Biomega

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Biomega is a 2007 Cyberpunk Science Fiction manga by Tsutomu Nihei.

Twenty 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 used in Biomega include:
  • 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 Mega Corp. 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.
  • Artificial Human: Zouichi
  • Badass Biker: Zouichi
  • BFG: Zouichi's coil rifle.
  • Biopunk: 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.
  • Cool Bike
  • Cool Guns: In pistol form, it can shoot through an entire jet. With add ons, it becomes strong enough to shoot down nuclear missiles. In orbit. From the surface.
  • Call a Smeerp a Rabbit: The technorganic Big Creepy-Crawlies are called "horses". But so is Zouichi's motorcycle.
  • Fanon: Everybody knew this was a prequel to BLAME! untill the news came out that Word of God said it wasn't.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Mega Corp: Toha Heavy Industries and the DRF
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Cyberpunk zombies! From Mars!
  • 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.
  • Organic Technology: The Polymer.
  • Perpetual Motion Monster: Synthetic humans, who can go for weeks without water and months without eating and not weaken.
  • Ramming Always Works: "I still have one projectile left."
  • Rule of Cool: Responsible for quite a lot of the plot, action and character design.
  • 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.
  • Scenery Gorn
  • Shout-Out: There are a lot, but the most obvious are the AI companions that appear as 10 inch tall, pretty young ladies in tight fitting clothes with odd vertical black markings. Now where have I seen that before?
    • Your first thought when seeing Fuyu is "Oh, hello Cortana." And she even has the same job.
      • This is by the same guy that did the Halo comic so I don't think anyone minds.
      • Given how ridiculously powerful Zoichi's pistol is its safe to say that Nihei did not approve of the nerfing of Halo:CE's pistol. That's right boys and girls, we may have found a Japanese Halo fan, they do exist!
    • The RDF's Ax Crazy patrol officers wear aprons and masks that look like faces. Hmmm...
    • The Mega Corp 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.
  • Transhuman: Just about everyone.
  • Twenty 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: Turns you into zombies, or superhuman cyborg zombies.
  • White-Haired Pretty Girl: Yion
  • World Shapes: If the enemy gets their way, it will result in the creation of a bizarre new world which is shaped like a giant worm.
  • Zombie Apocalypse
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