SINoALICE 01

SINoALICE #1

by Yoko Taro, Takuto Aoki, jino (Designer)

Everything about Alice—her family, her friends, her life, even her crush—is ordinary, no Wonderland to see here. But lately, her dreams have been anything but ordinary. While asleep, she finds herself interrogated by two creepy marionettes, their glass eyes peering into the darkest corners of her heart. “What is it you desire?” “What is it you wish to visit upon the world?”

Try as she might to ignore the dreams, Alice is drawn into their violent, twisted universe. As greed and desire begin to warp the ordinary reality she knows, Alice is thrust into a dark game of slaughter made for fairy-tale heroines who’ll stop at nothing to bring their creators back to life!

Genres: Manga, Horror, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Thriller, Paranormal

192 pages, Paperback

First published June 14, 2022

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise for this is fantastic-a fairy tale, Alice in Wonderland inspired battle royale. The execution, however, left a lot to be desired. I realize this was originally a video game, but supposedly the story is intended to stand alone. I'm not sure it did that very well, at least not in this volume, because it was extremely confusing. Part of this is intentional, I believe, and is meant to be a reflection of Alice's mindset, but if I had read this without reading the synopsis, I would still have no idea of the plot by the end of the volume. There were also a few things that really didn't sit well with me. There was a subplot about a high school teacher sleeping with several of his students that made me uncomfortable, as well as multiple scenes of "upskirting" that were completely gratuitous. It's odd, but I think my favorite part of this was actually the bonus prose short story at the end. It was only there that I began to get some answers. I don't know if I'll read the next volume. There was a lot that I didn't like, but I may still be curious enough to give it one more attempt.

[Anani Rodriguez · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t really expect that, it was all of sudden but it was kind of okay🤷‍♀️ but idk, it was anew thing for me.

[Jurnee Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one is a little hard to follow, but had an interesting premise. I think it could improve as we get farther along in the story. I will likely give the next volume a try to see how I like it moving forward.

[FaDoug · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before I really go into the first volume of "SINoALICE", I want to talk about the game that's it's based off of.

"SINoALICE" was a mobile game that featured, easily, one of my favorite narrative concepts of any mobile game ever. And hell, it's such a cool idea it might be one of my favorite ideas *in general*! "SINoALICE"'s main concept was that two weird little puppet things were hosting a big competition that allowed for characters from fairy tales and other stories to fight through monsters and other fairy tale characters for a chance to meet their authors and change some aspect of their narrative. It's an incredibly post-modern concept and one that I love *A LOT*. The idea of having characters reflect on their own stories, and try to forcefully change it to fit their own wishes is incredibly captivating, and it's what made me keep playing in the first place.

All of the characters wished for some sort of inverse or reverse of their narratives in some way too, because they were all a little bit twisted in some way. For instance, Pinocchio just wanted to have someone else live his life for him so he didn't have to make any more decisions that would get him in trouble. And Red Riding Hood loved killing the Big Bad Wolf so much that she wanted her story to be about killing things all the time. My personal favorite was Cinderella, who wanted to meet her author just to kill him for making her suffer so much abuse at the hands of her step-family. These were all narratives that add an extra layer of darkness and remorse to the already grimdark narratives, and it's what fully kept me engaged with the game originally for months.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same about the gameplay. It was the usual Free-To-play mobile game gacha garbage that got overly grindy and boring after the first hour of playing. This, sadly, was the reason I stopped playing for a while. And when I finally found the will to give it another try, the game had been shut down. "SINoALICE" can no longer be played in any capacity. You can't experience its really cool narrative outside of maybe cutscene compilations on YouTube. What a shame.

But hey! That's why we have this manga! Which is why I was so excited to give this a try! Maybe I'd finally be able to see the full narrative that I had missed out on! I'd finally be able to see everything I missed! I'd be able to gorge myself more into this world that I loved! I was so excited!

And...that excitement was immediately snuffed.

I have no idea what the hell is even going on in the first volume of the "SINoALICE" manga. The characters who were explicitly the characters from fairly tales in the game were now high school girls? And now the puppets have to be accessed from apps and keychains? And nobody seems to even acknowledge anything...? Man, I was stumped.

My assumption is that this either takes place in some reality after the narrative of the game had ended, and that this is the result of someone's narrative changing wish. Or maybe the story from the game is leaking out into the real world and taking over real people's lives. Or...maybe it just has nothing to do with the game at all outside of character usage, which is...weird, but kinda cool....in a Yoko Taro kind of way.

It's weird because the characters are all still accurate to who they were in the game. Red Riding Hood is a psychopath, and Pinocchio is someone who lets others control his life. It doesn't feel like this was some half assed measure that didn't respect the source material, but it also...doesn't feel like the source material. The *main thing* that I liked about the source material, the concept of popular fairy tale characters trying to change their own fairy tales, is not present. It might as well just not be a "SINoALICE" manga at all.

But then again, I don't know where this is going. The purposeful usage of the black boxes around characters' names makes me think the story is going to have some big reveal later on, and that's at least got me a little interested. And I also like how overly gory and violent this is. But aside from that, there really isn't anything too interesting keeping me here.

And lastly, I'll just comment on some of the...more unsavory aspects of the narrative here. The weird sex stuff is...uncomfortable at best. The story switches between annoying panty shots and a story of sexual abuse, which don't really mix all that well at all. I wouldn't go as far as to say that it doesn't belong in "SINoALICE", the original game dug into some uncomfortable sexual topics as well. Princess Kaguya's whole thing was that she wanted someone to violently dominate her after all. It *can* work, but I think its execution here is...distasteful.

Overall, I want to see where this story goes, but I don't think it's going to get anywhere close to what I came to love about the game this manga is based on. God, I wish there was a way to experience that narrative for real again...

[Lizzie (TwoFaceLizzie) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Très beaux dessins, mais histoire un peu incompréhensible et trop de combat-culotte (et les combats-culotte, on en a marre depuis 2005).

[Maxime Facon Lisiak · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 étoiles pour le dessin c'est tout

[TiAnna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was introduced to SINoALICE through the mobile game several years ago and found the story of the mobile title fairly interesting. As a mobile gacha game the story was never particularly deep, especially because it was split between so many different characters and I was more invested in the special events the game would have. Eventually I stopped playing because the game was eating up data on my phone, so when I saw this manga on the shelves of my favorite book store, I was excited to pick it up and get reacquainted with the characters and the Library setting from the game. I didn't get what I expected, which is both a good and bad thing. The story of this manga is definitely intriguing. I read it all within an hour, so there's enough intrigue to interest readers who are already familiar with what SINoALICE is, but there are aspects of this manga that I'm not a fan of. My main gripes have to do with some of the choices in the art. Certain scenes are hard to make sense of simply because there's an over-abundance of gore in some panels and that makes it difficult to determine exactly what happened in this manga's climax. Additionally, even though there is an explicit content warning (which I missed btw, but it is there) there are too many instances where the art goes in a lewd direction. Initially the purpose of that aspect of the art is to show a particular plot point that's integral to Alice's story, but then the more explicit art keeps going after that in random ways, and that was irritating as well as nonsensical. It adds nothing to the story and knocked what could have been a 4 star read to a 3 star read for me. The story is good enough to survive these issues though. There's even an additional short story included in a text format that's highly interesting and provides some answers the manga proper didn't get into. As someone who is already familiar with SINoALICE, this manga was fine. I expected something better, but for what it is, I'm not too disappointed. I don't think I would recommend this manga to people who haven't encountered Yoko Taro's work in the past, but someone who already likes the phone game should like this fine. This manga was interesting enough that I plan to read the next volume, but I hope the more negative aspects that I have problems with are toned down.

[Mjhancock · Rating 3 out of 5]

After a strange dream, Alice wakes up to find a brutally violent act has occurred in her family home. She is attacked and rescued, but it's not certain whether the new location is any safer.

That's basically the entire volume; the scenes of violence and the dream are given a lot of space, which makes the volume feel a bit brief and disjointed. You can put together a very broad idea of what this story is, but it's pretty much guesswork at this point. What seems to be happening is that Alice is somehow in touch with alternate reality versions of herself, connected through strange sets of dolls. Her friend Snow also has these alternate reality connections. And when one of the alt-Alice or alt-Snows desire something strongly enough, or kill an alternate version of themselves, they power up. So we get a prolonged scene where an Alt-Alice feels like she's just drifting through life while her best friend Snow has an affair with the teacher Alice has a crush on, and another scene where a Snow(?) seems to have murdered actual protagonist Alice's family.

I didn't know going into this that it's based on a mobile game, or that it's the brainchild of Yoko Taro, the Japanese designer behind games like Nier. It makes sense; it has a lot of the kinds of tropes he tends to draw on, including odd approaches to the multiverse, heavy violence, weird sexual elements, and meta-gamelike structures. If anything convinced me to check out another volume, it would be to explore it as an adaptation; I was most narratively invested in the dream part, and that seems done with. There's just not enough of the other half for it to make much impact. Otherwise, I can't say I enjoyed it much--the sexualized elements are a bit off-putting, as is the drawn out violence.

[Morgast · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't know that this manga is based on a mobile game but apparently that doesn't matter all that much - apparently the creator said that this story isn't connected to the one in the game? Which makes a limited amount of sense to me, but I can see why they did it.
It doesn't really stand out to me storywise but I don't mind terribly. It's just the character design that personally irks me because the characters have, as is often the case, very little to do with their fairytale counterparts. But I suppose that's on me because I love fairytale reimageinings so goddamn much and am very picky about them, especially if they barely have anything in common with the original.
I kind of liked Alice for her apathy because I could relate to it and because it seemed like an interesting basis for a protagonist. The other characters not so much - Red Riding Hood was an annoying "iNsAnE pSyChO" brat and Snow White already seems like she's gonna be a stuck-up, self-righteous pain in the ass.
The fight scenes were terribly confusing which probably had to do with the overabundance of details and high contrast. I honestly mostly skipped them, they weren't that interesting anyway.
Apart from that, the story was also somewhat confusing and I only managed to grasp it a little better after researching the game this manga is based on.

I like battle royale managas though. I might check out the second volume.

[Rebeca F. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This reading was really weird to me. I've always been interested in the game, but haven't gotten around to play it because I'm busy enough with Reincarnation, so I'm waiting until that one is finished (which can pretty much take forever) to sink my teeth into SinoAlice. I'm interested in it because I know Yoko Taro's involved, even if it's just tangentially, and the title was done by a team of fans of his work, but also because I like the story and characters.
I saw the manga was finally released and Yoko Taro is shown as the author, so I got it right away and was really disturbed by the violence and sexualization of it. The premise's pretty interesting and the art and dialogues are cool, but damn, that first volume was hard. This is why I always feel it's really challenging to adapt video games to other formats and why I'm a bit frightened about Automata's anime, even if so far it seems stunning.

[seacat · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐3.5

I am absolutely in love with these characters and could gush about my girl Cinderella for hours. Sadly, as much as I would want to give this a higher rating... I can't.

By no means is it bad! It has only a 3 star because the story is written in a way that makes it very hard for newcomers to understand what is going on in the story and enjoy it. I have played SINoALICE since launch so I know these characters, I know their desires, and their story as "humans in the real world", not just their fairy tale counterparts.

I can't recommend this manga series if you wanted this to be your first introduction to these amazing characters. I wish I could but the series needs to be much longer and more willing to set up the mystery of what is going on a bit better.

What I did see was amazing! But that is coming from someone who already knows what is going on. It was a refreshing take on the series but still requires previous knowledge.


To end this review -
Need Cinderella to hurry up and enter the manga story because I need to see her beat up some people and be super blunt to other characters because she is a queen like that.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

SINoAlice ist eine interessante neue Fantasy-Reihe, die inspiriert vom gleichnamigen Videospiel aus der Feder Yoko Taros ist. Um den Manga zu lesen, benötigt ihr kein Vorwissen aus dem Spiel und müsst dieses selber auch nicht ausprobiert haben.
Worauf ihr euch einstellen könnt: Blutige Szenen mit feurigen Kämpfen, unheimliche Set-Ups (Gruselpuppenfaktor inklusiv) und eine düstere Story, die viele Fragen aufwirft. Die vielen Fragen waren es, die mich auch nach dem Lesen noch beschäftigt haben. Es gab einige "Hä?"-Momente für mich, die ich einfach mal mit in den zweiten Band nehmen werde, der hoffentlich etwas Licht ins Dunkel bringt. Zur Story kann ich nach diesem Band noch nicht so viel sagen und trotz meiner andauernden Verwirrung über die Zusammenhänge hat der Manga irgendwie kein Interesse wecken können. Die Zeichnungen sind sehr detailliert gestaltet, besonders die düsteren Szenen sind dadurch eindrucksvoll und konnten mir eine Gänsehaut bescheren. Gäbe es bei Manga auch TW, bräuchte dieser hier dringend eine. Vor allem die kleine Bonusnovel am Ende des Bandes strotzt nur so vor psychischer und physischer Gewalt und ist definitiv nichts für schwache Nerven! Die Altersempfehlung 16+ finde ich angemessen.
Ein spannender Manga, der vielleicht mal etwas nieschiger ist, aber mich definitiv fesseln konnte. Ich freue mich auf Band 2. 4 🌟

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this may be more of a 2.5, but I'm rounding it up because it's more on the good side of "I have little-to-no idea what is going on here." I've also never played the game it's based on, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing - the deliberately half-baked philosophy, violence, and disconnected reality all come across clearly, perhaps more so because I don't know where it's heading. Two volumes like this would be one too many, so the plot needs to explain itself in volume two, but I'm casually intrigued by what this one brings to the table.

CW: violence, statutory rape (teacher/student; it's consensual, but...), suicide, gore

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really do like the concept for this manga with fairy tales and battle royals, but it just fell a little short on the actual initiation of the idea. I think part of the problem is that things felt fast and rushed. I wish I could have gotten to know the characters a little more or had something as more of a segway than what there was into the world that Alice goes into. It felt like one moment we were here doing something, then zoom we had to move on to the next thing, so it felt a bit like whiplash, then the desired effect of shock and terror.

[Ashe Catlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aside from the exposition dump on the first two pages which felt like an essay, this was a lot of fun. It's weird in all the right ways, has a bunch of murders and you don't quite understand what is going on, for me is probably the best part. Cause by the end of the volume we still don't really know what's going on much like our protagonist so we can kind of insert ourselves into her shoes. Very well done with a lot of fun things going on.

[A_Paige · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important: this is NOT for a young audience. I had no idea what I was getting into when I picked up this volume. It’s an interesting concept, and I actually enjoyed the volume near the end, when everything became a little more clear, but I wouldn’t say this is my favorite manga. There’s lots of gore and adult scenes and concepts throughout this single volume. Aside from that, I might consider reading the next volume.

[Novels of a mermaid · Rating 4 out of 5]

J’ai adoré ce premier tome !
Je me dis que j’aurais quand même dû attendre que le 2ème sorte car il y a beaucoup de questions qui se soulèvent dans ce tome 1.
Le résumé laisse penser que l’histoire va commencer le lentement alors que pas du tout ! L’action survient tout de suite et ce mélange de Disney revisité en gore badass était vraiment cool !

[Annie Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was somewhat hard to follow but once I got into the groove of the writing style I liked it better. The font was sometimes too small and I had to read it a couple times to make sure I read it correctly.

I will give it another volume before I decide to drop it or not.

[Tia Moore · Rating 2 out of 5]

The art style is gorgeous and the premise is cool, however the plot was really hard to follow. I get this might be a stylistic choice for us to be confused along with the main character as to what's going on, but Alice didn't so much as seem confused as just sorta... there.

[Bry Parnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the art and can feel the underlying story... however the more action-y parts are hard to read on what is happening with all the blood everywhere... I will be picking up the second to see if it helps.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited by the premise of this series. So much so I picked up the first two volumes. Total buyers remorse. The storyline is pure chaos. There's no chance to connect with any character and determine what is real or make believe. Do not recommend.

[Taylor Hunt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up because the premise sounded interesting, and I needed to read a Manga book for a reading challenge. The genre isn't my cup of tea, and this one was really hard to follow. It seemed like the artist/writer was more interested in gore and shock value than an actual story line.

[nadin · Rating 2 out of 5]

the sexualization of these girls bruh

[Maellis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Weird

[April Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting intro.. tad confusing but like it enough to want a vol 2

[Lulai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un tome 1 flou ms avec du potentiel

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

War ok, aber nicht wirklich gut, die Geschichte hat versucht viel mit Blut und Grausigkeiten wett zu machen.

[J-Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far, I am confused..... I hope things will clear up in the next volume.

[Mário Barbosa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strong 3.5* rounded to 4. There seems to be some potential here, with lots of things to reveal and explain. Can get quite interesting...

[Sombre Grimoire · Rating 5 out of 5]

J'ai adoré ce premier tome et j'ai hâte d'en voir l'évolution !
Il me rappelle tellement de manga et d'animer que je voyais au collège !