Limit (rank 2.5)

Publisher: Vertical

Volumes: 6/6 (Complete), In Print

Shoujo

Genre: Survival Horror

 

Summary: Konno is a high school girl who thinks she has life all figured out. Go with the current when navigating her high school cliques, keep her distance from others to keep from being hurt, and never let her status in the class pecking order get too low. She’s friends with the top clique leader, Sakura, and life is good.

Her class is going on a camping trip for a few days when disaster strikes- the bus driver suddenly collapses while turning a sharp curve on a mountain road. The bus goes over a cliff and most of her classmates are killed. Only her and a few survivors are left alive. All they need to do is stay alive while they wait for rescue. But past simmering resentment comes boiling to the surface, and before they know it, there are bodies turning up... and they are running out of food...

Review: This is a strange sort of combination of high school girls, drawn in a Shoujo style, and a survival horror type scenario. On one hand, I really enjoyed the character development for the characters, especially Konno. This experience forces her to re-evaluate many of her deeply held beliefs, and she comes out of her experiences as a better person.

On the other hand, as a survival horror, I remember one review that described the plot of this manga as saying that “It was going good and then the mangaka lost her nerve and backed off”. I kinda can understand that kind of Point of View, it starts as survival horror, deepens it, and then at the end, it turns back into Shoujo again. So then you have this odd combination where the story is too dark for most Shoujo readers looking for stories about love and friendship, but not dark enough for survival horror fans. 

Recommended: If you want to read a blend of Shoujo and Survival Horror that leans more towards Shoujo than Horror, then this was a great read. But If you’re hoping for a manga like Battle Royale, you’re going to be disappointed.

Age Rating: Older Teen

Other Notable Works by this mangaka: Life (Tokyopop) That being said even though reading this convinced me to give Life another chance, I think Limit is this mangaka’s best work currently in English. And Life was dropped by Tokyopop so the whole story wasn’t even finished.