The Promised Neverland (Review)

So guys, this is another really interesting entry for me to make because I decided to finally make a review for the manga and anime series, The Promised Neverland. I say this is interesting because normally I do just anime reviews on here, especially ones that are adaptations of different mangas, but, for this occasion, I've decided to make a review for the anime, but especially for the manga. If you don't know, the anime for this series is in a weird space with what they did with it after Season 1. I'll get into that later, but, for now, I'm just gonna talk about the first part of the series and a summary of the entire story. So, The Promised Neverland is another Shonen Jump series that was created in 2016 and finished in 2020. It only has 20 volumes, which means it's one of the shortest manga series I've ever read. It was created and written by Kaiu Shirai and illustrated by Posuka Demizu. I got into this series last year. I got all the manga volumes and finished it pretty quickly. Like I said, it's only 20 volumes and the volumes themselves are honestly not that long, you can read through them incredibly fast. I'm not 100% sure what it was about the series that made me want to check it out, maybe it was because it's another Shonen Jump series or maybe I just thought it looked cool, but, whatever the reason, I started and finished it last year and I absolutely loved it. This might be one of my new favourite Shonen Jump manga series of all time. Not entirely sure about that, but I did absolutely love it nonetheless. So, I'm gonna be doing a review of the whole thing from start to finish and, like always, this will have full spoilers for the whole story, so, if you don't want anything spoiled, go read or watch it and then come back and read the rest of this. So, the general plot of this series is that the beginning is set in some orphanage called Grace Field House where there's a whole bunch of kids being looked after by a woman named Isabella. The main characters of this series are three kids named Emma, Ray and Norman. They've all been there their whole lives and all live happily and are always playing with the other kids and taking tests and being loved by Isabella. They've never seen the outside world beyond the wall that surrounds the orphanage. Sometimes, they're having to say goodbye to one of their friends in the orphanage because they get adopted but never hear from them again. One night, one of the girls there named Conny gets adopted but leaves her stuffed rabbit behind and so Emma and Norman go to catch her to give it to her at the gate, but, when they get there, they find Conny's body in a truck because she's been killed and it's revealed that it was done by these demon creatures and Isabella intentionally handed her over to them and Emma and Norman put together that the orphanage is actually a harvesting ground for the demons and Isabella is handing the kids for them to eat and this completely messes with the two of them since they pretty much destroys everything they ever thought they knew and now they're trying to think of a way to get the rest of the kids out of there and escape to the outside world before anyone else dies. So, yeah, that's a pretty insane premise for a Shonen Jump series, but, at this point, what series isn't? And what I loved about the early stages of the story was the whole tense vibe that the series was going for because the series itself is a dark fantasy horror story with Emma, Ray and Norman doing everything they can to investigate what's really happening and what's the best way to escape while trying not to be discovered by Isabella. With the first five volumes of the manga, we get a whole bunch of information for the series, especially in volume 2 when another adult named Krone comes to the house and decides she want to try to kill Isabella because she wants to be the "mother" of the house because the woman who runs an orphanage is given the title of a "mother" and Krone wants to be the mother of this house. That's actually another big piece of information given, that there are multiple houses just like Grace Field and Krone, even though she doesn't really like the kids, decides to help them in order to get what she wants. So, like I said, for the first five volumes of the manga, what I absolutely loved the most was the constant planning and brilliant ideas the characters were coming up with to figure out how to escape the orphanage like when they try to train the other kids to run faster and hide too. They also do other things too like they realise they have tracking devices in their ears and so they try to figure out how to disable them. But that's not to say it doesn't have other minor things too like how we learn more of the characters personalities like how Emma, seeing as she's the main protagonist, is the more happy-go-lucky one who's always looking on the bright side of things, Norman being the clever and methodical and having a caring, friendly side to him and Ray being the more quiet and almost kinda sombre person, but is still one who cares for the others like them but still keeps everything to himself. We even get some good comedy from this too. Even though the series is super serious a lot of the time, it still knows how to be funny when it needs to be. But, the most important part is that it keeps the focus on the story and characters and it does it very well. I also love when they slowly begin to bring other into the plan as well, especially Don and Gilda, as in two kids who are their age and Emma, Ray and Norman decide to tell too. Though they never tell them that all the kids who have been adopted are actually all dead and so when Don and Gilda begin to get suspicious and find out what's really happening, they lose it and get angry at them but they all manage to compose themselves enough to realise they all need to be on the same side. But then things start to really get nuts when Krone is eventually discovered by Isabella and so she and the other demons decide to kill her and have Emma and the others killed too since they know the secrets and so Isabella decides to have Norman shipped out and Emma tries to save him but he decides to go through with it as a way to save Emma and Ray. After he's sent off, and after he has a quick chat with Emma, Emma and Ray act like they've given up on trying to escape, but they've actually got two separate plans going because Ray decides to kill himself on his birthday, because the smarter kids don't get sent out until they're about 12, and so he decides to do it but Emma manages to stop him and reveals how the other kids all now know what's going on and they've all agreed to escape and save Ray and so we get a whole lot of crazy things happening that night like Ray almost killing himself but Emma saving him like I mentioned and they manage to trick Isabella by having Emma cut her own ear off where her tracking device is and Ray's as well and so all the kids that are 5 years old or over and now going to escape and leave the younger kids who can't walk at all or run fast and come back for them. So, Emma, Ray, Don, Gilda and the other kids manage to escape and that whole I've been talking about up until now takes up the first five volumes of the manga and the first season of the anime. So, in terms of just this segment of the story alone, it's honestly brilliant. I think the structure of everything is so well thought out and how they do all sorts of different reveals and have twists and turns is amazingly thought out and how they show each one is so smart, every single one of them. I love how they, not only show the different ways all the characters think of each of these schemes while Isabella is hot on their heels the whole time and it feels like they could be discovered any moments and be fed to the demons, but also show all the character's different personalities along the way too. Like I said, Emma is like a lot of other Shonen Jump protagonists with being super cheerful and happy and optimistic, Norman being smarter and more careful with how he plans things out and Ray being super secretive and quiet but still doing whatever it takes to keep the others safe. But it's not just them, we also have Don who's a bit more of a hot-headed but still being able to think things through carefully and cleverly and Gilda being the more kind and gentle one who's still worried about everything that's happening. And just all the other small things that happen are crazy too like when Krone dies or when Isabella breaks Emma's leg or when Norman discovers the fact that the wall around them has a gigantic gap between their side and the one leading to the outside world.  We even learn other smaller twists in this part too like how Ray is actually Isabella's actual son. Honestly, everything that happens up until now was all enough to get me super intrigued into the series and I was really excited to see where the rest would take the story. And everything honestly just keeps getting better and better from this point because, even though I really enjoyed all the stuff at Grace Field House, everything that happens after they leave is really great as well. Not only are they leaving to escape and find out the secrets of the world and what really happened to make the world the way it is, but they're also trying to meet someone named Minerva because they found a bunch of books in the library that have his name in them and so they feel like he was trying to send them and a message. So, as they're all leaving, they get pursued by some other demons which leads to Emma falling unconscious due to blood loss because her ear was cut off but then all of them get saved by some other demons who don't eat humans at all and are willing to help them. There's two of them and their names are Sonju and Mujika and from them we learn a whole lot more information about the story that's really vital to the plot. The main thing is that they tell Emma and Ray that the reason the world is like this is because there was a promise made 1000 years ago made by humans and demons to do these harvesting of human children to give to the demons because they wanted to stop the constant fighting and killing that was happening and that there's two separate worlds, the demon world and human world and that they're in the demon world. This was all stuff was insane to read about the first time I read it, and, I'm not gonna lie, when I was going through it, even though Sonju and Mujika were saying they didn't want to eat any of them and were acting pretty friendly, I was expecting them to do something to them all at some point, but they never did, they genuinely really wanted to help and be friendly and they ended up being some of my favourite characters in the whole series. Anyway, they also teach them different techniques too like Sonju teaches Emma how to hunt and Mujika even gives Emma some amulet that she says will help her. They then leave again to find the location of some place that they believe Minerva is leading them to and so they eventually get there and it's some underground bunker and find that there's only one random person there. He doesn't tell them who he is but he explains how he's been there for many years and that he came from a similar place as them but all the people he was with were all killed so it's just been him on his own all this time. This is something I found really interesting about this series because as the plot kept getting more reveals like this, I was really interested to know what exactly was gonna happen and how it was gonna happen, especially with this new guy being introduced, and I had heard this guy was actually a lot of people's favourite character and this is another example of there being a huge difference from the manga to the anime because this part right here in the anime is where things change dramatically because for some reason, they decided to cut this guy out from the anime entirely and we never see him at all which means there's a lot of the upcoming stuff not in the anime at all. Like everyone else, I have absolutely no idea what they were thinking with removing him from the anime because him being absent not only means that one of the best characters in the series is gone, but it also means that the upcoming parts of the story in the manga is completely cut out entirely, which is a terrible idea because the upcoming parts in the manga are some of the best parts of the entire story. Anyway, when they meet him, he says he wants them to leave so they don't deplenish all the food and other things in the bunker he wants for himself and he even threatens to kill Emma if they don't but she manages to stop him and they tie him down so he doesn't hurt anyone. They then find a letter from Minerva telling them they have the option to either stay there or go to another location for more stuff and so Emma and Ray decide to go to this location alone but they also decide to bring the man with them in case he hurts the other kids. This part here actually kinda introduced a kinda dark moment for Emma because she basically threatens the man saying that unless he helps them get to this place, they'll blow up the bunker seeing as he's so desperate to keep it for himself. So, the three of them leave to find this other place, and even Gilda threatens the guy by saying the same thing as Emma, but saying that unless one of them comes back with him, she'll blow it up herself. On the way though, the three of them get attacked by more demon monsters that act like animals, not like the other demons they saw before who look different but still act, more or less, like humans. This then leads to Emma getting captured by other demons and taken away after her and the guy were having a talk about how he escaped where he was originally. Emma then finds herself in this kind of amusement park place and it's revealed to be some place called Goldy Pond, which is where some other demons pay to get kids to be brought there and they hunt them for fun. She meets other kids while there and learns just how dangerous it is because some of the kids she meets there are killed and this resolve that she has makes the kids she meets there take her to meet another man they know who's been there for a long, long time named Lucas and what's really cool about him is that he's one of the other man's friends because this is the place the other guy was mentioning. The two of them were there together but the other guy was able to escape but all their other friends were killed so the two of them were the only survivors. Lucas also shows Emma a door there that he believes was left there by Minerva and Emma is able to open it due to the special pen she has with her. When they open it, they find an actual small golden pond with a tiny island on it and an elevator on it and so they think it could lead them to the human world but then they hear a recording on a phone from Minerva himself saying that his real name is James Ratri and that he created the elevators to take people to the human world if they wanted but that this one is closed and can't be used. He then explains that his brother named Peter Ratri betrayed him years ago and tried to get him killed because James himself was trying to save everyone while Peter was trying to kill everyone since they're descendants of the family that made the original promise. Not only that, but he then explains how there are other ways to get to the human world and they're actually in the different orphanages, just like Grace Fields House. That was a major turning point when I read it because, even though it was obvious that Emma and the rest were gonna have to go back there at some point since they still need to get the rest of the kids and so on, the fact that this place was also being set up as the place where the final fight was gonna be happening made it really intense and awesome. Emma also not only learns all this information, but that one of the kids named Adam keeps saying some numbers that are actually the same numbers that Norman had on his neck. I didn't mention that yet but every Grace Field House kid had a bunch of numbers tattooed onto their necks as a way to label them and, I think the idea is that we were supposed to believe that Adam was actually Norman but just enhanced to be this giant kid that we see but then it's revealed that Adam saw Norman at some facility he was being taken to the night he was supposed to have been killed, so this gives Emma hope that he's still alive. This then leads to a really awesome action scene where Emma teams up with the kids there to try to kill the demons there because they discover that shooting their eyes is what kills them and so we get a whole action scene where everyone tries to kill them and it goes well for the most part except when there's one demon who's insanely the leader and is harder to hit named Leuvis. Not only is he insanely tough to kill, but he also almost kills Emma by stabbing her and she's almost killed but then Ray and the other guy arrive and they all team up to take him down. This is also where he and Lucas reunite after all this time and that was a really nice moment as well. They then agree to take everyone back to the shelter and the man decides to take Emma back himself to save her and so he does and we even learn his name here, it's Yugo, which is insane, but incredibly awesome. So, I really wanna talk about that part, a lot of people consider the whole stuff at Goldy Pond to be maybe the best part of the whole story and, while I'm not sure if I can necessarily agree, I do agree that it's an amazing part anyway. Not just for the cool action scenes and new lore we learn, but also just in terms of character development too and learning more about different characters and their motivations like learning who Yugo is and his history of being at Goldy Pond before and now having to go back and learning his lesson along the way, it just made for a really interesting and cool character. Not to mention Lucas joined them too and they now have two adults on their side too which made a lot of this even more exciting for what could happen next. And what does happen next is insane and pretty tragic again as well. Everyone tries to decide what to do now and Emma decides to go to this supposed demon god who helped create the promise that was made over 1000 years ago and make a new promise to hopefully keep everyone safe and go to the human world. So Emma, Ray, Don and Gilda decide to go to some place that they found in some books about this place that looks like a dragon's eye if you look at this in a certain way and  when they're there, Emma gets this vision where she's somehow with the demon god they're trying to find and he says that they need to find him for real if they really want to talk to him. They then decide to go to this town where demons live and they're able to disguise themselves as demons and they find this temple that has pictures on the ceilings to that tell them where something called the Seven Walls are and so they decide to go to this place and this is where the tragic stuff really begins because one of Peter Ratri's men, Andrew, finds them along with his men and they decide to just kill everyone and this leads to another super tense moment where they have to evade Andrew and his men while trying to escape and you grow to really hate this guy because he's basically trying to kill kids because he's a psychopath. Anyway, they manage to get out but then Yugo and Lucas decide to try to keep Andrew and his men distracted and give the kids a chance to escape even though they know they're most likely gonna die and then that leads to them trying to kill every last one of them but they get hit multiple times and they're dying but Yugo manages to get to a room full of gas tanks and he shoots them to try to kill Andrew. I dunno why, but even though I probably should have expected they would die, it was still surprising to see the two of them die considering how big they were to the other characters. Plus, after they die, it was nice to have that moment where Yugo imagined reuniting with his old friends again and then they both really die. This however doesn't kill Andrew yet and he goes on an absolutely insane rampage demanding the kids to surrender and die and he even does end up killing three of the kids and is about to kill the rest but then we get a really satisfying moment where a demon comes out and kills him. This then leads to the reveal of a bunch of new characters who are some older kids who were in farms as well until this Minerva guy was able to save them and they reveal that Minerva and them have been going around to the other farms to save all the kids. Stuff like this in a manga is the kinda stuff I absolutely love, where, when a specific character or group of characters show up and sorta help expand the world more and then they become super important. I've seen that be done in a lot of different ones and it's always great to see them to see more before the story goes into bigger plots. We sorta see more characters help grow the cast bigger. In the case of these new characters, they say that Minerva sent them to find them and take them back to their base. When they get there, they see it's a gigantic tree with a whole bunch of different kids there and Emma finally finds Minerva there who it turns out is actually Norman, he's been masquerading as Minerva for a while and has been helping as many kids as he can. This is another part that changes a whole bunch of new stuff going forward, not just because Norman is finally back, but because when Emma and Ray talk to him, they learn a whole lot more information about the state everything's in. For example, he explains the reason there's different kinds of demons, as in ones that act like humans and ones that animals, is because they evolve based on what they eat, that's why they were eating children all the time, because they have to keep eating to maintain it. Not just that, but there's also this town that Emma and the others were at before where the demons live and in that town, there lives a royal family of demons and this begins a long story where Norman decides to meet with some other demons who hate the higher ups of the demons because they're getting the better food, as in the human children they're eating, and they're left tiny pieces to survive by comparison and so Norman decides to pit both sides of the demons against each other to have them try to kill each other with an invasion and then once the majority of them are dead, Norman plans on killing the last few survivors with the other kids he's met. But, Emma has sorta begun to change because she realises that demons are like people in the sense that they eat to survive and get along with each other so Emma wants to try to create a world where every living creature can get along, especially since they already know demons like that with Sonju and Mujika. This then makes Ray talk about how Sonju and Mujika were not only very intelligent, but they also didn't eat humans and actually helped them. They go to try to tell Norman this but he apparently says that Mujika is some kind of special demon who's blood is able to make other demons be like her in the sense that they don't need to eat humans to keep their intelligence. This actually starts a super, super clever plot twist that revolve around the royalty trying to make it so this stops because they have Mujika's blood in them and that's why they're so intelligent but they like how they have a grasp over ruling all the other demons and so they make it so that they can keep that control by making so the demons recognise them as royalty even though Mujika's blood is what's making them this way. But then, this is where things get extremely insane because Norman sorta becomes a villain a small bit because he wants to kill Sonju and Mujika as a way to help cause the extinction of the demon race. Emma and Ray try to argue against this though and think there's a better way to go about it and think they can make it where no one dies because they think that if they can find this demon god that Emma saw briefly before, they can make a new promise and send the humans to the human world and the demons can stay alive in the demon world and so Norman gives them a time limit because he still wants to go through with his plan but says that if they can find him and make the promise, he'll leave everyone alone. But this is where a lot of things get really extreme because Norman decides to let them do that but also let Don and Gilda try to find Sonju and Mujika to protect them, but he's really trying to find and kill them with his gang that the others met and try to have them kill them. Not only that, but Norman has also manipulated the royalty into thinking demons who want to rebel and eat the children are the ones who were attacking the farms when it was really him the whole time and that's how he's going to have them attack each other. I'm not gonna lie, stuff like this and storytelling like this is what makes me love anime and manga so much. When they have plots that are being unfolded in so many genius ways that also get me really excited whenever I see them to see where they're going. Anyway, while Emma and Ray are off to find The Seven Walls, which is where the demon god is said to be, Don and Gilda are heading off to find Sonju and Mujika and the different demon armies are coming in close to each other and we get tossed around from different perspectives. A lot of other mangas do that a lot too and this is no different. My favourite stuff is honestly everything involving what Emma and Ray are doing because they go to where the demon god is supposed to be and when they find some huge door, they go through it and find themselves at Grace Field House but it's not the real one, it's some weird illusion version that the god has created as sort a test for them and when they go in, they find some versions of Isabella and the other kids who turn into skeletons and the demon god even talks to them and they go through a door that leads them some other version of the house and this part is honestly something that's super weird and I love it. It's almost kinda supposed to be like psychological horror where all sorts of different versions of rooms appear every time they open a door and it jsut keeps getting weirder and weirder until Emma eventually figures out what's going on and says the reason this is happening is because their thoughts are creating what their seeing and so they both sorta try to imagine meeting the god but only Emma is able to do it whereas Ray gets taken back to the shelter and so Emma is the only one who's able to go see him and while with him, she discusses about making a new promise. He says he's willing to grant her wish of bringing all the humans to the human world and have it where no one will ever be able to travel between the two again, and this scene ends with him saying he wants a reward in return but we don't get to see what it is and I remember constantly wondering what it was gonna be when I read it because from how things were going, it looked as though it could have been anything bad. This is when we then check back in with Norman's group because they're still following Don and Gilda while they're trying to find Sonju and Mujika and almost all of them are hoping to kill them as soon as possible since they hate what demons have done to them and so many others but one of them who's this quiet girl actually hates them because they killed a demon who she felt was her dad because he related to her and raised her because of a sense of similarity of people thinking they were ugly but then Norman's group killed him and now she wants revenge and so she tell Don and Gilda what's going on. They eventually find Sonju and Mujika but then Norman's group ambushes them but then one of them has this seizure that a lot of them have and Mujika tries to help them despite what they were just trying to do and this is when Don and Gilda realise what Norman was up to and realise what his plan was. This is what I meant by Norman sorta becoming a villain small bit because they realise he's trying to kill every single demon and so they start heading for the city where the demon royalty is and this is when Emma returns from meeting the demon god and all of them meet up to try to stop Norman because he's already attacking the royalty with the majority of them dead along with the rebels. So, Mujika tries to save as many of the demons as she can while Emma and Ray find Norman who acts like he's super proud of what he's done but Emma is able to get through to him by calling him out knowing what's really going on in his head despite Norman trying to put up a front and act like nothing's wrong until he eventually says he doesn't want to do this anymore. I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that. I mean, I guess it is kinda nice that he isn't just acting like a bloodthirsty crazy person and actually wants to do the right thing, but how it's done, I feel like maybe there was something else that could done for this moment. But it's not like it's a problem, it's still a nice moment that Emma, Norman and Ray are able to have together and Sonju and Mujika manage to get Mujika's blood into the demons but then the queen who Norman thought was dead isn't and starts turning into this monster because she's another super special demon who starts to eat all the corpses around her and we even get a cool reveal where it turns out that Sonju is actually her brother and this leads to another super cool moment where Mujika reveals that the queen is about to die since she's eaten a bunch of corpses that have Norman's poison in them and this means it's gonna kill her. I've heard some people say that was kind of an anticlimactic way to kill her, but I thought it was awesome and really well thought out, especially when we see her mutate and see faces of everyone she's ever eaten like Krone. This is then when everyone realises that the shelter where Norman had everything set up is being attacked and everyone there is being kidnapped and so Emma, Norman, Ray and the Norman's other small gang with them go to help them while Sonju and Mujika try to get everything under control in the town. They discover everyone is being taken back to Grace Field House and so they head back there to put an end to this. This is then when we finally get to see Peter Ratri as a villain because he says he wants to create these lambda farms, which are the worst kind of farms and is where Norman freed his gang, afetr Peter discovers the queen is dead and decides to be the king of everything, and everything that happens from this point onward just shows more and more how hateable he is because he tries to get so many people killed and tries to set the Moms to kill the kids too. We even get a really cool moment where when Emma, Ray and Norman return, they see Isabella and just glare up at her, but this is where a whole bunch of incredible moments happen because the kids manage to hold Peter at gunpoint and he thinks he's outsmarted all of them by thinking the Moms are on his side, especially Isabella, but then Isabella reveals that she managed to convince the other Moms to turn against him and she mentions how proud she is of the kids and so it looks like Peter is finally defeated. Not just that, but, at the demon town where Sonju and Mujika still are, they were taken down and were about to be executed by all the other demons, but then it's revealed that Leuvis survived Goldy Pond for the same reason as the queen and he sorta has a redemption where he tells the demons there that the only reason Mujika was being hunted is because the royalty said she was dangerous and he even takes a taste of her blood to prove it's not dangerous and tell them all the royalty's original plan to control them this way so they could stay in power. This helps them get everyone then be on their side and this is what really takes Peter down but then he believes thinking that if he kills Emma, things will go his way again. Emma then has a talk with him and tries to get through to him and make him stop this and be their friend but he doesn't believe this so he then kills himself. That's another small thing I don't know how I feel about it. For one, I was clearly glad he died after everything he did, but the whole thing overall just wasn't my favourite moment in the series. Maybe I would have liked it more if he died giving a small sacrifice and maybe that one moment would have been his one act of redemption, though maybe they didn't do that because of what's about to happen. So, Isabella and the other Moms try to say that they'll redeem themselves by staying in the demon world but then the children manage to convince them that if they want to redeem themselves, then to come with them to the human world and find redemption there. Again, that part there is stuff I don't entirely know what to think of because, I get that Isabella and the other Moms are the only parent figures they've ever known, but the whole thing is again done in a way where I feel maybe there should have been a bit more talking about it, but it was still a good moment anyway and it was nice to have Isabella and the other Moms have redemptions. They then reunite with Phil and other children under 5 years old and are about to go to the place in Grace Field that's supposed to take them to the human world, but then another demon who doesn't want to give up human meat tries to attack Emma but then Isabella jumps in front of her to save her and ends up getting killed and when another demon kills that one, all the kids try to help Isabella and this is what I meant a moment again about not having Peter sacrifice himself because Isabella does it here and I liked the moment. It's nice to have Isabella's last act be an act of kindness and caring and it was generally pretty sad to see her die but also nice that she got one last moment with the kids and they all realise that they've always loved her and seen her as a true mother to them. They all then go to the portal and Emma and Mujika even get a small nice moment as they say goodbye and this whole part just leaves us wondering what kind of deal did Emma make to the demon god because we still don't know what she offered him in return. When all the kids and other Moms get taken to the human world, they start celebrating but then they realise that Emma is gone and they get worried and start thinking that Emma got taken away for the promise to happen. They then meet some men and one of them says that he's Peter's uncle and they've known that they'd come and are now looking for everyone who's been brought there and everyone is worried where Emma could be so everyone decides to dedicate everything they have to find her. We then see that Emma appeared in some snowy mountain and is found by an old man who takes her to his house but when she wakes up she doesn't remember anything. It's pretty much here where we realise that what the demon god took from Emma were her memories and so doesn't remember a single thing about what's happened to her. We then cut to two years later where everyone is still trying to find Emma and she's still living with the old man and they're in a town one day but when Emma tries to find the necklace that Mujika gave her that she just dropped, she runs into all the other kids who were in the same town at the same time and they're incredibly happy to see her, but she says she doesn't know who any of them are and so they all realise that what she had to sacrifice were her memories and Norman has a nice moment with her where he tells her what they've been doing the last two years with being able to go to school and even the technology they have here has helped the lambda kids. They then decide to help her by having them all live together even if she'll never get her memories back, they're just glad to have her back in their lives and the series ends with all of them deciding to stay in one huge house together. So, yeah guys, that really is it. I know this review might have been different compared to other anime reviews I've done before because I was talking about the manga this time, but I couldn't help it, I just really wanted to talk about this. It's like I said at the start, I can't remember what it was that made me want to check this series out in the first place, but I'm so glad I did because I absolutely love this series, it's become one of my favourite manga series of all time now. I love how even though it's not the usual Shonen Jump storytelling you'd expect, it's still done the best way it could be done. I love how this is more of a fantasy horror story, which is something I'm not used to in Shonen Jump, but I love it for that anyway. A big part of why I love it is definitely because of the characters, I love them all. My favourite was probably Emma because of just how likeable she was. I love how she's very similar to other Shonen Jump protagonists, but still has her own unique aspects to make her stand out. I think I heard somewhere that some people didn't like how she wanted to save the demons after everything they did to her, but I didn't really mind, I thought it made sense with how they did it and I think it made her more likeable. But other characters like Norman, Ray, Yugo, Sonju, Mujika, Don, Gilda and everyone else are really likeable as well. And, really, I just can't get over just how well thought out this plot is. It's like I said, storytelling like this is why I love anime and manga so much, for just how amazingly stories like this are told. Kaiu Shirai did an amazing job writing this series and Posuka Demizu's artwork is incredible. It looks very different to other artists' works and how she does everything is really incredibly thought out in terms of her designs. The anime is also something where I don't really know what to make of it. I'm not even just talking about how poorly Season 2 was handled and what they did with that whole thing, even Season 1 is kinda weirdly put together. I dunno how to explain it, but something about the atmosphere of the anime and other things about it like the editing in it and things like that make the anime kinda weird. Not bad and, overall, the first season is good, I guess, but it's nowhere near as good as the manga because I personally do feel like this is an instance where you should stick to just the manga, but the anime does have some other good aspects to it too like the dub. Erica Mendez, Jeannie Tirado and Laura Stahl are all really good as Emma, Norman and Ray and everyone else does a good job too, but the anime isn't really something I'd want to go back to. In terms of the manga, I would absolutely want to go back to this multiple times, mainly thanks to the fact that the series is only 20 volumes long, but also the fact that I love it and would love to read it again multiple times. I really don't think I can recommend this series and I would totally say that this series is very underrated. I know people like this series and some even love it, but I don't think it gets enough attention. So, yeah guys, if you've never read this series before, I would highly recommend it big time. Like I said, this has honestly now become one of my favourite manga series ever and I really can't say enough good things about it. Even if you're not that much of a manga fan, I would still say you should check this out because there's some really amazing things in it, again, especially since it's not long at all. I was able to finish it really quickly myself. And, so, everyone, that's my review of The Promised Neverland. Thank you all for reading and please comment down below to tell me what you think.