tl;dr: A manga that’s a really good zombie manga, but goes off the rails when it tries to become something else about a third of the way through. 

This manga is one that changes pretty much completely about a third of the way in. The first third is focused on a group of people doing their best to survive a very peculiar apocalypse while trying to uncover the mysteries of what is occurring. Due to how it involves magical girls, this involves having to be a bit more tactical than when just dealing with normal zombies which leads to a lot of interesting situations. This portion also has a heavy focus on characters with some good character and relationship development, which allows a lot of the characters to come through pretty well. After that, it transitions into a story about trying to stop a villain executing a really complex plan that involves really complicated subjects like parallel worlds and time travel. This starts off decently enough, and has some good concepts such as the Magical Girls being reused in a new context. However, after the ending of what’s dubbed as the first season, it transitions into focusing on a new set of characters, and then it starts losing momentum. Things that had been interesting when they were left mysterious, start to seem kind of lame once they get more fleshed-out explanations. And ultimately, it didn’t really feel like it did a good job with any of the characters during this portion. It does feel like it tried to show character and relationship development but I don’t think it did a particularly good job at it, and I didn’t really feel connected to any of them as well as during the first season.

During the final season, it connects everything from the first season and second season. However, ultimately this ends up producing something incredibly convoluted due to the plot being pretty complex and all the stuff related to time travel and parallel worlds. This also results in the characters having to basically infodump information that the reader already knows to other characters which while generally pretty short still feels like it hurts pacing. On top of that, combining the multiple timelines screws a lot with the relationship set up from the first two seasons, and just feels all sorts of strange. It also doesn’t feel like this season even tries to focus on characters that much due to how many there are, with the exceptions of Rintarou who comes out pretty awesome and the best character in this manga, and Himeji who is a solid attempt but one that falls pretty flat. The rest of the characters, including the main character Kii end up feeling pretty lame and dull this season. The ending does manage to tie all the various plot threads together in what feels like a pretty consistent ending, and it does hit a lot of the notes it feels it should in regards to what it needs to show in the epilogue, but due to how messy the final season got it doesn’t feel as satisfying as I think it should have. The art is pretty great with good quality and lots of interesting designs, though I should note it is also incredibly creepy at times with lots of gore.