Theprogressiveowl
Imagine if the king of scavengers was 6 and a half feet tall, bipedal, and had a bone to pick with humanity.
It’s said you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I freely admit I picked up テラフォーマーズ(Terra Formars(“Terra for Mars” get it?)) based solely on the cover art – and I didn’t regret it. Terra Formars is an ongoing science fiction manga about the never-ending struggle for supremacy between humans and cockroaches, and it’s pretty awesome.
Nearly 600 years in the future, humanity has looked to its neighbor, Mars, to serve as a second home for the ever-increasing population. In order to make the red planet hospitable for humans, 2 specimens are sent for a long-term terraforming project – a special moss and cockroaches.
In the year 2557, a team of 6 astronauts are sent to Mars to survey and capture a cockroach sample to see how they have evolved over the years, and find out why every probe they have sent has ceased transmitting. There they find that the cockroaches – called “terraformers” – have undergone a dramatic evolution over the generations, becoming 6 and a half feet tall, while retaining most of the qualities that make cockroaches so damn hard to kill – and they instinctively hate humans.
In the year 2599, after the massacre of the first Mars survey team, a second ship, the BUGS 2, is sent to Mars with a crew of 15 on a mission to eradicate the evolved cockroaches. Unlike the previous failed mission, the members of the BUGS 2 have undergone a special operation to give them the ability to fight the terraformers: The abilities of other bugs.
traight up, Terra Formars is high-octane entertainment – lots of cool action and captivating plot twists out of nowhere. Right from the start, once the first cockroach is encountered, the manga picks up and doesn’t stop, and it’s a Hell of an entertaining ride.
That said, it’s also fairly formulaic. The events of a battle could probably be mapped with a flow chart. What makes Terra Formars interesting is the bug ability plot mechanic.
Terra Formars asks the reader to suspend their disbelief and imagine what the abilities of a bug would be like if they were blown up to human size – an ant can lift 100 times its weight, so a human with ant powers can lift 100 times his weight. Physics be damned, it’s actually a lot of fun. This scaling up of bug abilities is also what makes the adversary terraformers a genuinely threatening and scary foe.
Boiled down to the essentials, Terra Formars is like as though the author watched Red Planet and read a lot of articles like this one.TerraFormars is very plot-driven. I often talk about plot-driven versus character-driven stories and I admit that I have a bias in believing that character driven stories are more engaging. Even so, plot-driven as it is, Terra Formars manages to be entertaining and generally a whole lot of fun.
Terra Formars’ biggest flaw is most likely in its formulaic layout of battle events, but don’t let that deter you. If you like suspenseful science fiction action where no one – not even the main characters – is safe, and you enjoy a sprinkling of trivial knowledge throughout, this is well worth a read.