Now that the final battle with Sun and Luna is over and done with, Undead Unluck gets the ball rolling on an epilogue in chapter 238. The actual final chapter is coming next week, but things already aren’t off to a good start.

To be fair, the final arc of Undead Unluck hasn’t exactly been great up until this point. While performing a timeskip centered around Fuuko sounded like a good idea in concept, what it ultimately meant was the exclusion of Andy and the introduction of more forgettable characters to fill the void. As a result, the climactic final battle was filled with a lot of unknown faces, plus a couple of plot contrivances that didn’t feel very well established.

Nevertheless, the thematic message still shone through. As immortal god-like beings, Sun and Luna misunderestimated the potential of humans to evolve over a limited lifespan as well as the power of love: a cheesy conclusion, for sure, but one that falls exactly in line with this series’ bombastic presentation. The error that Undead Unluck chapter 238 makes is to take this clichéd approach too far, ultimately cheapening the sacrifices made to get to this point.

Having lost their Negator abilities, the remaining members of the Union are left to shape the new world without gods and UMAs as they see fit. They decide to add Revolution back as a rule after Nico remarks that the Earth’s rotation around the sun is key for the manifestation of seasons, but everything else is left more or less as is. Perhaps the only loose end is Fuuko, who lost all of her memories after using the artifact Heart in the final battle: Andy reassures everyone, however, that he has a plan.

This is where Undead Unluck chapter 238 falls down. After taking the clueless Fuuko back to the bridge where they first met, he sees none other than Soul standing in the exact place where Fuuko was at the beginning of the series: Luna left him alive to pass judgement on the world that the Negators would create, but the important thing is that he has the ability to bring Fuuko’s memories back. Although this takes some cajoling from Andy and a brief conversation with Ruin, the status quo is eventually restored in the end.

On the one hand, you could see this as the ultimate victory of the Union over the UMAs: not only have they won the literal battle against Sun and Luna, but they’ve also managed to win the moral conquest over their point of view. Even so, it does also feel like something of a deus ex machina that cheapens the sacrifice Fuuko made only a couple of weeks ago. Try as you might, you can’t have your cake and eat it too!

What makes things even more baffling is the fact that it would make perfect thematic sense for Andy to live alongside a version of Fuuko who doesn’t know who he is, because Fuuko did exactly the same thing with Andy when she went into his past during the Autumn arc. It seems like such an own goal to miss this obvious parallel, which only results in the series feeling more disjointed and less consequential as a result. 

If this is the kind of quality we can expect from the Undead Unluck’s ending… then I’m not very excited.

You can read Undead Unluck chapter 238 in English for free via VIZ Media's Shonen Jump.