The Comic Corner: Bus Gamer “The Pilot Edition”

Bus Gamer was one of the first mangas I’ve ever bought for my collection. I’m rather proud of this find, got it off the discount aisle at National Bookstore back when they had a bigger stock of these things, and it was also my first standalone manga that didn’t need any further volumes to be complete. That, and it has a more mature plot than any of my other mangas back then.

The story is set in modern day Japan where various corporations gamble their corporate secrets in an illegal simulation game conducted secretly in the city of Tokyo. Each corporation have a three-person team who were given a disk containing their respective trade secrets, and their “players” have to steal the opposing team’s disk under a time limit while protecting their own. This was the Biz game (a more accurate title name than the official one). There are no rules. Anything goes, anyone can die. And the main characters Toki Mishiba, Nobuto Nakajyo, and Kazuo Saitoh, players who were originally only in it for the money, are starting to fight for their lives as the stakes keep getting high.

If you think the artwork’s any familiar, that’s because this title was made by Kazuya Minekura, the prolific Japanese author mostly known for the Saiyuki series. She is also known for putting on hiatus any of her long-term projects that isn’t the Saiyuki series.

The copy I got was the “Pilot Edition” which compiled the first eleven chapters of the story before the series was cancelled due to serialization problems. Minekura mentioned in the afterword that she planned to get back to this series eventually because she liked the characters and had no intention of ending the series with just this. But it had been at least 13 years since that time and she had moved on to other projects. Safe to say that Bus Gamer was left with the rest of her other on-hiatus works to gather dust.

An 3-episode anime based on this was released last 2008, and that maybe the only progress we could expect from this title. Pity, and this work had so much potential to end just here…