Escape from the Grace Field house arc review

"You mean, in exchange for spying on us, they won't get shipped out and are allowed to live?"
- Emma thinking about what types of motives the spy has (The Promised Neverland).



The Promised Neverland (2019) is the animated version of one of the newest best-sellers on the Weekly Shounen Jump magazine. The manga has been written by Kaiu Shirai and illustrated by Posuka Demizu and it has sold millions of copies between 2016, which is when the manga first started, and 2019. I’ve been a big fan of the series for a long time now, ever since the first arc finished in the manga as the amount of atmosphere, storyboarding and character writing the authors did in the first 37 chapters (length of the first arc is 37 chapters) was phenomenal. 
Normally series don't start out strong because the authors either are novice or they create a story that is supposed to get better and better (rarely they do). In my opinion, as far as series in the shounen demographic go, the first arc of this series stands at the top along with series like Death Note in how amazing the first arc of the series is.

This blog post will be talking about the first arc of the series which has now been animated by A1-Pictures into a 13-episode TV series that adapts the Escape from Grace Field house arc. The story continues beyond the Escape from Grace Field arc and a second season has been confirmed for 2020, but that's a story for that year.


Emma, code number 63194, is a bright and cheery young girl who loves her family. In the Grace Field house where she lives, Emma’s large family consists of Isabella, whom she and everyone else in the house calls 'mama,' along with Emma's dozens of brothers and sisters whom Emma plays with all the time. Grace Field house is said to be an orphanage in which every singleday there are IQ tests being done by the children. The children doing those IQ tests is the first ominous thing in the manga that tells the reader that this series isn't as rainbow and sunshine as it's made out to be. 

One day, Conny, one of the younger sisters of Emma, assumedly get adopted and leave the house, but Emma notices that even though Conny was supposed to take it with her, Conny’s stuffed toy rabbit is still in the Grace Field house when the girl has already left through the front gate that leads out from the Grace Field house’s large gardeny-foresty area. No child that has lived in the house has ever left through the gate because of warnings and creepy stories the children are told by mama Isabella.

As Emma and her brother Norman decide to go to Conny to give her the stuffed rabbit back, they come across something very dangerous and creepy. Conny’s cold corpse is found in a truck with a rose penetrating through her heart, and as Emma and Norman hear voices they decide to go under the truck to spy on the ones that have potentially killed their sister Conny - only for them to see that there are large, crazy looking creatures next to Conny that drop her corpse into a large bottle of liquid. Those creatures can speak human language and are seen to be talking with mama Isabella by Norman and Emma. Those creatures are literal demons. 
This is when Emma and Norman get the realization that they don’t in fact live the type of happy family life with a great mother that they originally thought they did – no, the children of the Grace Field house are actually food to the demons, they are cattle who now must escape from this prison, they must escape from the clutches of the demons and mama Isabella before it is time for more imminent deaths of the children that get regularly "adopted."


Basically: once a child reaches a certain age (related to their IQ but still at oldest they are 12 years old) they get picked by the demons, killed by putting a rose through the children's hearts and then the entire dead body gets bottled and taken away only to be sold to the the rich demons, due to the delicious brains that humans have.


The Promised Neverland series has three easily recognizable and memorable main characters with Emma, the loud-mouthed and caring protagonist, Ray the cool-guy-looking silent book-worm, and Norman, the mastermind of the series - even though Emma, Ray and Norman are all peak-level students, Norman is a god tier even among those three when it comes to outsmarting your opponents. The series still manages to have certain equal mind battles between all three of them when it comes to emotional level. This is also the first time in Grace Field history that three extremely smart children exist at the same time.

The story also has couple of semi-memorable side characters in Don and Gilda. The three main characters are the smartest characters in the Grace Field house, as I already mentioned, they are always scoring top scores from tests, but Ray and Norman especially are fantastic to watch or read about with their mind games, which I won’t be talking about in detail because of their very spoilerish nature as they are very important parts of the plot of the first arc. All I can say is that Norman and Ray make the series for me, which is why I believe that after the first arc of the series has really fallen off a lot, honestly. But aside from the character writing, there are many cool-looking and -feeling parts in the first arc as well, the presentation of how messed up the world is to the characters being psychologically challenged is beautiful to look at and think about more deeply.

The Promised Neverland is a shounen series with a gripping and dark atmosphere that plays on the psychological aspects of the characters. 
The artist of the series, Posuka Demizu, also really shined and will be remembered for what she pulled off in the first arc of The Promised Neverland. The artwork of TPN doesn't stick to a certain mold, so it's very different from most series. Even though it's not similar to Hunter x Hunter, it can be likened to it because Yoshihiro Togashi, the author of HxH, also has art that doesn't look the same all the time, both of these artists can really hit the bullseye with character expressions that look really deformed but great. 

There are crazy pages, spreads, paneling styles, and so on in TPN. The art at worst can seem kind of mediocre and at its best it can feel like something you have never seen before. There is a panel where Norman is walking through a hall of the Grace Field house with a glass of water in his hand. As two children run past him playing games, the walls of the hallway Norman is walking through feel as if they are becoming deformed and the face of Norman is seen reflecting on the water on the glass he's carrying. There are quite a few pages of fantastic stand-out art like that in the series, and mostly all the color spread-pages of the series are like that.


Yeah, all in all there is a lot of good to say about the first arc, the Escape from Grace Field house arc, of the series, but as most things do, the series in my mind really should have ended there at the end of chapter 37. The manga did not have any that relevant plot lines left that would have excused the continuation of the story at this point. The series is 100 chapters past the first arc and not even a fragment as well written or presented as it. The characters are also shadows of their former selves. Look at Don and Gilda or the main characters; they all feel underutilized, irrelevant and just... waste of space. The series should have focused on fleshing out other characters and introducing them over time rather than dump dozens of characters in the group that the readers have no emotional attachment to. There is another arc in the series that is also an escape arc, but it lacks all the qualities, the psychological aspects and so on that the first arc did. I am usually the kind of person that appreciates when an author can change the way they write things, monotonous writing can be pretty boring after all, but the next escape arc is a downright downgrade of the Escape from the Grace Field house arc, it would have been better if it was entirely different arc from an escape arc, I guess. Didn't like that arc at all. Also the series has been skipping arcs and events that it should have shown us by now as the Promised Neverland manga is right now in its final arc.

The series started out strong with the authors clearly having planned many plot lines throughout the first arc which kept the series fresh and interesting to both the authors and the readers, but as soon as the first arc ended with that amazing ending, the series was not the same ever again.

The Twenty Year Old Murderous Intent: The Symphony Serial Murder Case

"If you want things to change, first you have to change."
- Dan Pêna

Detective Conan holds a special place in my heart for many reasons. It's one of the first series I actively got into, and the series that I bought most volumes for in my childhood, volumes which burnt down along with our family's apartment, and everything else nostalgic that was tied to it, many years ago. I just have to talk about it more because I know there are people willing to discuss about it, so I've been planning on trying to write about standout episodes in the series as well as get into some of the more highly acclaimed 'anime-original' episodes and share my thoughts about them as well. Before I can get to talking about the episode this time around, I just have to talk more in-depth about my history with the series and what it means to me.

It's been a good while, well over a decade actually, that I first started watching the animated version of this series because I used to visit shops all the time trying to find the next released volume's but the wait was just too long because the content was just so good in each and every volume, be it because of the way that the author Gosho Aoyama writes his characters or because of the crazy storytelling and plot twists that he pulled off in certain parts of the series. This is a bit cliche but Detective Conan was one of the first series that I watched on the net, if not the first, and that really was what pushed me to watch other series without me even realizing it, it was a time when I was the most into anime in general.

I used to follow the releases weekly for years in the animated format along with whatever came along the road that pulled me in, newer series such as the highly acclaimed thriller Death Note (2006), an anime adaptation of a certain visual novel named Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni (2007), Kindaichi R (2014), an anime adaptation of a novel named Subete ga F ni Naru (2015), and so on. . . I noticed that I was immersed into a certain genre; crime fiction, and it's the sub genre of soft-boiled detective fiction that I've put all my focus into the most of all. I spent years following the Umineko no Naku Koro Ni (2007) visual/sound novel series from the beginning to the end, same with the second trilogy of both the Ace Attorney and Professor Layton game series, and on top of that bunch of novels and some TV series and movies, majority of them of course crime fiction genre based. I'd love to talk about them all once more in this blog if I ever get the time to truly go in-depth about them, which I hope that I will one day.

It was that one volume that I picked up as a child that caused this... addiction, actually no, it was two volumes, because I happened to buy two of them with the price of one, but I will only talk about the one that somehow affected me the most. It was volume 35 of Detective Conan in which I saw a certain character with darker color of skin and a cool personality that was hanging around with the main character. In this volume the group witnesses gruesome murders in an island setting that is blocked from outside world (sounds all too familiar now). The captain of a ship got his head bashed in brutally and his corpse was left hanging on the side of the ship, and then another body of another character appears. A case with missing footprints on the beach, and a woman strangled to death. The way that these main cast characters went about solving the case really inspired me. They were cool and level-headed in such a tense situation as they cleverly dealt with such a coldblooded crime of the Death Island case (2001).

 The character with a cool attitude whom I mentioned is called Heiji Hattori and he's part of the main cast of the entire series, and for a good while now he's been my favourite DC character as well. Last year's Detective Conan movie, The Crimson Love Letter (2017), only served to reinforce my opinion of him as Heiji and his childhood sweetheart Kazuha played key roles in that movie, and it was amazing.

So, a mention about a volume of Conan that lead up to me talking about my life history as well as my favourite character in this particular series of course leads up to me talking about a case in the series, wooo!

Detective Conan's 174th episode, titled:
The Twenty Year Old Murderous Intent: The Symphony Serial Murder Case (2000)
produced by TMS Entertainment, known for their fantastic quality Lupin the Third productions, adapts a six chapter long case (which is long for DC's standards as the series is mainly about short stories) from volume 23 into a two hour special..! The episode is very special as it is actually the first episode of the 2000's of this long-running animated TV series, and the production values are at the top of the game for the series as well. The atmosphere of the case itself is great, due to the darker colors that looked fantastic in the early Detective Conan episodes, along with the effort the animation team put into the episode itself. Character dialogue, movement of the frames, everything is well produced. When we are asked about what are the best cases of the series, many DC fans, myself included, immediately point to ep 174. In fact I think one of the reasons I praise this one so much is because it is as close to a movie format canon case (case created by the original author which takes place in the actual world of DC). Now, there is more than just production values in the reasoning for why this episode is a standout.
The author, Gosho Aoyama, has a certain structure in the type of cases he writes. Theft or murder, the setting being in an island or a town, the tropes he utilizes, and so on, they all change from case to case along with the constant change of the overarching characters that the cases revolve around. Two examples would be: the Nagano police department cases are more about being hard-boiled in style, while Heiji Hattori cases usually have the 'supernatural' tag on them, so cases happen in enclosed spaces as soft-boiled mysteries (golden age-styled cases).
The Twenty Year Old Murderous Intent: The Symphony Serial Murder Case is the latter as it is a prime example of just how good Heiji Hattori cases are (it's crazy how they used a great case with Heiji to celebrate the 2000's!), I think this is by far one of the best cases for an episode I have seen. There are many cases and storylines that can rival and perhaps even surpass it, but definitely not many episodic cases that hold a candle to it because of the movie-like format. For the case, the supernatural elements are switched around a bit, instead of supposed monsters attacking people, we deal with a mysterious thief, but not one named Kaito.

The story:
*BANG, BANG* right off the bat, multiple shots can be seen and heard at a forest area. It's nighttime. A radio is playing in a car as a body falls to the deep sea from a mountain. "Four shots to the chest." The victim is known as Kanou Saizou, Organizer of the Shadows, and the people who killed him? His very own underlings. One of the underlings say that he had to be silenced because they had killed a bank assistant during the group's latest robbery, and because of that the boss, Kanou Saizou, was about to sing like the birds to the cops. Now, the three underlings have a problem at hand as they are still on the run and majority of the dough is marked by the police. The stolen money has to be hidden for the promised day of when it can be used, but where?

And then, 20 years go by and the prologue ends as 'chapter one' begins.
Mouri Ran, one of the main characters, asks her father, the great detective Sleeping Kogoro, to bring a 'record' to a certain place due to a newspaper announcement created by a person named Masaru Furukawa. The first ten people who bring a very special item, something almost everyone had in a previous era in Japan but almost no one has anymore, to the docks where ships are sent off, get a price where they are invited to a thee days and two nights lasting trip to Ogasawara on S. S. Symphony. After thinking about it for a second, Edogawa Conan, our protagonist, tells Ran and Kogoro that what they probably should bring with them to that place is not a 'record' but an old paper bill. And he was right as masses of people bring other items but can't get in but they did. What awaits our main characters is a large cruiser with a slew of people.

Now because Conan is a kid, the personnel technically allow 11 people to board the ship aside from there only being the promised 10 spots.  A huge cruiser for 11 people... Suspicious! What's more suspicious is that the organizer of the event, Masaru Furukawa, is nowhere to be seen, in fact the ship's workers have never even seen the guy as he had reserved the ship over the phone.

The characters on the ship are of wide variety. Aside from Conan, Ran and Kogoro, there's ex-superintendent Toji Samezaki (62) from the Homicide Department, he's one of the people Kogoro knew when he used to work for the Metropolitan police force. Samezaki had retired two years ago and he claims to be on he cruiser trip because it's a 'very special day.'

For the rest of the passengers we have:
 Teruyoshi Kameda (45) who is an almost bald overweight man that carries a seal mark that bears the letters 'Furukawa' in kanji. He meets up with a person named Korehisa Kanie (46) who shows him a key, and then they go to drink together to the bar.
Then we have a glasses guy Minoru Ebina (46) whom the ex-superintended seems to recognize from somewhere, as well as 'an old man who had boarded but then left to get something' and then had come back and went to take a nap, bothering him is not allowed. The old man's face is not shown so you can try to guess what kinds of tricks Gosho is doing with him.

S.S. Symphony is presented in a really beautiful way in the episode, be it during day or dark night. There's a scene where Ran goes to the front deck under the orange skies and shouts "I'M THE KING OF THE WORLD!" which is one of the more memorable scenes of the case as it's a Titanic reference, and the scene looks miraculous.

As well as the last few passengers:
Sadao Kujirai (50) is another passenger, but he's more talkative than the rest.
Nagisa Isogai (27) a woman with a pendant who talks about the sea hiding dead bodies as she had lost her father to the seas.
And of course there is certain other detective on the ship. 

The day turns night and everyone is enjoying their dinner. As the employee's of S.S. Symphony are asked about the 'quiet old man' who was resting in his room, they answer that his name is... Kanou Saizou...!

The very person, the mastermind behind the 400 million yen robbery, on the ship? The ex-superintendent freaks out and shows that he has a hidden motive. Kogoro and him decide to infiltrate the room appointed for 'Kanou Saizou,' which by the way has a nice addition to it when the ship's employee with the room key is shaking due to fear from opening the door, but in the end it's almost like no one's even been in the room at all when they go in. Strange. Was the old guy not resting all day?
At the same time as the infiltration happens, we can see Teryoshi Kameda, the almost-bald guy, get a letter and go to the engine room of the cruiser. There he meets his final moments as a gun appears on the screen and its trigger gets pulled.

The room next to 'Kanou Saizou's' opens up and we see the detective person whom was mentioned earlier. Heiji Hattori, our protagonist's rival and best friend, is on the cruiser as well!
Kogoro tells Heiji about Kanou Saizou from when he was still in the force himself. Saizou is known as an organizor of the shadows, a phantom schemer. The organizor of flawless plans where he easily escaped police forces. But then 20 years ago someone died during a robbery and the phantom schemer disappeared.

The statute of limitations. For a murder, a civil case, was 20 years when the case was created by the author Gosho Aoyama. That holds a large part in the intensity of this Symphony Serial Murder Case as the reason why the ex-superintendent said that 'today is special' is exactly because the statute of limitations runs out... Tonight! There is no time left and the main cast is constantly running against the clock. The underlings of Kanou Saizou have to be captured now! Even if they are all on the ship, there is no time to get on a shore and wait for the cops as the time limit is in a few hours. This aspect of the story ups the intensity to another level, from an already-tense situation where people drop dead while other things are happening. The presentation is amazing from many levels, to say the least. Literally the only way to make this case better would be to make it longer due to building up multiple plot threads and multilayered characterisation for the case cast, but that is not the author's style in the first place and the 6 chapters this was adapted from are perfect for what we get.

Heiji himself had gotten on the ship due to the very same Masaru Furukawa-named person sending him a letter with 100 000 yen in it. Heiji had come, but only to return the cash as his moral code says not to accept cash for a case.

As the race against the clock goes on and the intensity changes tiers, Kogoro and ex-superintendend Samezaki running all over the ship trying to track Kanou Saizou down, the rest of the cruiser's guests decide to play poker.

And then the clock hits midnight and time runs out. The statute of limitations has been crossed.

Immediately at 12:08, a gunshot! Not even time for a breather as the pacing of the story is so damn good. All the time there is something going down. The flag of S. S. Symphony is on fire on the deck, and there is a paper bill with writing on it saying 'My phantom shall rise from the dead with the help of Poseidon.' The paper bill has been stuck to a chair on the deck with a large knife.
Seeing the paper bill's text, Kujirai, one of the passengersm freaks out and an explosion happens on the deck! And a burning body is found. After the burning has ended, the others assume it's Kanie, the bald-looking guy due to his clothes. There are some mentions about rigor mortis's effect during burning as well as well as a certain plot twist about the dead body.

One of the best aspects about this episode is the way how the investigative parts of Heiji and Conan are handled. The information that gets passed around is interesting and the animation keeps it going. It's fast paced just like a lot of things in this episode, there's always something happening as I mentioned earlier, and the rivalry part between Heiji and Conan, where their deductions are in conflict, is one of the best in the series. I absolutely love the part where the animation studio shows their shadows when they compare their theories, and Heiji decides on a race where they can figure out who is right and who is wrong, as the last time their thoughs were at conflict was in the case when they first met.

In the end I've spoken a bit too much and don't want to spoil people about the greatness of this episode. As the time has passed and I've become more experienced about the tropes and cliches of detective fiction, rewatching this for about the 5th time has surprisingly enough been much more impressive than I thought it would. Gosho's style of pacing is frankly what everyone else should aim for. There are countless series where nothing exactly is happening in the episodes, but the fans only like them because the events that happen in them are standouts, such as decapitation, because 'gore is cool,' this case is far from light due to burning corpses and all the other elements in it, but it really reinforces my notion of Gosho's ability to condense information and write perfectly paced stories that do something new, for example it's a surprise that the statute of limitations is shown supposedly 'running out' only 25 minutes into the one-and-half hour episode. Also Heiji tends to get hurt alot in the series, this case is no exception. It helps to make the cases more personal. In this one Heiji gets attacked and goes missing, the watcher is left to wonder what in the world happened to him, and aside from Heiji, the one-off cast-only characters are mostly entertaining to watch as well due to each of them having a role to play in the story, and none of them overstay their welcome at all unlike in certain other mystery anime series (such as Subete, I just have to say it, sorry. The side characters in that were abysmally irrelevant).

There are some nice references in the case to Hercule Poirot's Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, a famous ship case (probably the most known case on a ship ever), but honestly, I think The Twenty Year Old Murder Intent: The Symphony Serial Murders by Gosho Aoyama has surpassed even the great Christie, and there are not many other writers to talk about when it comes to great cruiser cases in detective fiction. The pacing of the events, something new happening one after another, great presentation and use of characters in the same format as Christie (in the Golden Age style),  well rounded plot twists after plot twists, and great handling of the smallest details from the strong beginning up until the climactic ending moment... It really is an amazing episode from so many standpoints, and as I said, by far one of the best episodic cases ever created, and that's a line hard to reach.