This is a spoiler-free review :)

When I started reading Bokurano, I really wasn’t expecting much. But by the time I finished the first volume, I knew that I was in for one hell of an emotionally devastating ride.

Story
Bokurano, written and illustrated by Mohiroh Kitoh, is a series that goes in depth about acceptance, despair, revenge, life’s value, and more, but its premise is pretty simple. One day, a bunch of middle school teenagers come across a random stranger, and he offers them a chance to play an exciting new real life game. The kids all take turns riding an enormous and powerful 500m tall robot later called Zearth that can shoot lasers from everywhere on its body, and the goal is to use it to protect the planet from enormous alien monsters. Yup, the planet’s actually at stake in this “game”.

The story doesn’t focus just on the deep, heavy, and complex themes I mentioned about earlier, but the twists and turns of the story provide plenty of gut-punching moments and events that make you HURT. As we move further and further into the manga, we see that not all fights are the same, as we can see from how different each Zearth pilot is and how differently each enemy alien fights. As time goes on, the plot thickens and thickens, more and more people get involved, and the feels just keep on hurting. I won’t say much more, but at the time of writing this review, it’s been one day since I finished reading, and I still feel wrecked.Characters As we know, all these kids have to fight the aliens to protect their home and their loved ones, but what really makes this story shine is how much depth and uniqueness Kitoh added to each of these kids’ backgrounds, outlooks, and the way they handle the enormous responsibility they have to protect the lives of around 7 billion people. One by one, we go through the whole group of 15 kids. We learn so much about these characters and their thoughts, burdened as they are with such a heavy responsibility. Each character’s story is varied and interesting; from heartwarming, to disturbing, to sad, and so forth.

Each arc is always different from the last, and every time we finish an arc, we think “man, this kid’s arc was so good, there’s no way this one’s gonna be as good”, and the next kid does just that. Because of how great each arc ends though, it is pretty easy to get burned out because of how high each character sets the bar, (although this might just be a ‘me’ problem). With each of these characters’ arcs having so many great themes attached, combined with the twist and turns of the plot we get a tragic, yet amazing story.

Art When the story focuses on humans, the art is pretty average. Not groundbreaking, not terrible. But when Kitoh wants to put in effort on a shot with landscapes, the giant Zearth and his well-designed aliens, it’s really good In the end, the art gives more than enough compliment to this tragic and heart-twisting story. I have zero complaints about it.

So, long story short, it’s great. I’m aware that there are people out there who don’t like these kinds of emotionally-heavy stories, and, after finishing Bokurano, I can’t exactly blame them. If you don’t like stories that pull your heart out and twist it 5 times, this isn’t really for you. But don’t get me wrong, the fact that this manga shook me so much that I still feel it a day after finishing it only proves its genius.