The anime adaptation of Made in Abyss last year took everyone by surprise, coming from nowhere with a surprisingly original and dark story, amidst the usual myriad of cute girls and isekai anime you get every season, including a, uh…horse girl. Judging from the anime, it's easy to be misled that the manga will be just as good, but Made in Abyss is one of those few examples where the adaptation improves on the source material.

Of course, the story itself isn't the problem, since the anime is almost a panel by panel adaptation of the manga (and for me, the small changes were for the best). However, each medium has its own sets of rules and demands for storytelling: when adapting, you can never tell the same story twice. That's why so many adaptations suffer from constant comparisons to their source material: because they are way too concerned with just telling the story without first adapting it to a whole new medium. That's why The Tatami Galaxy would never have worked as your usual ~~school~~ college anime with a Groundhog Day twist: not even Morimi's delightfully fast-paced prose could have saved another Endless Eight. That's why Houseki no Kuni worked: because they didn't just mimic the manga's minimalist art, they added their own touches and cinematographic techniques.

And finally, that's why Kinema Citrus' anime succeeds: because it takes a manga that is not so sure of what it wants to do, and turns it into an immersive and interesting adventure fantasy story. The manga is already pretty cinematic, so that moving pictures and a great, unique soundtrack managed to create a completely different feel to it, is quite the feat.
That's a bold statement, so if you are here already, before picking up your rakes and rifles, bear with me.

First off, the arcs covered by the anime are not too bad. They are pretty much the same, with some short scenes added for a more fluid storytelling and a mostly filler episode that didn't add much to it except for dramatic tension, but wasn't bad. The problem with this is that the anime does a much better job at telling the story than the manga — granted, most credits going to the fantastic soundtrack — and so, until chapter 26, I was stuck with the same story that I thoroughly enjoyed in the anime, but that fell completely flat when I read it.
Tsukushi's art is impressive, both in its details and creativity, but it's not enough to carry the story alone like Blame!'s or Akira's art, and reading it didn't really add much to the experience of immersing myself in the adventure. Without the soundtrack, I realized, there wasn't much to drag me into that fantastic world which, suddenly, seemed not so fantastic anymore, and emptier. The abyss is constantly labeled by the characters to be extremely dangerous and threatening, yet, if you stop to put things on a balance for a sec, the most threatening stuff until now came less from what crawls in the abyss and more from psychotic humans living in its depths. The incident with the Tamaugachi does weigh for the abyss side, but just barely. Now, while complex worldbuilding in detriment of story is not ideal, it begs the question: what's the point of creating a whole new world, sectioned in several literal layers, to the extent of defining its fauna and flora, if you are gonna linger but briefly in each of them, and for the two layers that they remained longer, spend most of the time indoors? It's almost as if the author created the world first, but didn't think about the plot very thoroughly. It's the kind of masturbatory worldbuilding that does nothing in the matter of weaving a good story. Both the manga and the anime commit the sin of being rushed, but in the latter, it is at least less apparent.
For the characters…well, they weren't cardboards, but they weren't very fleshed out either. Riko and Regu aren't terrible, but they feel more like reasons for the plot to move along than the reason why the plot moves. I might burn myself for saying this, but, while the relationship between Nanachi and Mitty was decently played out, I feel like it manipulates us a little to feel moved. Don't get me wrong, the anime did wonders of distilling the most brutal and sentimental aspects of those more gritty scenes...but, in the end, why did I care about those characters? It wasn't because they were well written, interesting characters, but because they were kids suddenly ripped from safety and thrown into a inhospitable, ruthless world. It's an old formula, and no matter how many times it is played out, it still works. No matter the hard times they face, those characters stay essentially the same, never seeming to be significantly changed in any way, which kinda nullifies their hardships; after a while, I stopped caring altogether: which is why what I'll deal with in the next paragraph does not work (I will talk a bit later about the other characters).

Now, I know this horse has been more than beaten to death already, and maybe nothing I say will add much to the topic, but still, this is a review and I have to say it.
Yes, it's about those scenes. The controversial stuff. Anyway, I will keep it short ~~(I failed).~~
Some have argued that they add depth and realism to the story, since, you know, they are in that age. As you might have guessed, I fundamentally disagree with that, not because it was creepy or anything (which it was — but I'm not delving into it), but because of the way the author chose to present those themes.
If an author actually wanted to work with the early awakening of sexuality in a relevant and serious way, there's a handful of ways they could deal with that, but none of them involve turning it into a joke everytime the subject matter is brought up, without ever making any significant impact on the story or characters. It would take one hell of a good writer to fool the whole audience and make that work. Which, by the way, didn't.
Because, honestly, I can't even begin to conjecture how anyone could rationally convince someone else that a 12yo girl being tied up in a bondage style as punishment added anything worthwhile to the story, and wasn't just a gag or ~~GOD FORBID~~ fanservice. If anything, it just works to show that the adults of that world are profoundly troubled and arguably insane, but not in a credible, interesting way, but just as a means to vent the author's own probable fetishs. And honestly, denying so is just being extremely naive, as the manga is filled with borderline fetishist scenes.
It's the old dilemma that comic books solved two decades ago after the dark decade that was the 90s, but still sneaks and finds its way into pop culture: that adding grittiness, blood, and sex makes something mature, or even deep. It doesn't. And while it didn't ruin the story, it certainly left a sour taste in my mouth, and made me not so thrilled anymore with it.

And presently, the manga is already two arcs after what the anime covered. I overextended myself way too much already, so I will just make a quick comment on what was probably my biggest disappointment in the manga: Bondrewd. Yes, the bad guy who did bad things in a short cameo in the anime, but was enough for everyone to hate the guy's guts.
When Ozen appeared on the anime, she immediately became my favorite thing from it. She has the same problem of not being a well fleshed character, but still, when everyone's unremarkable, someone with such a strong presence and odd demeanour catches my eye, and she is at least given some reasoning for acting the way she did.
Bondrewd, however, isn't given anything. He's the epitome of evil for the sake of being evil; someone so twisted by the so called madness those who linger for too long on the abyss acquire, in the guise of a mad doctor (and I swear I can almost picture him screaming I AM A VISIONARY MWAHAHAHA in an english or german accent), that instead of being terrifying and remarkable like Ozen, it turns him into just someone that just tries too hard to be unsettling and imposing, but in the end feels like a terrible James Bond villain. The author even tries to pull another

Spoiler, click to view

mitty, with a character that gets introduced and butchered into a car battery way too fast for me to care

to make us hate Bondrewd even more, but it's just not effective.

But who knows, maybe all of that will be, again, improved on the second season. There certainly is potential there, specially with the awesome battle scenes this section of the manga has, but well, let's wait and see. I don't have much to say about the present arc, but it's been mildly interesting, so I'll until the conclusion to formulate any opinion on it.