Well, it's time to drop Made in Abyss.

Two years ago I fell in love with the world of this manga, I was charmed by premise of mysterious, cursed pit, the sense of adventure, beautiful backgrounds, cool looking monsters and coming to age story of young protagonists.

Even if Idofront arc was a bit of step down in terms of exploration, it fixed a major problem with early parts - lack of interesting and compelling characters.
Not only Bondrewd is by far the best written character in manga, but through the interactions with him main characters finally got some very much needed bits of development. Despite some minor flaws, this arc was a great finale to adventures in the known part of the Abyss, and full of excitement I was ready to see terra incognita.

Oh, how wrong I was.

The sense of adventure is gone, because characters had to stuck in the same closed place for more than 2 years and ending is nowhere to be seen. Instead of actual exploration there are massive walls of text or endless flashbacks after flashbacks.

Riko didn't get any development; after 7 volumes long adventures in gruesome, horrible hellhole she is still one-dimensional naive, pure kid. Reg is somewhat here, I guess. Remember how his entire motivation to delve into the Abyss was to learn about himself? In recent chapters he missed every opportunity to reach this goal. Why? There is no explanation for this, perhaps author just wanted to drag the story for the sake's of dragging it.
What happened with Nanachi is just pathetic. I wish author had some balls and gave her fulfilling, climatic death as he originally planned, but as long as characters are selling tons of merch, they are immortal.

Ah, I see, following Nanachi's popularity mangaka added another cute furry, but now with 100% more tits and nonexistent personality. The first thing this character did was attempt to get into Reg's pants and it was enough to make this pathetic fandom scream about "best girl".
To be fair, not all characters of this arc are this bad, but the most interesting ones are sidelined, while story focuses on glorified rehash of Nanachi and Mitty backstory.

The shock value lost any weight. It's always the same story about the same naive little girl, who got screwed by Evil Man. If you've seen Mitty's story in anime, you've seen everything this manga can offer. New cute loli appears, something bad happens to her, everyone is sad for a while. Rinse, repeat.
And let's be honest, no one would care about these characters and their tragedy, if it wasn't fo the moe art style and their young age.

I'm actually kind of sad, while writing this review. This manga introduced to me one of the best fictional worlds and my favorite villain, but it's such a letdown in every other aspect. The awful pacing, release "schedule" and weird writing successfully killed my interest.

I survived several months of a filler fight with random monster, one year of boring flashback and after almost three months of waiting I got 10 pages of another flashback. I'm not invested in Big Loli Drama pt. 3, I don't care if obnoxious newly introduced furrybait gonna survive or not (I wish not), or how main characters will plot armor their way to the bottom this time. Now I'm exhausted, bored and disappointed. Someone may say: "but it's all build up for great climax! be patient!", but I gave up. There are a lot of great stories out of there, where I don't need to wait half of a year for a small portion of not so entertaining anymore content or to turn a blind eye on creepy pedofanservice.

May be later I'll check how the things ended on Wikipedia article and i think so far it's the best way to "read" Made in Abyss, since my eyes wouldn't bleed from loli nipples, shota boners and piss jokes thrown every five pages.