Not Lives

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I recommend this manga most highly for men who like battles and a bit of fan service, and who don't mind if the logic of how the combatants win is a bit fuzzy.

The shining star of this manga is its art. It's polished; there are a lot of great action shots, and the perspectives in many frames are really interesting and impressive.

Perhaps coming in second is the world in which it's set, specifically the game Not Alive. It's a death game scenario of sorts, but a fairly unique take on it, despite the prevalence of the genre. A few things in this area seemed ... weird and arbitrary to me, but they were eventually explained in a pretty satisfying way. The story completely ignores how such a game became possible, which I think is probably best. It wouldn't have been interesting, and I don't think any explanation would have held up under scrutiny.

I think the above two points are the main draws of the series.

The characters are... fine. Amamiya Kyouka is a fun character, and Shigeru Mikami is what he needs to be to drive the series. Amamiya's demeanor is probably her most interesting trait. It's a bit hard to predict how she'll react to things, especially at first. Her reactions are odd, but they're internally consistent, which makes them feel realistic. The only interesting thing about Mikami, apart from his role in the plot, is his use of his own game making experience to strategize in Not Alive. However, this is only mentioned occasionally without drawing any particularly interesting connections between his experience and his strategy. It would be more appropriate to say this could have been an interesting aspect of his character that wasn't really taken advantage of. The other characters are passably interesting, although I personally found some of them annoying.

The story is fairly standard. The main characters have to win to survive, and they have a couple other easy-to-understand motivations that are revealed as the series progresses. There are some twists that I actually thought were impressive and that I enjoyed, but otherwise it often feels like its incoherently bumbling its way down the obvious path regardless of whether it actually makes sense.

The incoherence is probably the worst part for me. It feels like some of the players in Not Alive are straight up cheating, but not getting called out on it, and they're doing so to such a degree that it would be impossible to win against them. The logical conclusion of this is that their opponent would either have to be absurdly good at the game, or they would lose. However, the players who should logically lose in this situation are supposed to win, because that's the plot. What ends up happening is that the players who should lose get extremely lucky, use some nonsense strategy that seems like it would only very questionably work, but it does anyway, or Dragonball Z their way through a fight by being insanely fast or strong. This makes the strategy aspect of the battles completely uninteresting to me. Also, the cheating characters are *extremely* smug, and seem to think they're the best despite being very lucky, which was really annoying.

Overall, I give it a 6/10. Anywhere between a 3 and a 9 wouldn't surprise me from others. I think this manga certainly has an audience, but not a huge one.

So, when I first started reading this manga I found it very cliche, and thought I knew exactly where it was going and what was going to happen. Thankfully, I was totally wrong. Not Lives is a strange name that doesn't get explained until the manga seems nearly over. It never reveals all the tiny details, but I found that to be a positive more than a negative. I like stories where I can make my own theories and try to figure things out for myself.

Are there things that don't make a lot of sense? Yeah, but I was never bored, and I found myself ... gasping in shock at certain plot twists that I never saw coming. I found myself really caring about the characters and what would happen to them, and I really appreciated and loved the ending.

There are a lot of stories that are great the whole way through, but have terrible endings, this was a story that I felt started off kind of average but got much better and had a fantastic ending. And to be able to finish off on a high note is always best.

While a bit underdeveloped plot-wise, Not Lives is a fun read with a unique take on the concept of being stuck in a game - a tough thing to do in a genre which has been done so many times. The art is stellar, the fight scenes are fun, but you won't find yourself too engrossed in the story or attached to the characters. All in all I give it a 7/10 - if you're looking for a light read in the isekai genre, it's enjoyable even if it's not deep, and worth a read.

Story: 6/10

With the amount of manga out there having the concept ... of being "stuck in a game", it's hard to come up with something original. And yet, Not Lives manages - with death in the game resulting in a player becoming an avatar to be controlled by another player being a pretty unique take on the genre. Besides that though, the story is unfortunately nothing special, primarily focusing on the MC and his avatar's attempts to clear the game and opting for action over plot. No explanation is ever given about what the game is, how it exists, or why it exists.

Art: 8/10

I really love the character design of Amamiya, and the fight scenes feel very crisp and easy to follow, not overly busy like some series. Most of the male characters though are not nearly as detailed or spectacular, which is a given since the MC is a bit of a self-insert character.

Character: 6/10

Most of the characters are pretty shallow. The MC himself has basically a single character trait: that he obsessively likes games and designing games. He's given no further character development beyond that, and the only things driving him to clear the game is that he wants to understand more about it and fulfill his avatar's wish purely out of altruism and curiosity. Amamiya on the other hand is initially very mysterious with little actual character development, but towards the end is more fleshed out becoming the one truly developed character in the story. Most of the villains and rivals are, unfortunately, entirely one-dimensional as well though. One thing I will say is that the author didn't descend into harem or ecchi tropes too often, and when they did, it was always tongue-in-cheek - usually with the MC commenting that he needs to take notes for when he develops a dating sim.

Enjoyment: 8/10

It's a fun series. It's not the most profound thing in the genre by far, but the fight scenes are among the best I've seen in an "isekai" manga and the pacing of reveals about the game and Amamiya's backstory are perfectly timed. You definitely won't be bored by Not Lives.

So when I first started the manga, I though that it was a rather slow paced storyline, and I thought that I would drop it after the first handful of chapters. But as I read further, I really got grasped into the storyline. With interesting characters, a strong storyline, which processes with each chapter, and the overall concept was appealing to me. I would have to say that there were moments, which I was quite surprised about, as I did not expect some of the things that have happened to happen. On the other hand though, I do think that at some points it was ... cliche, and a bit predictable. I do wish it was a bit more to the story than there really was, and at some points I did find the characters a bit dull. None the less, an interesting concept and read, and would defiantly be a great surprise, if there was an anime adaptation, even though my hopes are not high for it to be good, even if there was one. P.S. The ending is rather shocking, by far the most shocking thing in the entire series.

tl;dr: A manga with a good though predictable plot with solid action, but pretty shallow characters. 

This is a manga centered around the standard premise of featuring characters that live in the real modern world for the most part but occasionally have to enter into supernatural battles as a part of some sort of competition. As far as this goes, it felt that it didn’t use this setting all that well, in that it spent essentially all of its time past some parts in the beginning completely focused on the supernatural battles part. These early parts were pretty amusing with good comedy stemming from the strange ... aspects of the main characters and definitely made the main characters more likable, and I think the manga could have definitely used more of such parts during the latter half. I feel that this was a missed opportunity because it may have helped with better developing the characters, who for the most part all felt pretty shallow and didn’t go through any major character development. And while a relationship did develop between the two main characters, it didn’t feel built up to all that well.

Still, I guess in exchange for that the part focused on the supernatural aspect was done well. The plot has various twists and turns that often don’t get explained immediately, but in the end it manages to tie most of them together into a cohesive endings. There are still various things that aren’t fully explained, but they don’t really feel like plot holes, but rather things that in the end simply weren’t all that relevant. The battle system was fleshed out pretty well in the outset, but then it seemed to not use a lot of those aspects all that well most of the time and instead go in random directions. Still, despite that the various mechanics it did continue to use, mainly those stemming from the player-avatar duality, as well as the randomly new introduced ones did make the battle scenes pretty interesting. The ending all around was done pretty well, in that it was predictable, but satisfying. The art was solid and felt high quality, though style wise it was a bit generic.