Cipher Academy Part 1: Unedited Audio and Recording Notes

Manga Details

• Author: NISIO, ISIN (Story), Iwasaki, Yuuji (Art)

• Run dates: Nov 21, 2022 to Feb 5, 2024

• Chapters/Volumes: 58/7

About the Manga

• Plot

  • Iroha is a first year student at Cipher Academy: an all-girls school dedicated to training code breakers. While studying alone, a girl named Kogoe rushes into the room, begging them to hide her, which they do. Soon after a girl named Toshusai, heiress to the weapons manufacturer Kick Attack, and her posse, consisting of Omomuro and Tayu, enter looking for her and Iroha feigns ignorance, and Toshusai reveals to the reader that Iroha is actually a boy? At an all-girls schools? WOAAAAH??? After she leaves, Kogoe gives Iroha glasses that help him solve puzzles which is good because that’s the whole manga. Toshusai and her underlings approach Iroha and demand that he tell them if he received something from Kogoe, and make him solve a puzzle where if he fails he has to become her manservant. Iroha uses the glasses to solve it and then Kogoe speaks through the glasses, telling Toshusai that she’s gotta be his maidservant now, which ends up being exactly the same as it was except she refers to him as master. Kogoe then asks Iroha to help her find the 50 billion Morg crypto hidden at Cipher academy. If she finds it she says she can stop all wars, or at least half of them, you know? But then Toshusai says to her posse that Kogoe actually wants to cause more wars cuz she’s actually evil woah! 

  •  It’s time for the class to determine its “leading private” which I guess is like the class rep or something. Some decoding happens and Iroha winds up in a group with Toshusai and a girl named Ensa who’s goblin mode and can do stuff really fast. Together they decode a jigsaw. Iroha asks a scary girl named Oboro for help and she asks Iroha why he’s even here, to which Iroha says he wants to end all wars. Anyway the answer to the code is “start” because this is just the “start” of the arc get it? Kogoe approaches Iroha with a video of a soldier dancing in code, and Iroha, revealing that he’s an incredible dancer, identifies every move he’s doing determines that he’s asking for help. The process of decoding is so taxing that Iroha faints and wakes up in the nurse’s office where Tayu is waiting for him. She challenges to a code fight that ends in a draw but traumatizes Iroha. He discovers that a royal girl named Nohime beat Toshusai in a game and now she has to talk about butts at least ten times a day. He challenges her to a code battle where if he wins she has to void the punishment. Toshusai calls the whole thing off but Nohime takes a liking to Iroha and offers to give him 100 million bitcoin. 

  • The next few chapters are an extremely convoluted game of mafia and all that matters is that Iroha wins and becomes a candidate for the next phase of selection where he has to play coded poker against a girl named “Anonymity Requested” who wears fancy glasses that look like a censor bar. He gets her to take them off and ends up winning, becoming the leading private. Iroha and Omomuro have a dance battle to make up for some shit that happened earlier, and she reveals to him that there’s a password he needs that will update his special glasses from AR to VR which will let him take classes in THE METAVERSE where Kogoe goes to school WOAH. Just then another leading private named Shitai Kubanashi walks in and says that all the leading privates are gonna combine their passwords to get the 50 million dogecoin and Iroha better be there or be square. At the meeting it’s determined that all the classes are gonna code fight each other with the winning leading private becoming the Code Emperor and will get all the buttcoin. Iroha’s first match is against Kubanashi’s class.

• Characters

  • Iroha Irohazaka

    • Is a boy?

    • Not good at puzzles

    • Becoming better and more confident in themselves

    • Lord of the dance

    • Has gone through horrific trauma where his entire class on the cheer squad was murdered in a refugee camp and only he survived because he looked like a girl holy shit. 

  • Kogoe Horagatoge

    • Wants to be a hero

    • Warmonger

    • Loves crypto

  • Toshusai

    • School idol

    • Puzzle queen

    • Mean

    • Has to talk about butts

Why it failed

• This is such a fucking dense concept

• So many of these puzzles don’t translate

• Fucking crypto shit too

• These puzzles seem unrealistic and not solvable without cheating so it’s hard to feel like I could have solved them myself

• I’m not really getting a lot of character interactions it all feels like discussion for the sake of plot rather than organic conversations

• They kind of force the use of other students, having the intro puzzle for everyone (or just pieces of it) would have been nice

• Why does no one besides Iroha struggle with puzzles

• The art while high quality is…plain?

• I don’t find the M plot that interesting tbh

• This author looooves retconning things to seem clever

• It could have used more variety in the puzzles like some social deduction, logic, scavenger hunt, or hell an escape room 

• The puzzles are so single focused nothing feels lived in about the world, where's the student government, athletics or even clubs?

• Its just so tiring to read this like I'm sure a lot of people read it last every week 

• Wait where are the other male students 

What it did well

• I think the writing style is cute, I like the diegetic introduction of elements like character names

• Honestly maybe the puzzles being insanely difficult is better because then you don’t feel like you failed

• I like how the glasses help but do not solve the puzzles

• Lmao I love the dance battle it would have been nice if they actually played it straight though

• I like the balance of the economics of wars, you can’t just remove all wars as then it removes your resources

• I’m so glad they started playing around with the glasses it would have been annoying otherwise

• Showing the other characters solve the intro puzzle is fun

• The author has fun little trivia for the characters like catchphrases 

• I’m actually enjoying it, it’s got a nice pace and at least the puzzles seem exciting

• I like the imagery

• The cake chapter was fun and light 

• There's honestly a lot to like

• I love how Tayu’s threat to traumatize Iroha actually meant something

Misc Thoughts

• Legit RIP the translator, god this must have been awful

• Crypto currency is more like cryptic currency, bazinga!

• Wouldn’t such an insane influx of that cryptocurrency crash its value?

• This shit is like Yu-Gi-Oh rules

• Baumkuchen, which literally translates to "tree cake" or "log cake”

• How ya not gana call digital cypher academy cyber academy 

• Where was the cypher freestyle rapping section