Tsutomu Nihei's beautifully drawn and interestingly conceived series Blame! landed poorly for me, squarely where I was hoping it would not land...
I enjoy ambiguous narratives (Lynch's Lost Highway is an all time favorite, and I like Panos, Jodorowsky, and Yorgos movies quite a bit), and I enjoy interesting science fiction (especially hard stuff like Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter), but from the third (Master Edition) volume of Blame! onward, I was concerned that rather than resolve the interesting elements put into play, Nihei would simply repeat what he had done earlier.
Beautifully drawn, Blame! is:
1. Characters explore excellent, atmospheric, and arterial environments;
2. Protagonists fight H.R. Geiger/Bubblegum Crisis mechs (mostly but not always comprehensibly);
3. With little exposition or unclear exposition, "people" toss around odd tech allusions
If the piece had far less technobabble and was akin to something like Daft Punk's Electroma, I could have enjoyed this as an abstruse, visually lush cyberpunk travelogue, but the introduction of so many plot elements hampered my ability to relish the action and environments on a simpler/more emotional level because my brain was so tied up with all of the data and enigmas, trying to make some sense of things.
I'm sure some understood this series better than I did, but considering that some of the action itself is unclear, I'm not certain how much of this was supposed to be "ambiguous" or just wound up that way...possibly to make it seem deeper or to cover up haphazard narrative that stitches battles together.
So in the end, Nihei's insistence on continually introducing new plot ideas and concepts and having almost incessant action rather than resolving anything led me to feel the story was at its best, most engrossing, most atmospheric, most intelligible and--in many ways--most complete when I had only read the first book, possibly the first two, rather than all six, which expanded, complicated, and repeated the experience of the first two less enjoyably and less clearly, again and again.
For this reason, I preferred the far shorter (and still narratively challenging) Abara by this incredible illustrator and designer.
Update:
I had hoped to have better luck with BioMega, but didn't. Again, I enjoyed the first third and found that the story grew increasingly confusing (both in terms of plot and the scratchy artwork during the action sequences) as things progressed.
Although I should've already learned my lesson regarding Nihei, I am reading Aposimz and hope that it coheres better than the aforementioned, but I have doubts...