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This story starts off as a cross between "The Hills Have Eyes" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" on an island, then goes in an odd direction: the psychotic, mutant cannibal clan are by far the most sympathetic characters in it. This is probably this manga's most notable feature, and I think it's biggest shortcoming. The intent was likely to be social commentary, as in even decent people will do horrible things in bad enough circumstances. Instead, it largely just comes off as every single character being a cartoonishly horrible person.

The reason I consider this a shortcoming is because, if the insane cannibals are far more ... sympathetic than the people they're hunting, you don't really care if the protagonists live or die and any horror subjected to them is rendered moot. Still, the cannibals' own antics do make the story somewhat entertaining, even if I've mostly been left hoping they'll just kill all the protagonists and be done with it.

Even though I think this story is very good, I have to admit to not finding it even a little bit scary. More than anything, the things that happen in this story are very gross, bizarre, and hilarious. It's a unique, interesting concept overall, but I think its scare factor really relies on whether one is afraid of fish and the ocean or not; if you aren't scared by those things, you probably won't find this story scary.

This story has been a very long ride and it has had its ups and downs. I had to put the rating somewhere in the middle because of that. The story generally starts out pretty good and the characters, while a tad bit bland, had a lot of interesting concepts and had the potential to grow and become more, which was even sort of the point of the story.
Somewhere between a third and halfway through the story, it started going down. Far down.
Somewhere between halfway and two-thirds of the way through the story, it genuinely seemed like the author was just making things up as ... he went along. Every new plot twist and revelation felt worse than the last and every one of them felt like the writing was dropping off a cliff in terms of quality.
Somewhere very quickly into the story, those lessons about functioning as a team and leaning how to be a ninja stopped mattering, because now everybody was just generic shounen fighting characters that you could see in most any story of the genre.

But where the story really seemed to come off the rails was in relation to Sasuke and his family. Their entire existence seemed like an enormous anchor that did nothing but drag the story down and force everybody to talk about how amazing they are/were no matter what they've done, without giving the audience any reason to actually think they are. I'm not even exaggerating when I say that their constant influence ended up ruining the story in the second half, because it seemed like nothing mattered unless they were involved.

I loved the story toward the beginning, and it was sad to see how far it sank after that, but I still can't give this manga too terrible a rating based on that early run.

This manga was not bad, but it wasn't really all that good either. The setting seemed like a realistic small town, but it seemed like everybody in it was a violent psychopath. It seemed like this was supposed to be a message about bullying, but the middle school-age bullies are so cartoonishly evil that it's impossible to take the story very seriously. On top of that, (pardon the probable spoilers) the only villainous characters that ever show anything even remotely sympathetic or even human do so shortly before or as they die.
The other reason this doesn't really work as a message about bullying is because ... most of the characters that are victims of abuse are just as bad, if not worse, than the abusers. I'm not even sure what the thing with the teacher toward the end was about, since it didn't actually factor into the story in any way and just seemed like trying to fill page space.

Aside from that, the story did accomplish the goal of making the main character and her family sympathetic, even if the author had to go to insane lengths to justify what ends up happening. Despite that, I still ended up feeling bad about enjoying the later action, because I couldn't shake the feeling that on some level, this story was just the author's excuse to show children mutilating each other and the message about bullying was just a vehicle to make it a bit more palatable.

If I had to sum the whole thing up, I'd say it's "a pretty good journey to get to a really, really, really bad destination." The ride to the ending is pretty entertaining and makes you wonder exactly what's going on. Then you actually get to the ending, and not only does it make absolutely no sense, and not only does it feel like it was made up on the spot, but several things in the story make much less sense in hindsight than they did before.

The ending largely renders everything that happens in the story pointless, pointless enough that if I'd known what the ... ending was going in, I wouldn't have started reading it.