I read it once, got halfway (like chapter 50) and then realized I'd been coasting for the past 20 chapters, not really understanding anything. I put it down. Later I tried again, put it down. Within the last year I purchased physical copies of volume 1 and volume 2 and I told myself that I would UNDERSTAND THIS MANGA.
I got out a notebook. I wrote and circled the different personalities and tried to write down what was happening as the plot points developed. I'm a bit proud to say that I understood it much more when the 4th (?) time around, but it still was very confusing.
There's a fine line an author, writer, or comic artist has to draw between "giving up the ghost too soon" and "being obscure to the point of ridiculousness". Unfortunately, this manga falls into the latter near the last half of the story. I don't know if it's the intention that I simply stop caring about what the ultimate plan was, but it sure succeeded in doing that. I've read other works that were part of big government conspiracies that--while they were either out in the open upon discovery or remained secretive--still captured my interest.
Lucy Monostone is like, I don't know, the Joker from Batman. He is never pinned down, there is never anything that really tells us who he is, much less what the heck his cronies and that frequently naked woman's true goals are. Difference between the Joker and Monostone is that with the Joker you don't care about the backstory, you're set up with the backstory not mattering. With Monostone, the backstory is all I want to know about, the motives, the exact psychology of this dude, and I'm not given that. So I'm left with a vague boogieman that becomes more than tiresome whenever the main characters fail to promptly pin him down or hit a dead end.
I'm all for psychological mind games and plot twists, but not when they add up to a bunch of circles and nothing.