This was terrible, which surprised me after very decent Hoozuki no Shima. It’s been long since I flipped through pages on pure rage to tear a work apart properly in a review.

Among the many factors that make you question your choice of hobby while reading this manga the atrocious hamfisted fanservice is the real star. It has no contenders in making you want to hit your head on the table from the complex combination of ire, cringe and lameness overflow. I am understanding of fanservice in manga, really, truly, I promise, but this time it got to me and it got to me bad. And I think it’s not my fault. One of the first things you see in Mouryou no Yurikago, even before learning anything about the story or characters, is a schoolgirl pissing herself with fear, attention on her crotch and labia majora, and her crotch, and her labia majora, and more crotch… – hope you catch my drift. The girl is made to look very earnest in being scared. Every girl in this manga is made to look very earnest, to provide tits'n'ass nonstop and be dumb as a brick (sorry, bricks). The level of grace with which this is handled is, say, a blind girl is nearly raped, but manages to escape by hurting her attacker in a living hell situation – this scene is used to make something like a pin-up of her for a colored page, her peach-like ass visible through a torn skirt and breasts outlined through a wet shirt. Or a twisted “bad” girl dies and her last thoughts are about forgetting to put on panties. No, sadly it’s not funny in the context. And all the female characters are like that, there’re about 5 pages combined in all the manga where they are not extremely irritating, 3 of those pages dedicated to the female MC swimming silently. The author also seems to have a thing for the “golden shower” (women piss a lot in this manga, boys don’t at all though, lol). It’s not erotic, it’s not motivated, it doesn’t have a good flow, it’s just “look tits” and half of the cast turned into trash. Damn this stuff to the bottom of the ocean.

The male cast fares somewhat better, since they at least don’t show their dongs left and right and some of the tropey personalities initially had potential. At the beginning we’re introduced to a stoic type that pushes people away, to a caring womanizer, to a psychopathic “effectiveness” guy still on the “good” side of dnd alignement and to a wheelchair guy with the moral dilemma of fighting for his life vs. being a burden. But later on many of these make 180 turns out of nowhere, some (nearly all) end up being wasted. There’s also a bunch of “weird foreigners”, including a sword-wielding Russian religious fundamentalist without any context or explanation.

Speaking about the context, when the backstories start to roll out, it doesn’t get better – it gets worse, for heaven’s sake, and that’s rare in fiction. The author shoehorns wild things in the cast, with children being also specialists – they are circus acrobats, “my relative built this ship” walking asspulls, tormented prodigies and language geniuses and I’ve already mentioned the psychopathic guy. Not to mention that their school trip involved going on a cruise liner to dig some ditches in Africa – yeah, don’t ask, don’t let me think about the logic and consistency in Mouryou no Yurikago anymore, please, I’ll conf… Sorry, got off-track. And the schoolkids also talk about each other in terms of “he won’t die, he isn’t that sort of guy”. Alltogether it holds water as well as the sinking ship they’re on.

You could've named the plot of Mouryou no Yurikago ambitious, if not for the huge amount of “hell on a sinking ship” movies filmed around early 2000-s, which this manga tries to copy, just with a Japanese schoolkids cast. And there’s a whole genre of similar “trapped on a spaceship with monsters” fiction. Manga has a lot of good catastrophe survival stories too. This – this is not a good survival story or a good sinking ship story, because it's not a good story at all. This manga is long enough and not amateur enough to have brighter moments, of course, but the overall quality of writing is catastrophic. One good thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t stray too much - no sudden alien invasions, no excessive breaking of the 4th wall.

I guess, two other things I can call remarkable is the sheer tonal deafness of the author and the art. The tone deafness is simply impressive. The art made at least my angry fast reading possible, since it’s easy to understand and detailed enough. It reminds me of good shounen art with characters designed in a few recognizable features and honest immersive backgrounds that do a fine job of being backgrounds, but not much else, and maybe also Ibara no Ou a little. The debris is drawn very nicely. Though, despite the events taking place on an overturned sinking liner, I can’t say that there were many memorable places where the landscape reigned the atmosphere as a character on its own (which manga is very capable of and which totally should happen in such a setting). So the art is good, yeah, but not good enough by far to redeem everything else.

I recommend not wasting your time and energy on this thoroughly disappointing work. Too many things are wrong with it. Even if you think you’re fine with poorly placed fanservice, crippling plot problems – in everything: progression, character development, logic, backstories – will remain and bother you in the end. Really, there’re better things to read out there. Wade in only if your very survival depends on finding a new survival manga or you are such a dedicated enthusiast of the piss fetish that you have ran out of all and every work containing it out there.