If there's one thing that people who follow the magazine closely can agree on, it's that the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump are a battleground every bit as fierce as their most iconic action manga. For every Naruto or Demon Slayer that manages to survive and reach untold heights of global popularity, there are series like The Hunters Guild: Red Hood or Mama Yūyū that meet an untimely end and get lost to the winds of history. The pages of JUMP run red with the blood of hundreds of canceled manga, and while most of these cancellations tend to be brief, some managed to gain an extended stay of execution, never quite finding enough popularity to earn an anime adaptation. When it comes to such JUMP titles with a noted reputation in Western circles, though, there are no examples more infamous than the tale of Psyren by Toshiaki Iwashiro.

Despite lasting a whopping three years in the magazine, it never performed well enough to get an anime adaptation green-lit during its run, and this helped to be its undoing, as without that extra blanket of security, it too was inevitably met with the sting of Shonen Jump's axe. Unfortunately, that blow could also be felt right into the pages of the manga itself, as its cancellation resulted in an extremely rushed finale, and while Iwashiro managed to wrap the story, this ultimately left a pretty notable mark on the manga's overall reputation.

While the series has maintained some vocal fans clamoring for an anime adaptation (I myself being having also been one of them), and it's even managed to appear on Anime Japan's yearly poll of Most Wanted Anime Adaptations more than once, it's pretty rare for a cancelled JUMP manga to be given that kind of second chance at life, so that seemed to be the end of Psyren's story. Yet against all odds, an anime adaptation has finally gotten greenlit courtesy of REMOW and Studio Satelight, giving the series another chance to grow its audience; with Psyren experiencing a sudden revival, it's as good a time as any to look back and see just how well this manga holds up.

The series functions as something of a cross between GANTZ and a more straightforward battle shonen setup, as it follows a troubled teen named Ageha whose quest to find his missing classmate and childhood friend, Sakurako, leads him to investigate rumors surrounding a secret society called Psyren. However, when he finally tracks Sakurako down, he discovers that rather than simply being a cult, Psyren is a post-apocalyptic future brimming with modified lifeforms called Taboo that possess psychic powers, and that Sakurako has been traveling back and forth between this future as part of a mysterious game. Having now been locked into that game himself, Ageha decides to make it his mission to protect Sakurako from becoming another one of its casualties while the two try to learn how to prevent this dark future from coming to pass.

All of this is just the opening hook from the first volume, so it's pretty easy to see where the series gets a lot of its appeal as it balances itself between the characters attempting to uncover the mysteries of how the future of Psyren came to be, and squaring off against all the dangers that world has to offer in flashy psychic shonen battles. Whereas a lot of the bigger Shonen Jump battle manga of its day like Naruto or Bleach were known for their largely slow-moving plots, Psyren's secondary status as a mystery thriller allows its story to move at a much brisker pace, and it never feels as though the series is wasting your time. While most of its overarching mysteries aren't overly complex, they do help to add a lot of extra tension to the story. New information also tends to be drip-fed at a steady enough rate that it's rare to go more than a few chapters without some brand-new revelation connecting Psyren to the present, which generally rewards readers for staying attentive.

That brisk pacing also extends into most of the manga's fights, which center on the use of psychic powers called "PSI," functionally split between physical enhancements, manipulating other people's senses, and generating some form of psychokinesis like making fire or healing wounds. Much like the mystery side of the series, the battle system here isn't anything terribly complicated (and does perhaps have a bit too much overlap with Ninjutsu in Naruto), but the series does manage to get some creative uses out of it, like giant scythes that can make illusions or making solid blocks out of air that are cool enough to keep the fights engaging. While some of the action paneling can be a little clunky in places, it flows enough that it's fairly easy to digest, and the same extends to the art, which generally doesn't stand out too much for what's expected from a battle manga, but looks good enough to add some extra spectacle to all of the fights. The ability to comfortably shift between mystery and action works as the manga's biggest strength, and those elements work together in tandem to give it a solid sense of momentum that makes it extremely easy to read.

As much as that constant sense of momentum works for it, though, it's also the manga's biggest weakness, as that pace doesn't leave much time for its characters. Out of the central cast, Ageha and Sakurako get the most focus, and their respective arcs end up heavily intertwined. Ageha starts off the story as an aimless delinquent who plays at helping people in trouble as an excuse to satisfy the emptiness he feels through violence. Although he finds a sense of purpose in helping Sakurako to survive in Psyren, his brash attitude ends up being a double-edged sword as his battles there slowly lead him to realize that he's a lot more comfortable with the thought of killing his opponents than he knows he should be.

Sakurako, on the other hand, deals with a lot of trauma brought about by all the lives she was unable to save during her previous trips to Psyren, and it's mostly through Ageha coming back into her life that she starts to let go of those burdens in order to allow herself to be happy. While these are both pretty solid foundations for their characters, and allow them to have a good dynamic with each other, that relationship largely plays second fiddle to the central mystery, so despite its prominence, it's never given enough room to breathe to feel as compelling as the story wants it to be.

The same also extends to the rest of the main cast, who have pretty simple character arcs such as a sleazy playboy named Kabuto who has to learn not to run at every opportunity, and a celebrity named Oboro who acts childish but has a dangerous side to him that causes him to view all of Psyren's dangers as nothing but a game to amuse himself with. While they're both given just enough focus to help keep them involved with the plot, there otherwise isn't quite enough depth to them to make them one of the series' better draws. The same also extends to the members of the organization W.I.S.E that serve as the manga's main antagonists, as while they're all entertaining enough, they otherwise don't display much personality outside their general archetypes, and the mystery of how they managed to bring about Psyren's future takes priority over their characterization.

This unfortunately bleeds into the quality of the fights, as the overall simplicity of the characters keeps the battles low on emotional stakes and makes it harder to get fully invested in them. This wouldn't be too much of an issue if the battles opted to focus on being strategic instead, like with Hunter x Hunter or Jujutsu Kaisen, but the battles are extremely straightforward; that lack of a push towards either direction leads to many of the fights coming off as merely functional rather than being essential to the story or the characters. The biggest exception to this would be the battle that takes place in volume 3 between one of the main characters, Hiryu, and his childhood friend Tatsuo, who had previously gone missing in Psyren only for Tatsuo to have been turned into a Taboo. It's given a fair amount of dramatic weight as Hiryu owes much of his current image as a tough guy to becoming someone Tatsuo could look up to since the latter spent his entire childhood unable to walk, but while those extra stakes make this fight more memorable, it's sadly the exception rather than the rule, and it ends up being the most Hiryu has to do in these volumes as he largely fades into the ensemble afterwards.

Still, while it's a little easy to see how these issues might have prevented Psyren from becoming a big commercial success, they aren't anywhere near severe enough to keep it from being an extremely fun comic. Even if it doesn't quite do enough with its characters to reach its full potential, the series does enough with its overarching mystery and explosive battles to make for an overall easy read that does just enough well to be consistently enjoyable. In that respect, it's not hard to see why the series has maintained a loyal following even over a decade past its conclusion, and even though it doesn't quite reach the heights of Shonen Jump's heaviest hitters, it's still more than good enough to be worth a read.