Lost in the Megastructure - The Infinite World of BLAME!

BLAME!│© Tsutomu Nihei

You’re dropped into a world that seems endless. Each page you turn reveals a maze of impossibly vast corridors, massive structures, lifeless machines, and a suspiciously silent figure named Killy.

Behind this archive of stunningly beautiful yet eerily wordless panels, Tsutomu Nihei is doing something brilliant: he is building one of the most ambitious fictional worlds in manga.

The City That Ate the World

The setting of BLAME! is called The City. A rather reductive term for a structure that’s been expanding for centuries, endlessly building itself in every direction. No one’s steering the ship anymore. The systems meant to keep it in check have long gone haywire, if they’re even functional at all. Humans are practically obsolete and the AI is not particularly friendly. Civilization as we know it has been swallowed whole.

And so you get The Megastructure, a city so vast it’s measured in light years. It grows out of control and without purpose. Architecturally, the structure is filled with endless concrete caverns, cables, and staircases that lead nowhere. It’s clear that whatever is shaping this infinite world, humans have no part in it anymore.

It’s near impossible to fully grasp how vast the BLAME! Universe is, which is kind of the point. Just as it’s perceived by the characters, it’s not meant to be understood. Nihei purposely buries you into his world where time and scale dissolve. What’s man-made, what’s organic, and what’s leftover from a forgotten war? Everything merged into one indistinguishable mass.

Nihei the Architect

Before Tsutomu Nihei was a manga artist, he trained as an architect. He caries this knowledge and skill into his panels as he designs the City. It’s clear that Nihei’s understanding of spatial anxiety is unmatched. There’s an unsettling realism to his vision, a sparse but surgical edge that his architectural background only sharpens.

While reading it’s almost as if you’re getting crushed by it. He managed to render space with such psychological tension that it carries most of BLAME!’s horror factor.

In a weird way, BLAME! doesn’t feel like fiction. The level of immersion created by Nihei rather feels as if Killy is documenting a world that exists somewhere out there in the void.

BLAME!│© Tsutomu Nihei

World-Building by Omission

BLAME! has barely any dialogue. Almost no narration. Most characters you meet don’t even last long enough to introduce themselves. And yet, somehow, this makes the world feel more real. Maybe because that’s how the world would work when it’s falling apart. When only survival is on your mind, there’s no explanation for the chaos, nor time to explain.

You catch glimpses of civilizations clinging to survival in hidden chambers, while Transhuman entities are waging private wars. Ruined control systems running ghost routines from a long-dead society. You’re walking through the decaying yet living remnants of a forgotten world.

But The City has more to offer than pure fear. Every layer hints at a deeper, more terrifying logic, one that was once designed, then lost, then buried. It’s a Lovecraftian ancient horror made of code and circuitry. The silence in BLAME! creates a wall between you and understanding. A constant reminder that you’re just a visitor in this universe, and that it owes you absolutely nothing.

Silicon Life and the NetSphere You’ll Never Access

In all this silence, there’s a plot, technically. Killy is looking for someone with the Net Terminal Gene (an ancient bit of biological code that can access the long-lost NetSphere), a sort of cyberspace control room that could in theory reboot the world. Standing in his way: Silicon Life (rogue cyborg factions obsessed with evolution through violence), the Safeguards (the system’s corrupted immune response that kills humans on sight), and roughly 75 billion tons of concrete.

Killy isn’t a big talker. He makes his way through The City while shooting at anything that blocks his path. It’s unclear whether he even fully understands his mission. But nonetheless he keeps going. A motivation that doesn’t stem out of hope, as we learn pretty early on that hope doesn’t last long in BLAME!, but out of sheer momentum.

Again, Nihei doesn’t care if you understand any of this. Apart from building a neat sci-fi system that defies manga architectural standards, he’s crafting a mood. And that mood is alone. Unfathomably alone.

BLAME!│© Tsutomu Nihei

Legacy of a Monolith

When BLAME! dropped in the late ’90s it didn’t create a big fuzz. Yet over the years, its influence seeped into the corners of Japanese sci-fi and cyberpunk, as it grew to become known as an absolute cult classic in its genre. You can see its DNA in Knights of Sidonia (also Nihei’s), in video games like Dark Souls, Nier, and Hyper Light Drifter. It taught creators that mystery without explanation can become the entire point.

BLAME! dares you to get lost and feel small, a survival manual for a world you forgot existed.

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