Note: This review have minor spoilers

The Promised Neverland, a series written by Kaiu Shirai and Illustrated by Posuka Demizu, without a doubt, has one of the best and most unique concepts I have ever seen in manga, however, It's also one of my biggest disappointments of the year, to see one of the most promising manga serires roll straight downhill.

Story/Writing 3/10

TPN did really well at the start, the first arc is by far the best arc in the whole series showing constant mindgames between Isabella and the children of the orphanage while they were planning their escape. It felt very thrilling, mysterious and also very intense at the same time. The setting of this arc is also one the reasons of why this arc is so great, as chapters go by, you grow more and more familiar with Gracefield, the place really grow an ominous aura and you can feel that as you go through the story.

After the fist arc, the story took a different approach, now the priority is the survival of the children in the forest and the search for a mysterious entity and I certaintly enjoyed how there was a new major element of discovery on the table, the progress was still very solid in the Goldy Pond arc but it started to feel very repetitive sometimes

Past the Goldy Pond arc, the series really started to fall apart. The Promised Neverland has it's merits and redeeming qualities, it explores a small range of things that other mangas couldn't but at this point of the story I really started to miss all the things that made the start of the series so good because it started to lack in several ways.

Every twist felt meaningless and unnecessary, the writing got really lazy, the cliffhangers were bad and on top of all that, the final chapters were completely rushed and the ending is one of the laziest tihngs I've ever seen. All the details were gone, there were no mindgames whatsoever, there was no world development whatsoever and there is no redeeming qualities to the ending whatsoever since Shirai just made a poor excuse to close everything up instead of tying the plot knots to make at least a decent/interesting ending.

Art 9/10

The art is one of the major redeeming qualities for TPN. Character design is on point, all the cover arts are outstanding with gorgeous color schemes, all the locations are very well put together especially Gracefield, which in my opinion is the best place in terms of art. There's almost no inconsistencies with the art, It's very good and expressive

Overall, it's one the things I enjoy the most in TPN.

Characters 5/10

At first the main trio was very interesting we've got Emma, the highly optimistic girl, we've also got the boys, Norman and Ray, the two incredibly intelligent and smart and they were the 3 heads of the escape plan alongside Don and Gilda which are good characters too. The villan in Isabella is a very well written one aswell, the one responsible for all the children in Gracefield.

The characters were very well written and set up from the start and at the end of the first arc you had an amazing and unique cast, however, as the story goes, the writing just gets lazier and lazier and with it, a stupid amount of characterization for future characters that appear along the way on the Goldy Pond arc is just thrown out of the window, there are very few characters that are well written like the ones that firstly appeared in the escape arc. All the antagonists, with the only exception being Isabella, are very underwritten and uninteresting. The main characters ran into some major inconsistencies aswell and the best two examples of that being Emma, that simply couldn't change and evolve despite all that happens in Goldy Pond and Norman which goes on the contrary direction and becomes one the most unlikable characters in the whole series.

Enjoyment 4/10

The enjoyment of the first half was a solid 9 for me but a 2 at the end because of all the writing issues that started to show up every single chapter which led to the plot being very bad, the characters being poorly explored and the end being a one the most frustrating. At the end of the day, The Promised Neverland is a huge pile of wasted potential

Overall 5/10