Aug 15, 2024
Disco Elysium meets Psychonauts on a geopolitical scale. Bonus points for the dynamic duo actually going inside each other for once! Er, each other's brains, that is.
Limbo The King (LTK) is an action-packed detective scifi manga about two guys fighting a disease which can only be cured by entering the comatose brains of the afflicted. The main mystery revolves around three questions: what is the true nature of the sleeping disease, how does it spread, and where does it originate from? The answer can only be solved by the small, limited population of people who are capable of diving into people's brains and fighting their
...
inner most demons: their memories. Through the eyes of King and his coworker Adam, we get to see these mental worlds unfold, attack, and peacefully collapse once they conquer the disease.
LTK is an exciting read, both for the entertaining dynamic between the MCs as well as how the mystery and scifi elements engage you to try and solve it. It is equally plot/mystery-driven as it is character driven. This is especially evident in the mental worlds of the comatose/diseased patients. Exploration of these worlds is equal parts about the psychology of the patients traumas as it is about the logistics of how brain diving works in the first place.
The dynamic between King and Adam displays this balance as well. They have a fun dynamic which deepens over time, and the main activity which nurtures their dynamic is their investigation/the scientific process behind it. Its evident that the mangaka put a great deal of effort into making sure everything's connected, which I deeply appreciate.
There's some major things holding it back from being a nine though, which I shall detail here. Major spoilers ahead.
The mystery has great pacing in the first two volumes, which starts to fall flat at the very last volume. What made its pacing so great initially is how it slowly built up the elements over several chapters, clearly creating a puzzle for the readers to solve, but never fully answering your burning questions/hypotheses. Well, LTK just throws all that shit out the window in volume three. It got real bad once Adam got into a car accident out of left fucking field, by which point it starts throwing random bullshit twists at you. What was once a carefully constructed mystery, now has new left field elements being introduced and added within panels of each other.
The twist villain is the epitome of this, the most egregious one. He's some random guy who just so happens to be King's childhood BFF who we never see until the last five or so chapters. So this whole mystery has been building up to...some nobody yandere who created the disease just to be a yandere? Fucking really? I could maybe excuse it if he's been there since the beginning. But no. He's just some random fucking guy. It pisses me off.
But I'll give credit where credit is due. While the actual mystery element of the ending was a complete crapshoot, its clear the mangaka was building up to a clear and satisfying unifying theme with this whole story. Life is worth living in a world full of suffering, and without the triubulations of the past, we wouldn't be who we are today. Suffering creates beauty and meaning, even if it hurts. That's a damn good message which hits home for me, and is what keeps the rating floating high overall. It also gives a satisfying conclusion for all the brains which have been dived so far, and to the journey between Adam and King/Rune (although its King's individual journey which is the most impactful). They also did a bait and switch at the end which makes the viewer almost think that King falls for the bluepill, which is the one actually satisfying ending twist once it turns out to be a trick.
Overall, its a fun read! Very engaging characters and mystery, even if it kinda fucks up at the end. I'm interested in seeing the rest of the mangakas future work.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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