Literally: the zombies are effectively the same, the biotech/body-horror pushes all the same buttons like the skull-mask-faces, the art is the same, most characters could be swapped with their counterparts with no loss, the fetishization of young women and the protagonist's inexplicable attachment to them is present in full force, some elements like 'Toha Heavy Industries' are identical, and in particular, the protagonist and setting and AI companion are so exactly identical that all the way up to the ending I assumed the big twist was going to be that _Biomega_ is actually the prequel for _Blame!_ explaining where Killey and The City come from (there are some differences like the gun's phlebotinum being 'brainwaves' rather than 'gravitational beams' but nothing that a good writer couldn't retcon or handwave away). difficult to see why _Biomega_ exists when _Blame!_ does almost everything it does. I guess now all we can do is flip a coin and hope nihei continues either blame^2 or NSE.Typical Nihei: gorgeous if extremely repetitive black-and-white art (in contrast, the few color illustrations come off as childishly garish and ugly) typically showing explosions and combat (rarely varied or exhibiting any imagination - if I had a nickel for every time Zouichi busts into a room and instantaneously shoots everyone in the head, I could probably afford to buy the entire printed manga), Nihei's obsessions like improbably powerful guns, borrowing of fantasy tropes that are wildly inappropriate (eg swordsmen and duels), a story that verges on gibberish (can anyone explain how the bear's wish could possibly lead to transforming the Earth into a megastructure?). I did enjoy the series overall but its week compared to blame, its hard to follow, and does not really fill its role as a prequel well.

the negative however is that the villains all look so much alike that its hard to tell who the peon is and who the ranking villain is, its not noticeable at first but once you get into volume three you'll know what I'm talking about.īut do not read this expecting it to explain the events that created the world of blame, in fact this story suffers like noise did in that it's hard to really lump this into the blame world since the only things it has in common is either a protagonist facing down the odds or the recurring villain types. blame^2 and blame nse)īut back to the series biomega, its an interesting story with a variety of neat characters. for blame it was the last few chapters for biomega its the entire last two volumes.Īnother issue nihei suffers from is starting a series and then not doing anything with it (i.e. He rushes the endings and you have no idea what's going on. Almost everything nihei writes revolves around the blame universe, however he always seems to have the same issue with his series.

Biomega, Vol. 1 by Tsutomu Nihei