If you love ‘Berserk’ and ‘Vinland Saga,’ you’ll get a kick out of ‘Centuria.’
If one were to look at what’s hot on Manga Plus, a manga-reading app filled with banner titles like One Piece, Chainsaw Man, and Jujutsu Kaisen Modulo, they might be led to believe that this trio is the reason the app is worth downloading in a sea of reading apps that are more of a monetization hassle than they’re worth. However, the real manga that make the app essential aren’t these tenured shonen, but newer blood series. Alongside MAD, another manga series that more people should be obsessed with is the dark fantasy Centuria.
Reductively, Centuria, created by Tohru Kuramori, feels like a chimera of Makoto Yukimura‘s pacifist warrior odyssey, Vinland Saga, by way of Kentaro Miura‘s brutal and melancholic masterpiece, Berserk. On its own merits, however, reading the manga as it has evolved from week to week since its debut in 2024 has been nothing short of witnessing a literary powderkeg poised to push dark fantasy into a new echelon after an era dominated by works that felt more derivative of Berserk than genuinely self‑defined.
Centuria follows Julian, a boy with a truly messed-up past who finds himself as a stowaway on a ship filled with slaves awaiting their freedom. There, he befriends his fellow slaves, most of all Mira, a pregnant woman who rekindles his faith not only in humanity but also in his right to live a happy life. That is, until the shoe you’re waiting to fall, having read the previous sentences, hits him like a Mack truck. His fellow slaves are massacred by the ship captain, and to make matters worse, an eldritch emerges from the sea. During all the chaos, said eldritch being makes a bargain with Julian, granting him supernatural abilities by gifting him the combined strength of his slaughtered friends as well as their combined lives. In essence, Julian becomes a quasi-immortal being: with every death he suffers, he is resurrected, and his tally of 100 lives dwindles.
