This volume marks the beginning of "season two" of Magical Girl Apocalypse, and...well, I guess nobody can accuse Sato of just giving us more of the same. Whether that's a good thing or not remains to be seen, but I don't feel that it's off to a strong start. I'll try to cover the major points without going into spoilers.
So, we've fast-forwarded to the year 2030, and the world is an entirely different place. It's also populated with a lot of entirely different characters. Several familiar faces do eventually show up, and it's interesting to see where they've ended up after all these years, but it almost feels like most of them have forgotten all about magical girls, witches, and the apocalypse. Many of them are just going about fairly normal lives, and when they're presented with evidence of magical girls, or people with strange powers, they act like they've never heard of anything like this before. It's really jarring, and I don't know if it's indicative of some sort of actual amnesia, or just sloppy writing.
The plot feels like a rejected Resident Evil script. The Wahre Liebe Pharmaceutical Company takes the place of the Umbrella Corporation, there's a serum made from magical girl blood instead of the T-Virus, and instead of zombies, there's...something I can't really talk about because of spoilers. But it doesn't feel like it fits, at all with anything that was built up throughout "season one." It's like...I don't know, after all the cool, retro X-Files stuff of the first season of Stranger Things, the second season took place in the modern day, with Greek gods running around or something. It's a complete thematic and tonal shift, and it would take a lot of narrative gymnastics to try and tie everything together.
Better example: the Image Comics series, Haunt. The original concept essentially boils down to: "The hero is a supernatural secret agent." Then the creative team changed, and overnight, the entire series flew off the deep end. All of a sudden, the hero can't control his powers, the secret agency he worked with is nowhere to be found, and instead of fighting criminal cartels and other mostly-human threats, there's some kind of insect cult that controls fire golems or something. It didn't even feel like the same series anymore, and it didn't survive long enough after that, for anything to get explained. And despite there not being any passing of the creative torch with Magical Girl Apocalypse, I'm worried we might be looking at a similar sort of downward spiral here. The only question is whether or not I'll stick with this on good faith as long as I stuck with Haunt. Right now, I honestly don't know.