Chalk this one up to a "good idea, mediocre execution." Shin Yamamoto's third English language release (following Sekiro Side Story: Hanbei the Undying and Monster Hunter: Flash Hunter) tells the story of two brothers who have lost everything. First, their parents abandoned them as children, then they were shuffled around between relatives before their grandmother took them in... and she's just died. At the same moment, older brother Kaname loses his job, they get evicted from their apartment, and then Kaname loses his wallet with their remaining savings. Kaname's reaction is to scream and get angry, while high school student Kanade retreats deeper into his cynicism. But neither of them quite knows what to do when an ad appears on their phone, offering an astronomical sum for taking care of a little monster problem.

When you're stuck between the frying pan and the fire, there are no good choices, and that's essentially what the brothers realize. They're in no position to turn down a well-paying job, and if it seems highly suspicious, well, that's just a risk they'll have to take. Neither of them imagines that what they're being asked to do is enter a real-life video game setup and fight actual monsters with weapons granted to them by the app they download, or that they'll be held financially responsible for any damage caused by their battles to the surrounding area. There's also the catch that they can't fight together because they only own one smartphone between them, so this can't be a team effort, at least not unless they team up with someone else.

At first blush, this looks like it's going to be a story about the gamification of life. If that's not a term you're familiar with, "gamification" is when non-game activities and settings are given game-like attributes to boost engagement. One good example is Amazon's Kindle "reading challenge," which awards achievements for reading a specific amount, a specific book or genre, or on set days. There's no prize, but the fact that I completed all challenges when it first popped up, hoping for a free book or a discount shows how effective it is as a strategy because, as a regular reader, reading is its reward for me. The promise of huge financial gain for defeating monsters using the app's proprietary technology seems to function the same way in What This World Is Made Of, especially since there's so much fine print that Kaname skips over every single time.

If this is the case, Yamamoto eschews it in favor of...well, not much. There's no reveal, or even hint, that this is an Ender's Game situation, and while that may be forthcoming, it doesn't help keep the plot moving here. There are hints that the app preys specifically upon people in distress, as the boys' new ally Tohko is shown trying to pay for hospital treatment for an unnamed person, but not quite enough is done with this information. Tohko seems to feel trapped in her work, while Kaname isn't in the habit of thinking hard about much. Only Kanade has any questions, but he doesn't do much with them, instead allowing himself to be drawn into a situation he has reservations about. Despite being repeatedly told that the brothers have nothing, this doesn't feel quite high stakes enough; we're told much more than we're shown (including about how close the brothers are) which takes away from the story's urgency.

That's not to say that there's no interesting world-building going on. Tohko's observation that the longer a monster's name, the harder it is to take down plays into the idea of gamification, and the opening scenes do make an argument for a later Ender's Game-style reveal—a person watching a plane fly while tabulating the stats and values of the machine and its passengers is more than a little unsettling. There's also an attempt at interesting monster designs, with the chicken monster from the last battle of the volume standing out. Yamamoto comments that he put a chicken on a T-rex skeleton, which works much better than you might expect for a visually interesting, creepy monster.

The art doesn't do the book a whole lot of favors in general, although, again, it has its moments. The biggest weakness is drawing people, specifically the thighs and lower torso. There's an odd squareness to that area that looks wrong, made a little more unsettling by the lack of flow in the linework. It's a visually blocky experience, which isn't great in an action story. I do, however, appreciate that the brothers aren't identical or similar in appearance. We see that they're related, through their actions and body language. That's not something we see all that often in this sort of media.

At the end of the day, What This World Is Made Of doesn't quite live up to the promise of its plot. It meanders a bit, feeling choppy and not nearly as high stakes as it needs to be, and some awkward art doesn't help. It absolutely may pick up later, but there isn't much here that's making me want to run out and grab volume two.