Tower Dungeon

Tsutomu Nihei

Jul 2025 · Tower Dungeon Vol 1 · Kodansha USA

About this ebook

An evil necromancer slays the king and carries off his daughter, secreting her in the legendary Dragon Tower. To save the princess, her steadfast Royal Guard assays the stronghold, but the way is blocked by powerful eldritch creatures… So, to supplement their forces in the face of mounting casualties, they press ordinary folks from the surrounding villages into service-including Yuva, a sturdy young farmboy with a strong back but no experience in battle, and only a battered old helm and wooden shield to protect him. Master of science fiction Tsutomu Nihei (Blame!, Knights of Sidonia) turns his unique storytelling voice and architectural eye to fantasy for the first time, offering a dark, gritty tale of swords and sorcery, bravery and adventure, great heroes and ultimate evil. Gird your loins, heft your blade, and enter the Dragon Tower.

Ratings and reviews

Thank you Kodansha and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review! This is an interesting dungeon-crawler type comic, with a mixed group of people attempting to save a princess. The art is absolutely beautiful, and I do enjoy the story a lot. It's interesting and leaves me with a lot of questions. Enough that I'll likely continue the series. There are some issues, though. For one, I think the story was paced too fast. I would have liked to get to know our main characters a little more. And within two chapters they climbed to the 60th floor of the dungeon. It would have been neat to see some of the floors and the monsters they fought. I hope the next volumes will slow down the story and really show us the world and its people more.

a dark gritty experience and with a little bit of music to go with it makes the experience more enjoyable to read. I was going to watch a YouTube vid on it then decided to buy the manga instead, I wanna know what happens and I'm looking forward to the next part. a must read for anyone into stuff like berserk, or even the mindset for stuff like Mörk-Borg. it leaves a wanting to run a dungeon of my own with themes that this manga series gives off.

This story stands out for giving a clear-cut end goal that so many of the isekai works flooding the medieval fantasy genre lack. The one thing taking me out of the story is the expectation that the author will reveal a collapsed sci-fi society somewhere down the line as many of their other works tend to build off of one.