I’ve always said that Shuzo Oshimi is a master at writing stories about sex without being exploitative. Drifting Net Café is an exception. It’s the opposite. And it’s a very fucking weird story. It mostly works, but the gratuitous indulgence in sexual violence drags the manga down without adding extra dimension to it.

I don’t really want to go into it, but there’s a lot of sex abuse scenes that are a lazy way to push the plot forward. Even then, they didn’t need to be depicted to the degree that they were. These scenes fetishize the power imbalance rather than just depicting the event. None of it is mechanically or thematically necessary.

The central plot is about unrequited romance and using regret as a means of escapism. There’s elements of it that resonated with me. I think the central themes were consistently held and realized in the end, but the story would’ve been much better off had it indulged less in trashy shock value and more in its character psychology.

The initial premise has a group of people at a net café becoming stranded in an unknown world, becoming a Lord of the Flies parable. It gets ridiculously dark at times, to the point I couldn’t believe it was an Oshimi work.

The trashy stuff is entertaining from a “junk food” perspective. It just doesn’t mesh well with the emotional core that’s actually really promising and could’ve held up the entire manga. It also would’ve given it more time to add depth, as much of the text is spent developing the survival story.

I mostly enjoyed Drifting Net Café, but it’s unfortunately really stupid and has a dozen asterisks attached to any recommendation. Sweet Poolside has a dozen asterisks but it’s also not a very interesting or engaging story. It’s inconsequential. Drifting Net Café actually has some shit in it that works. Overall, it was interesting enough to where I’m glad I finally got the chance to read it.