Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun – Episode 1

My oh my it’s here and I still don’t know how to feel about it. I recently finished this arc of Made in Abyss in the manga, seeing that the English volumes are a little bit behind the Japanese ones for obvious reasons. I think Made in Abyss might be the only manga I’ve ever read where I’m not quite sure what I read but I am sure it made me feel something. Immediately hopping into the episode we’re introduced to our three sages: Wazukyan, Belaf and Vueko. One thing to note, in the manga these characters are introduced in volume 8. The Made in Abyss anime season covers volumes 1-3, where the movie covers volumes 4-5. This means the anime is changing the order of things a little bit, but I think it makes sense to have this introduction at the start of a season. It’s at the start of a new volume as well in the manga. We’ll see how it pans out in the long run though.

Vueko has quite the traumatic past, being abused by the man she lived with, before joining up with Wazukyan and his people after giving him the compass. The man who was with her had this compass and found it on a charred ship with strange corpses. The compass points somewhat down and the theory is that if you get to where it points straight down you’ll find the golden city at the bottom of a large pit. Wazukyan sets out with a fleet of ships to find the island the Abyss is on and after losing every single other ship their ship luckily makes it to the island where they find a massive pit at the center of it. This is of course the Abyss we know from the previous seasons that Riko, Reg, Nanachi and Prushka are traveling down into. 

After the title card we find ourselves with the locals on the island, trading and talking with our travelers. Vueko trades her compass for help from the village chief. Here we learn that the Golden City is also called The capital of the Unreturned (Shourou). The villagers tell the sages that the city exists but you can’t return from it. On the edge of the pit they’re joined by a little girl who’s seemingly been exiled by the tribe. She has tattoos that indicate she can’t bear children and is thus exiled to the pit. Vueko pleads to allow the girl to travel with them and Wazukyan seems to be high most of his life and doesn’t really care. Not long after the first victims start to fall and we learn that the abyss has a curse. This refers to not being able to go up as soon as you go down into the abyss. Scary place. 

We travel past some of the highlights we saw in season 1, which is cool to see. And then we hard cut to Reg and Riko in the same place. I didn’t see that coming, but what a great cut. Going back to my first paragraph I think they made the right decision to move things around a bit. The entire first 17 minutes of this episode cover just a single chapter but I think it’s done well. I remember thinking in the volume that it was going super fast and I wasn’t following along properly and it seems like they tried avoiding that here. In the volume we also see more of the sages’ journey at this point, but it seems like we’re back at volume 6 now.

I’ve missed these little rugrats and I can’t wait to see them return to their journey in an animated form. Riko now has Prushka with her in whistle form. She’s now officially a white whistle although down this deep I suppose no one really cares if you should or shouldn’t be there. We descend through the sea of corpses which immediately gives off that creepy vibe that Made in Abyss is famous for. I can’t stress enough that this series is hauntingly brutal. As to highlight the insanity we immediately jump to a scene of Riko pooping. I can never tell if this series is messing with us or not, it’s just weird as hell all the time. We see Meinya again, who was Prushka’s pet and is now traveling with the group. And just like that we reach the exit of the sea of corpses and are well and truly in the thick of things. We’ve made it all the way to the so-called golden city, the capital of the unreturned. I’m going to wager a guess and say this anime covers up to the end of volume 10, which is a total of five volumes. Doing that in 12 episodes seems unlikely, so I’m guessing there will either be 24 episodes or two separate cours of 12? I couldn’t find a concrete answer to this on google, but otherwise they would end season two in the middle of a story arc. 

And there we have it, episode one of the new season of Made in Abyss. It’s been a little while since I did one of there episode review series, but they seem to be popular on other bloggers’ pages and although I didn’t want to just do this for any random show, because there’s already people who do this better than me, I did want to do it for a show I’m this invested in, because I have the manga sitting right behind me. Let me know what you think of the first episode, and if you like that I’m talking about the manga alongside it. Don’t worry, I’ll not put any spoilers in here and only talk about changes from the manga and which volumes/chapters things line up with. As always thanks for reading and I hope to see you all again here next week!