding and complex story. Unfortunately though, id say it ends up being mysterious to a fault. The premise is that our main character Kyrii is wandering through a seemingly endless liminal megastructure called the city, looking for a human with the net terminal gene. The net terminal gene grants access to the net sphere which would allow Kyrii to stop the rogue ai who are constantly expanding and repairing the city, along the way he gets into many battles with safeguards and silicon life. The first thing you will notice about Blame! is that there is verylittle dialogue, in some chapters none at all. While this does huge favours for the atmosphere of the story, leaving everything blanketed in a confusing mess... it also leaves everything a confusing mess. I really struggled to understand what the hell was going on and it felt like as soon as I had a grip on the story it would introduce something even more confusing. If this was a shorter story i would be okay with letting the vibes alone take the wheel, but since Blame is 65 chapters it did end up dragging to me. On the other hand, the art is fantastic, the size and especially the complexity of the city is portrayed perfectly. There are so many panels of the main characters just barely being visible on the page, overshadowed by whichever megastructure looms over them, its really stunning. Saying that, I did struggle to tell what was going on in some of the fights since the art style is kind of purposely messy and ended up feeling a little cluttered at times, which obviously didn't help with understanding the story. I think Blame! is definitely worth a read even if just for the art and character designs alone. But be prepared to not really understand what's going on.