When a franchise spawns a spin-off manga, the sensible reaction is to lower expectations and check your wallet. Tie-ins are usually more product than art, and the only suspense is whether the pages will fall out before you finish. But Resident Evil: The Marhawa Desire turns out to be a more interesting beast. It’s half franchise pamphlet, half Gothic boarding-school tragedy, with enough grotesque invention to make even long-time fans raise an eyebrow. The fact that it’s meant to set up a video game is almost incidental; what matters is that it sometimes forgets its job as a sales pitch and remembers to be a story.
With a franchise as big as Resident Evil, it inevitably develops the habits of a monarchy: new heirs must be produced, old scandals explained away, and the palace archive tidied to ensure the bloodline looks continuous even when the bastards outnumber the legitimate children. And yet, like many such commercial obligations, it turns out to be both more and less than what was ordered.
The “more” lies in its setting. Serizawa has the good sense to locate his story at Marhawa Academy, a boarding school so lavishly Gothic it makes Hogwarts look like a comprehensive in Croydon. It has chapels, cloisters, and dormitories designed less for study than for the choreography of despair. It is, in short, the perfect place for an outbreak. The “less” lies in the plot’s compulsion to dovetail with the larger franchise, which means that what begins as a deliciously claustrophobic tragedy is eventually hijacked by the BSAA—an international task force who believe that no problem cannot be solved by shooting at it from several directions at once.
The story begins, promisingly, with Professor Doug Wright and his student Ricky Tozawa summoned to the school to investigate “an incident.” One should always be wary when fictional institutions speak in euphemisms. “Incident” usually means “unspeakable carnage,” and here it is no different. An infection has taken hold, but the school’s leadership is determined to maintain appearances, even if it means locking doors on the sick and hoping nobody notices the moaning from the other side. This is where Serizawa’s manga is at its sharpest: the virus spreads, but so does denial. Vanity and secrecy do more harm than teeth and claws ever could.
The art is the manga’s true triumph. Serizawa draws his monsters as if they were clerical errors in the body’s blueprints—organs sprouting where they shouldn’t, teeth erupting like stalactites in places best left smooth. These are not sleek predators; they are the failures of biology, still twitching in embarrassment. Against this, the academy is rendered with stately care, its corridors and spires looming like judgement. The contrast is effective: the orderly stage, the chaotic players.
And yet, as ever with Resident Evil, the Gothic mood cannot last. Just as we are settling into a darkly amusing meditation on prestige schools and their willingness to sacrifice students on the altar of reputation, the franchise cavalry arrives. Chris Redfield and Piers Nivans storm in, and with them the story abandons its air of Edgar Allan Poe for something closer to Transformers on study leave. Guns blaze, buildings collapse, and all the quiet dread of the opening chapters is trampled beneath combat boots. The shift is not entirely unwelcome—after all, Resident Evil is supposed to supply explosions—but it is jarring. It is like watching The Turn of the Screw suddenly turn into Die Hard 5.
The characters fare variably. Professor Wright is set up as a tragic figure, though his downfall feels dictated more by the demands of the script than by his own flaws. Ricky, the student, is earnest and brave but reactive, as if his role is mainly to keep the reader company. Chris and Piers do what Chris and Piers always do: look grim and fire weapons. Only the school leadership, especially the imperious headmistress, achieves anything close to real dramatic weight. Their obsession with preserving Marhawa’s image makes them more frightening than the infected, because their reasoning is recognisable. We have all met the sort of administrator who would rather everyone die quietly than the institution be embarrassed publicly.
Themes? There are some. The manga is haunted by the idea that institutions are more dangerous than pathogens—a theme that would have felt sharp even before the recent global pandemic and feels positively prophetic now. Serizawa also seems aware that in the Resident Evil universe, viruses are not just weapons but performances: outbreaks are staged as spectacles, complete with theatrical reveals and grand transformations, as if bio-terror were a branch of opera.
And yet, for all this, the book is inescapably a tie-in. Its final volumes are hurried, its revelations crammed, and its ending deliberately unresolved so that Resident Evil 6 can claim the narrative’s inheritance. This gives the whole enterprise the air of an unfinished symphony—glorious in its movements, but with the finale scribbled in the margin: “see game for details.”
Still, there is something oddly memorable about The Marhawa Desire. It is Resident Evil dressed in academic robes, staging a zombie outbreak like a graduation ceremony gone very wrong. At its best, it is gripping, grotesque, and grandly absurd. At its worst, it is marketing copy with teeth. But in the end, much like the Academy itself, the surface grandeur is only half the story. It’s the rot beneath that makes it fascinating.
In fact, The Marhawa Desire is like most boarding schools: full of tradition, obsessed with appearances, and liable to drive you mad if you stay too long. The only difference is that here, when the students turn on you, it isn’t in the debating chamber but in the dining hall—and they come equipped with more teeth than arguments.
