Despite looking like an unassuming basketball manga for most of the first chapter, Creature! is actually a pretty gruesome survival horror piece wherein an earthquake (or possibly Meteor Strike) unleashes hideous monsters upon an unassuming Tokyo ward. It hits most of the checkpoints of the genre right off the bat: reasonably tragic hero, childhood crush in danger, hot girl he barely knows, class thug along for the ride, and massive amounts of carnage. While it wouldn't be fair to just call it a checkpoint series, it honestly feels a little hollow beyond those markers, although right now it seems reasonable to think that Honda is simply trying to start things off with a bang before taking a breath to explain.

The highlight of this volume is unquestionably the monsters themselves. They're some of the grossest I've seen, with my personal nightmare beast being the one that looks like it's entirely made up of festering pustules, claws, and jagged teeth. There's a monster for every fear, however, with one looking like a giant hairy centipede and another having more skeletal components, and all of them hungry for at least bits and pieces of human flesh. Or are they? We see down the gullet of one of them as the characters are fleeing, and the people are definitely not digesting or even all that chewed up. That does feel a bit Attack on Titan-y, but it's sufficiently scary that Honda does pull it off even without those associations.

The problem right now is that Creature! doesn't have anything to stand on beyond horrible man-eating monsters of mysterious origin and Akira and Co. running for their lives. Given that the only character we have any sort of emotional stake in is Akira, and that was only for half a chapter of fairly typical shounen romance stuff, that's an issue, because we really do need to care if these people get eaten or not. If Miku is alive, that could up the stakes considerably, as could the discovery of her death, but most of all, what this series needs to do next is rest and regroup so that we can have a reason to want the characters to remain alive. Otherwise all the nightmare monsters in the world won't be able to keep this from being nothing more than a jog around decimated Tokyo.