yakusoku no neverland manga review
well this has been a fun ride. since the proper end of this/the promised neverland/TPN, it's kinda been a whammy of back to back ends - like KNY, and other manga like haikyuu and fire force reaching the last arcs soon. 2020 really has been a year of shit just ending, and another moment of silence for my dead work ethic.
let's get into this - firstly, TPN was not actually a show i was even interested in or had any curiosity about. but for some reason, i was having a chat with someone off tinder who was asking me for anime recs (good) and generally i'll start with, give me something you enjoy and i'll give you stuff that's similar. basically im like, the human and shitter version of the 'you may enjoy' bar in Myanimelist.
anyway, the conversation was about how much they enjoyed TPN and how good it was and etc etc and never one to be out of the loop, i threw myself into the show just because i wanted to get a sense of what exactly was going on that lead everyone (at the time) being really into the show and really intensely into it. during this period, i binge read KNY, Fire force and TPN all in the span of a month. they're short, its actually super manageable.
if you weren't aware at this point, spoilers so fuck off if you dont want them.
so lets get into the whole actual thing and the review itself. so the story itself is about these super smart kids, emma, ray and norman, who live in this orphanage which is actually a fake world which was created in order to raise the best 'cattle' or meat for these demons. they basically live in a world where demons eat humans, and the orphanage that they're living in a front to raise intelligent children bred for rich demons to eat, because demons take on the characteristics of food they eat, so if you eat smart kids, you also become smarter, and if they don't eat then they lose their intelligence. also humans taste good apparently.
for some reason, there's a real trend in the manga ive read where the initial premise/arcs are never really the one that gets expanded on, it's always more like a jumping off point for the main story to happen, and i will now expand on this.
so like - the concept of the anime is that you get introduced to the grace field house orphanage thing, its a nice cute little life until a few episodes in in which you realize somethings gone wrong, and emma and norman find out that they're being sold for meat. the eventual rest of the anime (12 episodes) is spent trying to figure out how theyre going to game the system, featuring some minor human villans, and escape from their inevitable deaths. eventually, at the end of the anime, they finally find a way out (although norma is shipped out because he's the first one to turn 12) and jump out of the edge of the wall that leads them into a 'new world'. so you get to wonder, what is going to happen? what a promising concept, they escape and see whats outside. there is a s2 coming real soon, so if you're an anime only fan, its probably like, WOW i wonder, all this potential, whats next?
here's where i picked up on the manga, because first arcs, as beastars showed me, makes little to no difference to the future plot. so they realize that the outside world is completely fucked - the whole world has evolved beyond humans, so everything flora and fauna is trying to actively kill them. they bump (luckily) into this one demon Mujika who's blessed with magic blood which gives her the power of intellgince without needing to eat people, and her ... boyfriend? mate? bodyguard? Sonju (which always read kinda korean to me but..), and theyre both part of this religion which is against eating farmed humans, except sonju actually still misses eating them and is like, i wont eat them now that they're a rarity but i will eat them if the population strives again, so i wanna foster the population again so i can hunt and kill them but this whole character thing never gets resolved lmao. anyway so yeah Mujika is special and beautiful and she saves the group of kids (you only really need to know that Emma and Ray are the important leaders of the group) and the two demons teach them how to care for themselves and whatev. also she can basically give her powers to anyone who drinks her blood.
lets back track for a moment - so they kids learn how to leave the house and everything due to this magic pen thats given to them from someone called minerva, and they dont stay with mujika because they're trying to find this nebulous place that is supposed to be their haven, their heaven on earth, where maybe there are a ton of humans still there and living happily away from the demons, so they follow this secret tech and eventually reach this shelter where, unfortunately, there is no one left there except this one guy (Mister/Yugo) and he threatens them but eventually they live there for like a year ish and they all become friends. Yugo btw, probably has intense PTSD from seeing all his friends killed and dead or whatever, but anyway, he takes them out to some place and they eventually reach this place called Goldy Pond which, there is some sort of secret there? Anyway, the Goldy Pond place is like, this hunting theme park playground where humans are brought and live there and when the music starts to play, the demons come out and hunt them and try to eat them. however it turns out that Goldy Pond aslo has a group of smart kids who are lead by this guy Lucas, and eventually they make a plan to kill all of the demons there. Also some shit happens when it turns out Lucas and Yugo were form the same orhpanage and they thought they were both dead and sad about it for ages.
ANYWAY - so they're STILL living in the shelter, they're self sustinable with their farm and hot water supplies and wahtever, and now all of them are living happily including reunited dad and dad lucas and yugo for a while. love it.
except they get found out by the Ratri clan. So the ratri clan were like, the elite humans of this world. it turns out that there are two worlds that were created after the end of the human/demon war, and there was an agreement about how the world should be run. there's like some mystery about Peter Ratri and James - so James was the guy who was 'minerva', and trying to free the humans, whereas Peter is like, the evil dude who runs the whole shebang and hates humans and sabotages James' plan, and so Peter and his underling Andrew finally sniff out the last shelters and blow up the whole shelter. so yugo and lucas sacrifice themselves for the kids to be free. Frankly - very upset with this but anyway.
so this is where like, shit gets really rushed. a lot of people kinda bitched about the whole end of this, and frankly, with good reason, because the previous parts up to this are given a lot of care and thought, and then this sort of just rollercoasters the rest.
so there was this thing that happened way back where norman was shipped out and therefore, no longer with emma and ray. so you dont know if hes dead - tho there is an assumption that he is but SURPRISE he was shipped off to some special plantation to be experimented on or something like that, except because hes so ridiculously clever and amazing that he stages an uprising and becomes the default head of the anti-demon brigade, except this is all told through like 5 pages of flashback LOL so like, they get saved by 'minerva's followers after the shelter gets blown up, and theyre hangin out and theyre like wow minerva we finally get to met him, except it turns out to be Norman who has taken the name and turned himself into this deity figure. yay! except not yay because emma and ray want demons to have rights, but norman calls for like a mass genocide of all demons so they love each other yet they dont wanna make compromises for what to do when it comes to their future. norman is playing 4d political chess with the whole demon world, but emma's just been ... yknow whatever the fuck this whole plot has been.
so the seven walls arc is a lil thing mujika told them about, and then it turns out that emma and ray can go there to meet this god, who made the initial 'promise' that was the basis of their world or something. btw - the promise or what it is never really gets expanded on explicitly or anything, ray gets sent back magically to norman's hideout, and emma is stuck with this dude called "
" / demon king/ demon god/ squiggles / scribbles, and they have this convo that is left in secret, and dun dun dun, the imperial capital battle arc!
so theres this whole like, one chapter thing where theres a smidge of info about the political shit in the demon world, the unhappy nobles/elite and the queen or something like that, and norman comes in with his OP genetically modified dudes and storms the palace and tries to kill off all the demons, but Mujika and Sonju are also magically there for some reason. the demons are also kinda unhappy with the current state of things, so theres some sort of internal kerfluffle, and then peter ratri starts banging on about how much he hates his brother, and goes to the queen and goes, i will give you all the premium meat we own if you give me half ya army, and shes like youre pathetic but ok. so Peter Ratri storms like, everywhere the kids are, including the norman hide out, and then the original orphanage emma and co. are from, grace field house. its all happening there.
so mujika and sonju go get some back up support from these demons who havent eaten for 1000 years by giving them the special blood, the queen is officially dead, except ratri works real quick, within a day hes like, theres a power vaccumn so im gonna quickly just draw up a thing where mujika/sonju are evil despite them saving everyone with blood, and they all have a wake up sheeple moment where they realize omg theyre not evillll and they were using the farms as a way to control us wow. and the duke from the goldy pond arc comes back?? and is like haha yeah anyway this is the truth yall got duped and thats the end of the whole thing, because after he gets killed (or we thought so) it turns out he wasnt dead but he felt shamed and turns over a new leaf.
then this whole thing happens with isabella - lets back track for a moment, she was a orphanage kid that fell in love with this guy, and then he gets shipped off and killed. eventually she gets picked to be a 'mom' and they tell her all about what actually happens, she has a kid that she never sees, except surprise reveal, it turns out to be ray. so she doesnt ACTUALLy get killed despite all the kids having escaped, and peter ratri tries to get her on his side, only for her to have been playing the double agent game the whole time. anyway emma tries to talk it out with peter and you get a lil insight into how hes just a villain with no depth because hes the "am i wrong? no it is every one else who is wrong" meme, we find out that james is dead at peter's hands, and peter refuses to listen to emma and kills himself.
so despite like, the imperial troops outside and them planning to be like, oh what to do next, theres nothing they need to do anymore. and duke leuvis is like anywayyyyy yeah hi so mujika's gonna be queen now with like weird useless cheers from everyone else.
also theres this lil segway about isabella being a mom and how she like, was a good person all along (debatable) and then she sacrifices herself for all of them after the demon boss of the farm is like no fuck yall im taking all of you anyway theres like one chapter where she just dies surrounded by her kids, and then it jumps to mujika and sonju being like anyway ........ cONGRATS!
anyway now that theres been this change in the demon world, we can now enact the promise that emma has made with scribbles the demon king and we can all go to the human world, all the kids, because the old promise was that the human and demon world was to be kept separate? but the new promise that emma made is that ?? the humans in the demon world are allowed to return to the human world? this whole thing never really gets elaborated on, i honestly don't quite understand it either sorry - and yeah so the end is, they all vanish into the human world except it turns out the price was that emma had to give up her family - meaning her "past memories and future connections. everything. ill take your family from your world." and then she wakes up separated from her family, lives with this santa looking guy whos family was all dead in some snow covered wasteland, no one can find her. she also keeps dreaming about her past life and being like... why? i cant remember anything tho.
TWO YEARS TIME SKIp shes in the city and the ghost of yugo, connie and isabella show up and guide ray to where emma just happens to be. anyway yeah so they all meet emma again whos like idk yall and theyre like ok but lemme tell you about how happy we are now and shes like idk why but im crying but i love you all ok lets all live together again. "Screw destiny... lets live together"
if you were like, why was that so short, its becaue its literally that way in the manga.
the end.
right so this was.... a much longer recap synopsis than i expected but yknow we can work with it.
to be honest, it's taken so much out of me that i'm almost like, yknow what fuck it i'm happy with the ending and im glad its fucking finally ended - which is probably how the author felt when they were writing this.
okay so, i, don't hate this? let's talk about the ending since that's sort of the freshest wound. what the fuck is the point of her payment to him as both past memories but also future connections? because cLEARLY he couldn't stop her from finding them again. does he have no powers in the human world? what's going on? also frankly, these kids are bound to have PTSD, her losing all her memories of her family is a fucking blessing, imagine being able to live happily in a world where youre literally not being harvested and you actually have a future. yeah i dont understand the implementation of this 'big sacrafice' that never gets talked about with zero to no consequence. why introduce it as some sort of cliffhanger thing when youre just going to undo everything you did in the next chapter? also i hate amnesia tropes theyre horribly cliche-d and very rarely well done. also to have that all happen in two chapters, not super satisfying.
more largely in general, it's quite obvious that the ending is horribly rushed, we can all see that. it's been leading up to this whole thing, but in a way with the amount of shit that was stacked against the kids, there was kind of no better way to really resolve it without losing the tension that's been built up over since the first reveal of demon murders. however, it kinda sets up this idea that this might be more of a death heavy show, except despite all of this happening, there are very little deaths (especially in comparison to KNY/SNK in which everywhere you look its another character death). I don't mind the lack of deaths, it's a nice reprieve from everything else being god awful for the kids, but it does feel a little like a cop out due to exactly everything that's happened.
of course, we can complain about the sordid pacing, how the weird time skip in the shelter was a bit weird, the general sense of everything post goldy-pond and how everything just went breakneck speed, but like, you know what, at this point after having wrote the whole damn synopsis, I'm really just glad it's over?
also what else - the fucking mystery of the Ratri family which never gets touched upon or solved ever. that's the most infuriating to me.
I remember just reading this whole thing in a weekend and thinking, huh okay this really rushed towards the end, and having caught up on the last 20 chapters i missed out in a few hours, I just sort of looked at this and went, okay i'm glad that i was never super invested in the series and that i wasn't really that concerned abut the way it ended.
long (very long) story short, it's just a shame something that started with such a promising and interesting unique premise ended up copping such an arguably kinda cliche ending with what felt like, very little consideration to the premise of the story it initially presented (especially in regards to the anime only watchers, who have only experienced the action all within Grace Field House).
my take: it's a fulfilling ending in the same way it was nice that darling in the franxx ended (although marginally less tragic.... and when i say tragic i just mean, bad.). it finally ended, did what it set out to do - the kids reunite and leave the demon world to live with their family and also low key sorted out the demon world to make it a better place. and there's a promise of a better something at the end. but does it ever explore the world it intricately created for us? nah. does it ever touch on those mysteries they so valiantly uncovered in the first few arcs? no. does it have a reasonable ending that seems just right for the dark and depressing nature of the whole story? also no.
but look - it wasn't ridiculously long (181 chapters), and because i genuinely just never cared for the premise of the story, and frankly, i don't have enough energy to line up some alternate future where peter ratri plays 5D chess, the kids actually use their smarts in an interesting way, they explain the ratri curse, and go more in depth with the world, etc etc, so in the end, I'll just say, good job to the creators of this manga for finishing it.
i'd rate this a 5/10, a decent read but you probably won't remember this after it's done (and having written this review over a week, i've already forgotten most of it again, so that rating is born out of truth and experience.)
for more fun reads of people absolutely shitting on this manga because they were emotionally invested, have a look at the reviews on this page which have great, funny and eloquent points which i would steal but will do so later : https://myanimelist.net/manga/100128/Yakusoku_no_Neverland
let's get into this - firstly, TPN was not actually a show i was even interested in or had any curiosity about. but for some reason, i was having a chat with someone off tinder who was asking me for anime recs (good) and generally i'll start with, give me something you enjoy and i'll give you stuff that's similar. basically im like, the human and shitter version of the 'you may enjoy' bar in Myanimelist.
anyway, the conversation was about how much they enjoyed TPN and how good it was and etc etc and never one to be out of the loop, i threw myself into the show just because i wanted to get a sense of what exactly was going on that lead everyone (at the time) being really into the show and really intensely into it. during this period, i binge read KNY, Fire force and TPN all in the span of a month. they're short, its actually super manageable.
if you weren't aware at this point, spoilers so fuck off if you dont want them.
so lets get into the whole actual thing and the review itself. so the story itself is about these super smart kids, emma, ray and norman, who live in this orphanage which is actually a fake world which was created in order to raise the best 'cattle' or meat for these demons. they basically live in a world where demons eat humans, and the orphanage that they're living in a front to raise intelligent children bred for rich demons to eat, because demons take on the characteristics of food they eat, so if you eat smart kids, you also become smarter, and if they don't eat then they lose their intelligence. also humans taste good apparently.
for some reason, there's a real trend in the manga ive read where the initial premise/arcs are never really the one that gets expanded on, it's always more like a jumping off point for the main story to happen, and i will now expand on this.
so like - the concept of the anime is that you get introduced to the grace field house orphanage thing, its a nice cute little life until a few episodes in in which you realize somethings gone wrong, and emma and norman find out that they're being sold for meat. the eventual rest of the anime (12 episodes) is spent trying to figure out how theyre going to game the system, featuring some minor human villans, and escape from their inevitable deaths. eventually, at the end of the anime, they finally find a way out (although norma is shipped out because he's the first one to turn 12) and jump out of the edge of the wall that leads them into a 'new world'. so you get to wonder, what is going to happen? what a promising concept, they escape and see whats outside. there is a s2 coming real soon, so if you're an anime only fan, its probably like, WOW i wonder, all this potential, whats next?
here's where i picked up on the manga, because first arcs, as beastars showed me, makes little to no difference to the future plot. so they realize that the outside world is completely fucked - the whole world has evolved beyond humans, so everything flora and fauna is trying to actively kill them. they bump (luckily) into this one demon Mujika who's blessed with magic blood which gives her the power of intellgince without needing to eat people, and her ... boyfriend? mate? bodyguard? Sonju (which always read kinda korean to me but..), and theyre both part of this religion which is against eating farmed humans, except sonju actually still misses eating them and is like, i wont eat them now that they're a rarity but i will eat them if the population strives again, so i wanna foster the population again so i can hunt and kill them but this whole character thing never gets resolved lmao. anyway so yeah Mujika is special and beautiful and she saves the group of kids (you only really need to know that Emma and Ray are the important leaders of the group) and the two demons teach them how to care for themselves and whatev. also she can basically give her powers to anyone who drinks her blood.
lets back track for a moment - so they kids learn how to leave the house and everything due to this magic pen thats given to them from someone called minerva, and they dont stay with mujika because they're trying to find this nebulous place that is supposed to be their haven, their heaven on earth, where maybe there are a ton of humans still there and living happily away from the demons, so they follow this secret tech and eventually reach this shelter where, unfortunately, there is no one left there except this one guy (Mister/Yugo) and he threatens them but eventually they live there for like a year ish and they all become friends. Yugo btw, probably has intense PTSD from seeing all his friends killed and dead or whatever, but anyway, he takes them out to some place and they eventually reach this place called Goldy Pond which, there is some sort of secret there? Anyway, the Goldy Pond place is like, this hunting theme park playground where humans are brought and live there and when the music starts to play, the demons come out and hunt them and try to eat them. however it turns out that Goldy Pond aslo has a group of smart kids who are lead by this guy Lucas, and eventually they make a plan to kill all of the demons there. Also some shit happens when it turns out Lucas and Yugo were form the same orhpanage and they thought they were both dead and sad about it for ages.
ANYWAY - so they're STILL living in the shelter, they're self sustinable with their farm and hot water supplies and wahtever, and now all of them are living happily including reunited dad and dad lucas and yugo for a while. love it.
except they get found out by the Ratri clan. So the ratri clan were like, the elite humans of this world. it turns out that there are two worlds that were created after the end of the human/demon war, and there was an agreement about how the world should be run. there's like some mystery about Peter Ratri and James - so James was the guy who was 'minerva', and trying to free the humans, whereas Peter is like, the evil dude who runs the whole shebang and hates humans and sabotages James' plan, and so Peter and his underling Andrew finally sniff out the last shelters and blow up the whole shelter. so yugo and lucas sacrifice themselves for the kids to be free. Frankly - very upset with this but anyway.
so this is where like, shit gets really rushed. a lot of people kinda bitched about the whole end of this, and frankly, with good reason, because the previous parts up to this are given a lot of care and thought, and then this sort of just rollercoasters the rest.
so there was this thing that happened way back where norman was shipped out and therefore, no longer with emma and ray. so you dont know if hes dead - tho there is an assumption that he is but SURPRISE he was shipped off to some special plantation to be experimented on or something like that, except because hes so ridiculously clever and amazing that he stages an uprising and becomes the default head of the anti-demon brigade, except this is all told through like 5 pages of flashback LOL so like, they get saved by 'minerva's followers after the shelter gets blown up, and theyre hangin out and theyre like wow minerva we finally get to met him, except it turns out to be Norman who has taken the name and turned himself into this deity figure. yay! except not yay because emma and ray want demons to have rights, but norman calls for like a mass genocide of all demons so they love each other yet they dont wanna make compromises for what to do when it comes to their future. norman is playing 4d political chess with the whole demon world, but emma's just been ... yknow whatever the fuck this whole plot has been.
so the seven walls arc is a lil thing mujika told them about, and then it turns out that emma and ray can go there to meet this god, who made the initial 'promise' that was the basis of their world or something. btw - the promise or what it is never really gets expanded on explicitly or anything, ray gets sent back magically to norman's hideout, and emma is stuck with this dude called "
" / demon king/ demon god/ squiggles / scribbles, and they have this convo that is left in secret, and dun dun dun, the imperial capital battle arc!so theres this whole like, one chapter thing where theres a smidge of info about the political shit in the demon world, the unhappy nobles/elite and the queen or something like that, and norman comes in with his OP genetically modified dudes and storms the palace and tries to kill off all the demons, but Mujika and Sonju are also magically there for some reason. the demons are also kinda unhappy with the current state of things, so theres some sort of internal kerfluffle, and then peter ratri starts banging on about how much he hates his brother, and goes to the queen and goes, i will give you all the premium meat we own if you give me half ya army, and shes like youre pathetic but ok. so Peter Ratri storms like, everywhere the kids are, including the norman hide out, and then the original orphanage emma and co. are from, grace field house. its all happening there.
so mujika and sonju go get some back up support from these demons who havent eaten for 1000 years by giving them the special blood, the queen is officially dead, except ratri works real quick, within a day hes like, theres a power vaccumn so im gonna quickly just draw up a thing where mujika/sonju are evil despite them saving everyone with blood, and they all have a wake up sheeple moment where they realize omg theyre not evillll and they were using the farms as a way to control us wow. and the duke from the goldy pond arc comes back?? and is like haha yeah anyway this is the truth yall got duped and thats the end of the whole thing, because after he gets killed (or we thought so) it turns out he wasnt dead but he felt shamed and turns over a new leaf.
then this whole thing happens with isabella - lets back track for a moment, she was a orphanage kid that fell in love with this guy, and then he gets shipped off and killed. eventually she gets picked to be a 'mom' and they tell her all about what actually happens, she has a kid that she never sees, except surprise reveal, it turns out to be ray. so she doesnt ACTUALLy get killed despite all the kids having escaped, and peter ratri tries to get her on his side, only for her to have been playing the double agent game the whole time. anyway emma tries to talk it out with peter and you get a lil insight into how hes just a villain with no depth because hes the "am i wrong? no it is every one else who is wrong" meme, we find out that james is dead at peter's hands, and peter refuses to listen to emma and kills himself.
so despite like, the imperial troops outside and them planning to be like, oh what to do next, theres nothing they need to do anymore. and duke leuvis is like anywayyyyy yeah hi so mujika's gonna be queen now with like weird useless cheers from everyone else.
also theres this lil segway about isabella being a mom and how she like, was a good person all along (debatable) and then she sacrifices herself for all of them after the demon boss of the farm is like no fuck yall im taking all of you anyway theres like one chapter where she just dies surrounded by her kids, and then it jumps to mujika and sonju being like anyway ........ cONGRATS!
anyway now that theres been this change in the demon world, we can now enact the promise that emma has made with scribbles the demon king and we can all go to the human world, all the kids, because the old promise was that the human and demon world was to be kept separate? but the new promise that emma made is that ?? the humans in the demon world are allowed to return to the human world? this whole thing never really gets elaborated on, i honestly don't quite understand it either sorry - and yeah so the end is, they all vanish into the human world except it turns out the price was that emma had to give up her family - meaning her "past memories and future connections. everything. ill take your family from your world." and then she wakes up separated from her family, lives with this santa looking guy whos family was all dead in some snow covered wasteland, no one can find her. she also keeps dreaming about her past life and being like... why? i cant remember anything tho.
TWO YEARS TIME SKIp shes in the city and the ghost of yugo, connie and isabella show up and guide ray to where emma just happens to be. anyway yeah so they all meet emma again whos like idk yall and theyre like ok but lemme tell you about how happy we are now and shes like idk why but im crying but i love you all ok lets all live together again. "Screw destiny... lets live together"
if you were like, why was that so short, its becaue its literally that way in the manga.
the end.
right so this was.... a much longer recap synopsis than i expected but yknow we can work with it.
to be honest, it's taken so much out of me that i'm almost like, yknow what fuck it i'm happy with the ending and im glad its fucking finally ended - which is probably how the author felt when they were writing this.
okay so, i, don't hate this? let's talk about the ending since that's sort of the freshest wound. what the fuck is the point of her payment to him as both past memories but also future connections? because cLEARLY he couldn't stop her from finding them again. does he have no powers in the human world? what's going on? also frankly, these kids are bound to have PTSD, her losing all her memories of her family is a fucking blessing, imagine being able to live happily in a world where youre literally not being harvested and you actually have a future. yeah i dont understand the implementation of this 'big sacrafice' that never gets talked about with zero to no consequence. why introduce it as some sort of cliffhanger thing when youre just going to undo everything you did in the next chapter? also i hate amnesia tropes theyre horribly cliche-d and very rarely well done. also to have that all happen in two chapters, not super satisfying.
more largely in general, it's quite obvious that the ending is horribly rushed, we can all see that. it's been leading up to this whole thing, but in a way with the amount of shit that was stacked against the kids, there was kind of no better way to really resolve it without losing the tension that's been built up over since the first reveal of demon murders. however, it kinda sets up this idea that this might be more of a death heavy show, except despite all of this happening, there are very little deaths (especially in comparison to KNY/SNK in which everywhere you look its another character death). I don't mind the lack of deaths, it's a nice reprieve from everything else being god awful for the kids, but it does feel a little like a cop out due to exactly everything that's happened.
of course, we can complain about the sordid pacing, how the weird time skip in the shelter was a bit weird, the general sense of everything post goldy-pond and how everything just went breakneck speed, but like, you know what, at this point after having wrote the whole damn synopsis, I'm really just glad it's over?
also what else - the fucking mystery of the Ratri family which never gets touched upon or solved ever. that's the most infuriating to me.
I remember just reading this whole thing in a weekend and thinking, huh okay this really rushed towards the end, and having caught up on the last 20 chapters i missed out in a few hours, I just sort of looked at this and went, okay i'm glad that i was never super invested in the series and that i wasn't really that concerned abut the way it ended.
long (very long) story short, it's just a shame something that started with such a promising and interesting unique premise ended up copping such an arguably kinda cliche ending with what felt like, very little consideration to the premise of the story it initially presented (especially in regards to the anime only watchers, who have only experienced the action all within Grace Field House).
my take: it's a fulfilling ending in the same way it was nice that darling in the franxx ended (although marginally less tragic.... and when i say tragic i just mean, bad.). it finally ended, did what it set out to do - the kids reunite and leave the demon world to live with their family and also low key sorted out the demon world to make it a better place. and there's a promise of a better something at the end. but does it ever explore the world it intricately created for us? nah. does it ever touch on those mysteries they so valiantly uncovered in the first few arcs? no. does it have a reasonable ending that seems just right for the dark and depressing nature of the whole story? also no.
but look - it wasn't ridiculously long (181 chapters), and because i genuinely just never cared for the premise of the story, and frankly, i don't have enough energy to line up some alternate future where peter ratri plays 5D chess, the kids actually use their smarts in an interesting way, they explain the ratri curse, and go more in depth with the world, etc etc, so in the end, I'll just say, good job to the creators of this manga for finishing it.
i'd rate this a 5/10, a decent read but you probably won't remember this after it's done (and having written this review over a week, i've already forgotten most of it again, so that rating is born out of truth and experience.)
for more fun reads of people absolutely shitting on this manga because they were emotionally invested, have a look at the reviews on this page which have great, funny and eloquent points which i would steal but will do so later : https://myanimelist.net/manga/100128/Yakusoku_no_Neverland
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