Kenji and his friends regroup as Dec 31st 2000 approaches. Giving his friends option to step back and survive they all decide to go with the Kenji. And then deadly night begins, giant mechanical creature shows up and starts demolishing Tokyo.

Art as always is excellent.

Highly recommended. ( )

This series is still incredibly good, and I'd consider it one of my favorite manga series thus far.

It also kind of got pretty political at the end, particularly with the Friends passing a "youth development ordinance" that lets them censor and jail manga writers who write work people in the government don't like. It's particularly prophetic considering the push for expansions to the scope of the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youths in 2003, two years after this volume was published in Japan. ( )

What? What? What just happened here? We get the full setup and the opening of the final battle... and then...

Dab in the middle of the volume, 14 years passed. Wow. Didn't expect that. Guess that's why I considered this a mystery. It's not so much a who-done-it as a what the hell just happened.

Did I mention that it worked for me? It takes one hell of a writer to pull this kind of stunt off, and he did, gloriously, and now that chubby little baby has turned into one hell of a spitfire. Even the short detective sequence early in the manga feeds brilliantly into his grandson taking the stage. I'm left reeling and giddy at all the turns. The writing is fantastic. ( )

Quinto volume (de 22) da saga de Naoki Urasawa.