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.