Biomega is a Cyberpunk Science Fiction manga by Tsutomu Nihei, which was serialized from 2004 to 2009 (starting out in Weekly Young Magazine, and later moving to Ultra Jump in 2006).
20 Minutes into the Future, Zouichi and an AI integrated into his motorcycle called Fuyu are sent to retrieve humans for Toha Heavy Industries. They are looking for humans immune to N5S infection, which turns humans into undead disfigured "Drones". Zouichi is sent to find Yion Green, an immortal 17-year-old girl. The world's future is up to Zouichi when Yion is kidnapped.
Tropes related to the manga:
- Apocalypse How: The world undergoes a large viral plague which results in odd zombification. To make matters worse, the only people left are being killed off by cyborgs and mutants, with only Artificial Humans left to protect them.
- After the End: There were three seperate ends. The first was the loss of all digital information hundreds of years before the begining of the story. The second is the Zombie Apocalypse. And the third is caused by using zombies as a catalyst to turn the lithosphere into a giant space habitat. It Makes Sense in Context ... sort of.
- Alternate Universe: This seems to be the case with Biomega, it features a lot of similarities with all of other Tsutomu's works but the stories can't possibly take place in the same universes. Biomega and BLAME! both feature Artificial Humans who are quite similar to one another but the stories don't connect. Plus several brands appear in the different stories with Toha Heavy Industries appearing in all of them as a benevolent MegaCorp. They are the ones who created the good kind of Artificial Humans in all of the story lines. Then again BLAME! revealed that they posess the ability to travel whole buildings through space and time, so...
- Arm Cannon: One of the arms of artificial human Nishu Mizunoe is a rather destructive arm cannon.
- Art Shift: About halfway through it becomes less grim and gritty just like the plot itself.
- Big Damn Reunion: At the end, Kozlov is reunited with Yion after being separated for the entire series and thousands of years from Ion's perspective.
- Bio Punk: To the point that after volume 4, with the amount of Organic Technology and Technology Porn involved, it becomes really difficult to tell what is purely mechanical and what is partially or entirely organic (provided the distinction even makes sense in this universe at that point).
- Bizarrchitecture: A 4.8 billion km long space habitat made of reconstituted zombie meat and Polymer.
- Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": The technorganic Big Creepy-Crawlies are called "horses". But so is Zouichi's motorcycle.
- Distaff Counterpart: Nishu is basically Zoichi's female version.
- The End of the World as We Know It: The DRF's plan to turn the world into a worm-like shape.
- Enemy Mine: The main opposing force to the main characters for most of the story were the PHS, however they eventually semi-team up against DRF Headquarter.
- Expy:
- Zoichi is Killy AS A BIKER!
- Niardi's appearance also resembles that of Tomie.
- Faceless Goons: Almost everyone in the DRF wears masks.
- Flat Character: Ion Green, yeah, she may be a more than 200 years old teenager which is the key to inmortality and being the antidote for the N5S Virus but she barely has anything to do with what was happening, and the fact that the manga has some Mind Screw here and there it's kinda easy to lost track of her, and hard to see her as a character rather than a Plot Device.
- Friendly Enemy: While not necessarily 'friendly' its hard to explain what the relationship between Kardal Spindal and Zoichi is. On one hand they have come very close to killing each other several times, but on the other hand they have the odd habit of letting each other go. There was also one instance where Kardal gave Zoichi a cure for the poison an HQ solider shot him with, the author never got around explaining why. Whether or not this was a case of Fo Romance Subtext or something else is never explored since Kardal was later Put on a Bus for the remainder of the series.
- Fun with Acronyms: Sometimes it seems like the DRF must have an entire department that just comes up with acronymns for its subbranches.
- Genre Shift: From Cyberpunk Zombie Apocalypse to Heroic Fantasy Cyberpunk.
- The Gunslinger: All Artificial Humans. You don't see gunplay this fast anywhere outside The Dark Tower.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Fuyu sacrifices herself to help Zouichi get past the army of DRF agents during the final battle. The ending gives Zouichi hope that she can be revived.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Justified by the fact that everyone who does it is an organic robot, and POV shots explain that they have "terminator vision" and are doing physics calculations on the fly.
- Living MacGuffin:
- Yion Green is this in the first half of the manga, when everybody wants her for her ability to resist the N5S virus.
- Millennia after the Earth is reformatted into the Recreator, Funipero becomes the person whom Zouichi has to keep out of Niardi's hands. At least Funipero has more personality than Ion does.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: Koslov Grebnev, the talking bear, hates the DRF for the suffering it brought to the human race, Yion and himself. It turns out that his brain came from a clone of Loew Grebnev, the DRF's founder, which makes Koslov essentially Loew's son.
- MegaCorp: Toha Heavy Industries and the DRF.
- Mind Screw: The series starts off fairly easy to follow, but the further you get into it, the more confusing it becomes.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Cyberpunk zombies! From Mars!
- Cyberpunk talking Russian brown bears!
◊ Seriously.
- Cyberpunk talking Russian brown bears!
- Number of the Beast: At the very beginning of the manga, we see Zouichi driving down a long bridge on his motorcycle. A close-up of the dash panel reveals that he is driving 666 km/h.
- Oddly Small Organization: Toa Heavy Industries may be an industrial giant with artificial humans as its enforcers, but we only see a few of them in action (and after the whole world gets reformatted and there's a time skip, Team Kanoe is all that remains of the old world.) Team Kanoe is still referred to as "Toa Heavy Industries" by the bad guys whenever they attack.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Drones are zombie-like entities infected by the NS 5, a virus that originated from the planet Mars.
- Perpetual-Motion Monster: Synthetic humans, who can go for weeks without water and months without eating and not weaken.
- Rule of Cool: Responsible for quite a lot of the plot, action and character design.
- Russian Bear: Kozlov is a Russian scientist who had his mind uploaded into a bear.
- Russian Guy Suffers Most: It's a bit of a running gag that Kozlov the talking bear keeps getting bits of himself shot off by the bad guys. Considering his earlier manga, Blame! also features another guy with an Eastern-European-sounding name who endures similar hardships, it seems Tsutomu Nihei really gets a kick out of this trope.
- Shout-Out:
- The AI companions that appear as 10 inch tall, pretty young ladies in tight fitting clothes with odd vertical black markings, as in Halo.
- The RDF's Ax-Crazy patrol officers wear aprons and masks that look like faces, like Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
- The MegaCorp known as Toha Heavy Industries is a nod to Nihei's earlier manga, BLAME!, which featured a megastructure of the same name. This lead most fans to believe that Biomega was meant to be a prequel until
Word of God said it was a different continuity. - Kardal Spindal's last name may or may not be a mistranslated nod to Isaac Szpindel, a cyborg from Peter Watts' novel Blindsight.
- Single-Stroke Battle: The final fight between Niardi and Funipero plays out like this. They charge at each other with longswords, Funipero's sword is knocked out of her hand, and Niardi is bisected at the waist.
- Space Elevator: The Intercontinental Mooring Cable.
- Spell My Name With An S: Some of the spellings for the characters names can get a bit confusing. For example most fan translations has PHS' enforcer named Kardal Spindal. However the official manga translation has her name as Kaadaru Spindaru.
- Stealth Prequel: While it doesn't take place in the same continuity as Blame!, Toha may be the same entity in both manga through interdimensional travel, which would make it a prequel from Toha's perspective.
- Transhuman: Just about everyone.
- 20 Minutes into the Future: It's 3000 AD, but it looks like mid 21st century with anachronistic cyborgs and super weapons due to it being set hundreds of years after an act of cyberterrorism that brought the internet crashing down.
- The Virus: The NS 5 virus turns you into zombies, or superhuman cyborg zombies.
- World Shapes: If the DRF gets their way, it will result in the creation of a bizarre new world which is shaped like a giant worm. And they did.
- World Half Full: In the end, when given the choice, Zoichi decided to let the new world continue and let Earth be bygone.
- Zombie Apocalypse: The world has been overrun with the Drones.
