With revealed way back in 2014, Junya Inoue’s manga series BTOOOM! was going to end as it moved into its final arc as serialized in Monthly Comic @Bunch magazine. With the 25thvolume released this week, details have surfaced regarding what’s going on with the 26th and final volume due out later this year. The manga itself will have two endings with a light and dark kind of version under the name of the “Friendship Arc” and the “Truth Arc”, the former of which is what’s being serialized in the magazine. The dark ending is getting a short serialization in June and both of them will be included with the 26th volume in July. All of that is certainly an interesting and creative way to give both sides of the fans what they want.
Yen Press is releasing the manga in North America while Sentai Filmworks released the TV series on DVD and Blu-ray in bilingual form.
Series concept: In the blink of the mind’s eye, Ryouta Sakamoto suddenly finds himself transported from playing the hit Btooom! video game to being stranded on a mysterious island, equipped with a day’s worth of provisions, a bag of bombs, a strange crystal embedded in his left hand and a huge gaping hole in his memory. But it doesn’t take long to figure out what’s going on, especially after the first person Ryouta meets tries to kill him. Someone is attempting to recreate the ultra-violent Btooom! game in real life, and the island has been filled with an army of other unwilling players, each armed with one of the multiple variants of explosive weapons called BIM. Fortunately, Ryouta’s an ace Btooom! player, but this insane version of the game has no reset switch or second lives, and there’s only one way off the island: kill seven other people before they can kill you! Can Ryouta repurpose his game based skills fast enough to survive?
[Source: ANN]