Luca and Abel are still at a government facility far from home and, while the official line is that they are there to help with constructing it, neither of them believe for a second that these series of events have such a benign purpose. As the official government graineliers prove them right, concocting food and drinks that are harmless to humans but fatal to plants, or humans who have ingested seeds, the two of them begin to panic and act in completely different directions.
The first installment in this new series felt a bit disjointed, as if Rihito Takarai wasn’t sure if they wanted a more episodic series or one that was more centrally plot-focused, and that disjointed feeling continues in Graineliers volume 2. The characters continue to act as if they are being manipulated and dragged about by Takari, not as if they are independently responding to the conflicts they face, and so easily being able to see the “strings” manipulating the characters makes any sort of buy-in for the story difficult. This is true of the plot itself as well, as it still curiously enough feels as if it’s meandering and winding its way into some kind of conflict but as if it just can’t commit to anything yet. It seems that Takari is planning to have a “best friends must war against each other because they believe it’s the only way to save each other” plot, given that Luca has ended up with the mysterious graineliers and Abel is becoming involved in a resistance movement against them, but this is a hard plot to pull off convincingly even in a well-written story since it relies so heavily on a lack of communication and hot-headed characters. At this point I can believe that Abel would go to extreme lengths to try and keep Luca safe but it’s hard to believe that Luca would join the graineliers to do the same.
I would also like to say that in my first review I posited that a young girl from the first volume might also be an important character, since she was shown with Luca on a chapter title page, but I am reconsidering that theory for two reasons now. The first one is that she, quite simply, does not appear in this volume at all and the second is because that chapter title pages don’t seem to have any relation to the main story at all. Plenty of manga-ka use the chapter title pages as an excuse to just draw fun art with their characters, like how the chapter title pages of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle didn’t always match the situation at hand. But now several of the chapter title pages for Grainelieres show Luca and Able wearing what appear to be graineliers uniforms and happily going about their day, something that seems unlikely to happen given recent events in this volume.
Fans of this series may need to wait a while to find out if Luca and Able do join the graineliers however. Only two volumes of this manga are currently out in Japan and yet it looks as if there are enough chapters for at least one, possibly two, more volumes (although I am told that the more recent chapters are very short) and this volume was originally released in Japan on April 27, 2016. Perhaps the meandering plot and ungrounded characters are a sign that Takari is in fact unsure of where to take the story next, although at this point I don’t believe I will be sticking around any longer to find out.