Eiji is your typical shy college student trying to find himself, get a pretty girlfriend and cruise through life with no issues. Unfortunately his father was a brutal serial killer that left a stain on his family that follows him around everywhere he goes, and the emergence of a split personality with dark and violent tendencies gets him wrapped up in a murderous conspiracy where his dangerous alter ego seems to be his own worst enemy. Is he doomed to involuntarily follow in his disgraced father’s footsteps?
I thought this series would be a bit predictable considering I’ve seen this type of horror thriller before, but it ended up throwing dozens of unexpected twists at me, none of them being what I predicted given the premise. The truth behind both of Eiji’s personalities ended up being more twisted and complex than I had originally imagined.
What really won me over with this series is how unexpectedly complex and multilayered the entire cast of side characters ended up being. At first, the side characters all seem very simplistic and forgettable with one dimensional character tropes, but almost every single side character ends up having dark secrets of their own that are even more insane than those of the protagonist. Hardly anyone in this story is completely innocent, everyone is involved in the mass murder conspiracy in some way or another and the puzzle keeps getting bigger and bigger until the very end where everything is finally pieced together.
Don’t be deceived by the predictable opening with familiar psychological horror cliches. The series gets more intense, unpredictable and challenging to figure out the longer it goes on and the payoff at the end hits really hard. Eiji is a tragic character that’s easy to hate at times but incredibly sympathetic, the side characters all have fascinating subplots of their own as well. It has a slow build up but gets significantly better with each volume.