Yuri Honjo was an ordinary high school girl who really appears to like her brother…a lot. But well, we don’t actually follow her school life despite her being in her school uniform. Instead, we find her watching a man get sliced in the head with a machete by a husky man in overalls wearing a mask.
And she has zero idea how any of this happened.
High-Rise Invasion, or Tenkuu Shinpan, is one of the last titles I believe a US publisher has licensed off of MangaBox. For a quick premier on MangaBox: it’s a service powered by DeNA that started in 2014, had a lot of titles, quickly fell off the map for plenty of reasons, and today, only has four titles left on the English service. High-Rise Invasion, one of the earliest titles, is still going on the app. I’m also still reading said manga.
That said, actually remembering what happened from that far back is a challenge, so picking this up in omnibus format from Seven Seas is almost a minor miracle. I say almost because I didn’t think anything could get licensed from MangaBox. And yet, Spoof on Titan and Love and Lies, which were also MangaBox titles, did get licensed. So far I believe it’s just these three that will remain licensed by an English publisher.
High-Rise Invasion pretty much has to build its story from the ground up, as we’re abruptly thrown into a strange world from Yuri’s perspective. That is, she was at school, stared out the window in class, saw something from afar, and immediately was transferred to an area where she saw a guy get killed. Now she’s desperately trying to survive the encounter, and even after doing that, she has to ascertain where she is, if anything works, and if she can even reach her family. The good news is she does at least reach her brother.
The bad news is he’s also in the same world she’s at.
Outside of the survival aspect and violence of people choosing to kill themselves rather than anyone wearing a mask killing them, I completely forgot how obsessed Yuri is with her brother. Maybe more obsessed than I realized. At pretty much every sign of trouble she thinks about her brother for most of this omnibus. And at the one moment where, after she encounters a head dripping blood off a table in a room and decides she can’t take this world anymore, she drops her student ID and remembers there’s a picture of her brother in it. That brief moment saves her as a helicopter flies by her, which gives her a new goal to get on it and get out of here.
A survival series being complex isn’t always good, considering this one wants to come up with humans doing vile things they’d never consider doing in real life. But unlike most survival series, there’s no game or stated reason on why they chose these people to be the survivors or the ones that have to wear masks in this one. The world is interesting from just a rules standpoint — what are they, who’s the mastermind behind this, etc. And then how exactly does Yuri manage to overcome all of that and meet with her brother?
Well, I already know that, but we’re a bit away from getting there in print form. This volume contains 34 of the currently 251 chapters, and the chapters are pretty brief. It’s also uncensored. Now, if you read MangaBox back in its earlier stages, it was unedited. At some point during its run, someone told the developers to censor it. So you’ll get all of the panty shots that happen due to being attacked by a mask from Yuri, and someone will be happy about that.
The characters are pretty simple, but ultimately change as their mindset begins to get warped by this world — like Yuri, who goes from obviously freaked out girl to determined to do whatever it takes to kill those masks — but she does do her best not to try and compromise on her morals. That’s how she’s able to befriend another character in this manga…which is interesting because that character let the world affect their actions. Other character do show up, but they…let’s just say they don’t last long, unfortunately.
Between that and the art, High-Rise Invasion manages to be a compelling read. In print form? It’s pretty nice. Just be warned though — between its violence, the world being set up to force people to jump off a building or get killed by a mask, and some of the sexual situations with Yuri (some are tame, the one with the policeman is not since it involves forcing her to strip, though it doesn’t get too far), it can be a turn off.