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A lot of reviewers (many of whom have only read the first one or two chapters) write about this series like it's a silly slice of life comedy set in the world of Soul Eater. And that's not... *untrue*. However, this manga also has some plot beats that are pretty heavy! Characters get hurt and struggle. If you want an experience that's perfectly light and happy, you're not going to get that here.

...On the other hand, if you want an experience that's gritty, psychological, and dark, you're... also not going to get that here.

So what on earth's the deal with Soul Eater NOT!? ...

This is a series that was being written at the same time as the OG Soul Eater. The characters in Soul Eater are part of Death Weapon Academy's elite EAT class, training to become heroes who defeat witches and so on, but the characters in Soul Eater NOT! are part of, you guessed it, the NOT class, where they're really just training to live in the regular world. Soul Eater NOT!, then, provides a bit of a layperson's perspective on what living in Death City is like. Most of that perspective is meant to be funny (one of my favorite bits is around how the characters in NOT! see Liz and Patty). For my money, the humor is pretty consistently successful. Even in Soul Eater proper, there's a good sense of comedy, and it's awesome to get more of that in this series. With that said, on top of the regular Soul Eater NOT! chapters, there's also "Soul Eater JOT!," little one- or two-page scenes into the lives of characters, and these can be funny, but there's... a lot of them, and I often found myself wishing that we could just have regular chapters.

With that said, there is a heavier plot going on, sometimes in the background and occasionally in the foreground. The main character gets capital-T Traumatized on a couple different occasions! A fun gimmick turns out to have a dark origin, someone dies in a really brutal way. Does that succeed? Eh... not really, in my opinion. The digressions into more serious beats often feel more the result of the writers getting bored. The central struggle of the protagonist (to pick a partner between the two main characters) doesn't really have that much to do with the antagonist and their goals, for instance. A lot of the twists that happen in the last handful of chapters are actually pretty well foreshadowed, but I often wasn't sure what the point of including them was. Still, it's not by any means unreadable. When the plot gets darker, it's in the same way that Soul Eater gets dark, so even if it doesn't make a ton of sense, it's usually still pretty cool.

That's the broad strokes of the story and tone discussed, but what about the characters? The main characters of Soul Eater are basically irrelevant in NOT! (which I kind of appreciate). Maka shows up once or twice, but after her the most relevant member of Soul Eater's cast are, like, Liz and Patty, which I really enjoyed. As for the new characters, they're a mixed bag! Some of them aren't very well utilized and don't really have an arc, while others have pathos out the wazoo. But the worst a character ever gets is forgettable, they're never that obnoxious, and the rest of the cast is really fun and endearing. I sometimes struggled with the fanservice (come on... these characters are like... 14.... we don't need to see them naked.....) but the dynamic between the main three characters is pretty strong and sets up well for a lot of funny bits! There's also a well-written lesbian relationship! I dunno, I think that's pretty neat.

All in all, I think Soul Eater NOT! is... okay! It's not going to knock your socks off, but the characters are all enjoyable and it's funny when it needs to be. There are serious moments, and I'm not always thrilled with how they're handled, but when I looked at the manga as a whole I was happy to have read it. Just keep in mind that it's not (NOT!) trying to be like Soul Eater, and you'll have a good time.

I'm basically only writing this review because it seems like the consensus is so thoroughly against me. For context, I read this roughly a year ago when I was first getting super into death game stories (Squid Game got me into it, Alice in Borderlands got me hooked, if you're curious). I knew this was a very popular series — popular enough that people who had read it thought Squid Game was ripping it off — and so I went in hoping to get a new favorite death game series!

I cannot put into words how thoroughly wrong I was.

This is a fundamentally poorly ... written story. It is a horrifically, unbelievably poorly written story. I want to send off emergency flare after emergency flare saying "PLEASE DON'T READ THIS!" to anyone considering this, because it is really truly bad.

Apparently this is a controversial opinion, which boggles my mind, but I'll start with a somewhat less controversial take before I get into the meat of my issue: the games themselves aren't good. I actually had this feeling pretty early on — maybe even as early as the 'ring the cat's bell' game, I forget what it's called — a feeling in the back of my head. Huh? This is what people are raving about? Eh, it probably gets better... but it doesn't! It gets worse! Even the very positive reviews admit this: here's a very telling one that reads, "The character-focused story takes the importance away from the fallacy that the games themselves need to be interesting." I would say the arc right at the start of "part two" with the four demons is the most memorable? The jump rope one too, maybe? But besides two games — two games, that's maybe twenty chapters out of, what, two hundred? — everything else is boring. More than boring! The games are tedious!

And the games are tedious because the writing of the story also isn't very good at all. Games are cruel and meaningless. Death is cruel and meaningless. The way characters interact with each other is cruel and meaningless. Don't get me wrong, I've read my Nietzsche. I can appreciate a story that's trying to make a grand existential point about... anything at all, really. But this story doesn't have one of those. The characters don't go through bad things because the author is trying to say something of artistic and philosophical value. The characters go through bad things because the author dislikes them. Every single character — maybe there's two or so exceptions to this — is written with an air of complete disdain. You know what you get when you've got a story populated by characters the author hates? A story with no emotional resonance whatsoever. Not a single emotional beat did anything to me besides make me angry. No emotional moment lands. Very few moments at all land, honestly. Attempts at humor aren't funny (and are usually more jokes that we're in on with the author at the expense of the characters) and attempts at serious beats aren't worthwhile because, that's right, the games are boring. Character-focused story? Despite characters arguably being the most fundamental prerequisite for stories, I have read very few that care about the characters they're focusing on less.

The writing is boring, but does it make sense? Let's ask another review recommending this series! "Unfortunately the plot of this manga just makes no sense. If it does make any sense, then it is from a one-page, two-sentence info dump for the premise of a manga with 186 chapters and two prequels. It's unsatisfying, and it honestly is a bit insulting to the intelligence of anyone that cares about the plot making sense, even a little bit. This manga does a very poor job of pacing out the overall plot, and it is almost completely unclear at any point what the causes of the plot are, and why any of the events of the story are happening. That can be mysterious early on, but later it becomes this huge underlying plot hole which as I said, does not actually get a satisfying resolution, at least not in my opinion." This reviewer gave the series an 8/10. That 8/10 was on the strength of the characters, but, like... once again, the characters aren't a strength! They die so quickly and so meaninglessly and so randomly that it feels like you're being punished for caring about them. I won't specifically say what happens, but there's a few chapters devoted to a game that is literally in-universe random chance. No strategies, no mind games, no working together, it's just random chance. I read a lot of death game manga. Most of them do not do this, because they recognize it's fucking stupid.

To sum up those three paragraphs, it's a death game series where the death feels pointless and meanspirited, like a kid kicking an anthill and then killing the ants that come out, while the games are uninspired and boring. What else... oh yeah, the ending is unbelievably horrific! The second-to-last game has one or two elements that are, like, interesting-adjacent and which are also immediately ruined by how awful the writing for every character is (speaking of, I'm going this whole review not even mentioning how shallow the women are in this story — the author then went on to write Blue Lock, a series functionally without women... hmm...). The last game is disgraceful and the last moments make it even worse.

I'll say one nice thing: I like the art! It's pretty good.

All in all, As the Gods Will is bad. I don't think it's just bad in a nebulous, low-quality way, I think it's bad in that I'm a worse person for reading it. It's spiritually bad, it's bad in its soul. It's bad for your soul! Don't be like me! I would be ashamed to have written this story, so just imagine how you'd feel reading it.

I give this a 1/10. "Appalling."

I went through the series today, and I'll start by saying this: I definitely think this story is better than the first one. In a lot of respects, it's better than the second one as well. I would argue there's three huge draws to a good death game (having read... a good number of them), and I want to look at how it does with each.

Firstly, there's the characters and their relationships. "Pushed to the edge of morality, in a life or death situation, what sorts of people are these characters revealed to be? What kind of dynamics arise between the characters?" That's actually ... my favorite element of death games, and it's something that the first Jinrou Game seriously lacked. Even in Beast Side, I felt like that was an issue: why don't these characters talk to each other? I wanted to know more about the side characters, and when we did learn about them, it felt as though it were more through clumsy exposition than anything else. I didn't feel that as much this time — we learn a lot about a number of characters. The writer still isn't interested in addressing the whole cast, but the characters whose relationships are fleshed out are really interesting!

Well... except, now that I'm writing that, I'm not sure it's true. Yes, the relationships that exist are interesting — but are they *fleshed out*? I'm fine not always really knowing how one character feels about another — especially when it comes to relationships outside of POV characters, it shows that the POV character isn't omniscient and can be taken by surprise as well. But after being taken by surprise, there's a couple twists with characters and the way they acted that left me feeling dissatisfied, like there wasn't any justification to the twist. Maybe if I read through it all again I'll find hidden clues, but ideally when a twist occurs you want it to feel like, "ohhh... so *that's* what that was, that changes everything," but you want it to make sense. With some of the reveals from characters, it just felt like... huh? Really? That's it?

Secondly, there's the logic and intellectual work. "Pushed to the edge of their wits, in a life or death situation, what kinds of tricks and maneuvers can these characters figure out to keep themselves alive?" Liar Game is a great example of this (up until the last game, which flops IMO). Jinrou Game is consistently... okay at this, and I'd say this addition to the series is mostly no different. The previous game has a character who's constantly on her toes thinking about the next move to make, which I really appreciated. This protagonist is a little more offbeat in her thought process, but maybe that's fitting for the 'Crazy Fox.' At any rate, her schemes not being picture-perfect make her a little more human. However, I don't think that holds for the other characters. And while it's normally alright for the side cast to be less smart than the protagonist, they make a couple unbelievably stupid decisions that felt tough to believe and took me personally out of it. The ending especially was really frustrating. I don't think it's out of character for the writer to put together an ending like that, it seems thematically in line with the ending of Beast Side, but I think there were so many different choices to make and the one picked was the worst one.

I'll also throw in that the game itself is... pretty barebones. Werewolf is a good pick for a death game in part because of its simplicity, but because it's simple you have to be able to come up with ideas that the reader wouldn't and develop multiple strategies. None of the new additions to the story change it in any substantial, material way — not even the 'Crazy Fox' role that the story is named after. I wonder if, after two whole manga themed around Werewolf, the writer was starting to exhaust their ideas...?

I think there's stuff to like here — the character designs are pretty good, for instance, probably the best in the series so far (I don't plan on reading Lost Eden). Plus, the writers made the choice this time around for all of the deaths to be carried out by hand, which I think really exacerbates the dread and despair in the environment. Frankly, if you're just in it to look at some dead bodies, this is really good for that as well!

But ultimately, I can't recommend this with my full chest. If you're a death game aficionado, go for it, but this isn't something I'd recommend to someone who's only seen Squid Game.