Heavy Object

Heavy Object is a series of light novels set in a future where the world has fractured into four world powers, each possessing a different ideological basis for their government: the Legitimacy Kingdoms (LK) is composed of monarchies ruled by nobles, the Capital Corporations (CC) is a corporatocracy run by mega-corps, the Faith Organization (FO) is a union of various theocracies of different religions, and the Information Alliance (IA) is a cyberocracy heavily managed by artificial intelligence. With the threat of mutually assured destruction through nuclear weapons is no longer an issue, these factions have brought about the age of ‘clean wars’. While each of the four world powers may be locked in a never-ending war against all others, everything proceeds smoothly and systematically. There is a clear differentiation between safe countries and battlefield countries, wherein the safe countries of each world power are never directly harmed. Furthermore, the battles themselves are almost entire fought by Objects, 50m or so wide mecha that seem to make all other heavy weaponry obsolete.

These novels primarily follow the 37th Mobile Battalion of LK in particular, which is centered around the Object called Baby Magnum. This battalion includes our protagonist, Qwenthur, who is tagging along as a battlefield student in order to learn more about Objects with the goal of eventually becoming a disgustingly rich Object designer. It also includes his best friend Havia, who is a noble from a high-ranking family that joined the military to gain prestige in order to rise in his family’s succession order. Other key figures include the battalion’s sadistic but surprisingly compassionate and very beautiful commander Frolaytia and the Baby Magnum’s immature Elite pilot Milinda. As what is seen as the most troublesome battalion in the LK military, they’re sent to take part in the most annoying operations all across the world.

The novels start off with some world building about how normal soldiers did very little and how Objects did all the fighting. Qwenthur and Havia then break that rule and using their smarts to take down an Object by themselves which is seen as a never-before-seen miracle. The author seems to completely back track on that very quickly. Partly by saying that that was just propaganda to make the never ending wars easier to accept for those back in the safe countries, and partly by emphasizing that the 37th Battalion is always getting sent on bizarre missions. But regardless, the end result is that while this is a mecha series it is primarily from the perspective of infantry who often play the most important roles. The core of each story involves Qwenthur running into some sort of novel super weapon, usually an Object, going in to analyze it, figuring out how it works, and then coming up with and executing a plan to stop it.

Why this works so well is that this is a hard sci-fi series that heavily emphasizes the scientific principles being used in each weapon and the plans that Qwenthur executes usually involve getting pretty deep into how they work. It does gloss over a lot. The scale of things is ridiculous and it doesn’t really explain how it’s at all possible other than referring to mysterious JPLevelHMD reactors. A lot of the time it also feels kind of theoretical because it’s ignoring all the finer details that mess with things, though I suppose it could also be that at the level things are operating at these finer details just stop mattering. Still, this is a fictional series so I find that perfectly okay, and overall I was pretty impressed with what it did have and found it incredibly interesting. It has a lot of variety to the topics it touches on the course of the series which helps keep things from getting repetitive. At least to a degree. Even if the exact science changes somewhat, there’s actually not that much variety to the core concepts behind things so once you start to get a feel for that things do start getting more boring, though for me that wasn’t until the last quarter of the series.

The thing is that the series is heavily focused on this loop of Object destruction and pretty much nothing else. This largely comes down to the way the novel series was decided to be structured. The author wrote the series such that the first volume is required reading, but that after that any volume can be picked up and read without issue. There are obvious exceptions to that in that there’s a two-volume story where the second part requires reading the first part, and the finale essentially requires having read the entire series in order to fully pick up everything on. However, outside of that it does pretty much feel like each volume can stand on it’s own as an independent story.

The issue with that is that it means there’s absolutely no long-term progression in terms of anything. The end of each volume essentially serves as a reset and things go back to the status quo that was set up at the end of the first volume. That means there isn’t really any sort of overarching story. A single volume may have multiple interconnected conflicts, but the conflicts in one volume have pretty much nothing to do with the conflicts in any other. There’s world building in each volume and holistically there’s a lot of great world building. However, the world building feels really disconnected because it never really mixes together or interacts.

There’s also essentially no long-term character development or relationship development. The main cast is a lot of fun and thus easy to get invested in, but they have no development whatsoever. There are a lot of side characters that get development, but even if they do get minor mentions here and there, they’re only really ever important for a single volume (until the finale). The lack of any sort of progression makes the series overall feel like it’s getting kind of dull. As previously mentioned, the finale breaks this trend and tries to push through a lot of progression all at once while connecting everything that happened in all the other volumes. It’s a decent attempt, but that was way too large of an undertaking for two volumes, so it isn’t really able to pull it off all that well, and in the end, I found the ending just okay.

There is one more thing that this series has going for it that I don’t think is mentioned enough. It’s absolutely hilarious. It takes itself seriously at times and does genuinely tackle themes relating to war and conflict. But for the most part despite it being about war it’s incredibly lighthearted and does not take itself seriously at all. Everyone has absurdly exaggerated personalities that are manifesting themselves at all times, especially right in the middle of the action. It is completely and utterly absurd just how moronic Qwenthur and Havia get at times. And it’s even more absurd just how moronic they are all the time. They play really well off the side characters, and with the side characters constantly shuffling about that means a lot of variety to the comedy too. I definitely found this to be one of the highlights of the series.

The fan translation is also really good. It’s rougher than a professional translation in that it has lots of small mistakes here and there, but nothing too major. What makes it impressive though is that the prose in general is natural, fits the atmosphere, and flows well, and on top of that all the jargon and such seem to have been handled well. The art overall was also great, being high quality and having a lot of great character designs. I did feel that for a mecha focused series, the lack of emphasis on mecha in the art was kind of strange. The designs of most of the objects are included and while I think the designs are perfectly fine, the way they’re displayed and such felt kind of weak.

A hard sci-fi mech series that gets repetitive as it progresses due to a lack of overarching progression.

8/10

Neon Genesis Evangelion: ANIMA

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Anima is a semi-sequel to the main series in that it takes place in an alternate timeline where Shinji stopped the attack on NERV HQ and the Human Instrumentality Project was a resounding failure. As a result, it seems Lilith retreated into an impenetrable time locked chronosphere, pulling along those that were with, mainly Gendou and Ritsuko. The story picks up three years later, where the main trio of Shinji, Asuka, and Rei are now attending high school, but are also still serving as Eva pilots. Misato has become the head of NERV Japan, Maya has become the lead scientist, and Kanji is off doing spy things as usual.

The world had been at peace for three years, but things start going wildly off track when an Evangelion like entity that comes to be known as Armaros appears. From the perspective of Armaros, the purpose of humanity is to achieve the Human Instrumentality Project. However, as that has failed, there is no purpose to humanity. As such, his goal is resetting the world and humanity such that the Human Instrumentality Project may be attempted once more. Or to put it more simply, Armaros is a harbinger of the apocalypse.

I found the apocalyptic aspect of the setting really interesting. Most apocalyptic fiction involves civilization quickly collapsing once things get going. However, here even as forces far beyond their control cause the world to fall apart disastrously, the governments and world scale entities of the world very much remain intact. It doesn’t spend a good deal of time on this, but it does deal with things like the effect the world falling apart has on supply chains and communication networks and how to deal with them from a world scale organization’s perspective. As such, it has a very unique apocalyptic feel. A civilized apocalypse if you will. Though that did feel pretty strange at times as well. Mainly in how school stayed open despite everything.

The core of the plot involves the cast investigating Armaros, who he is, where he came from, how he functions, and what specifically he’s trying to do in order to stop him. At first, there’s a good sense of mystery to things and as things are slowly revealed a lot of interesting concepts and mechanics are introduced. However, in the final two books of the series it feels like it’s exhausted most of its idea, and though there still are some pretty cool elements added here and there, it feels like it’s getting pretty repetitive. A large part of that comes down to how there aren’t that many new enemies. There’s Armaros and his two minions who operate wildly differently from Angels and thus result in some pretty interesting fights. However they’re in too many fights without changing all that much, and thus things start getting dull. Beyond that, there’s very heavy reuse of Angels from the main series. There are some interesting twists on things at times, but for the most part it didn’t really feel like it was treading new ground.

Like the main series, there’s a lot of wild use of psuedoscience and Judeo/Christian religious concepts. I would say both of those have been cranked up immensely, for better or worse. The excess of psuedoscience was cumbersome and made it hard to follow along at times. It made some of the action that relied heavily on it especially painful to read through at times. The increase in the use of religious concepts I think was handled much better. The main series I always felt threw in a bunch of random terms, but was very superficial about things and didn’t use them all that well and in the end. There was a lot that just plain made no sense. Here it feels like it uses things much more concretely, wherein the religious subject matter is not just window dressing but actually a critical part of how things play out. It’s also explained more clearly so the overarching plot makes much more sense. I would like to say that it actually makes the original series make more sense as well, though I’m not sure how canon this is to it.

I should note however, that despite things being clearer, that doesn’t make them any less insane. I think this series goes very much toe to toe with the original for how bizarre it gets. The ending unfortunately isn’t an instance of that though. The ending to the series is incredibly generic and the climax doesn’t leave all that strong of an impression. However, similar to the main series, it has a very abrupt ending where once things are over, the story just ends with essentially no falling phase or epilogue. That worked well with what the ending to the original series was trying to do, but here it just feels dissatisfying.

This series also doesn’t really handle characters as well as the main series and doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as much of a focus as it was in the original series. It mentions that Shinji has grown from how he was in the original series in that he doesn’t just push people away anymore. However, it wasn’t all that well written and felt more like it was just telling and not showing. With Asuka it tried to convey that deep down Asuka has a very different personality as compared to what she shows on the surface, but that too wasn’t really fleshed out all that well. With both of them it kind of felt like it was just glossing over their traumas. Rei got the most development as she essentially got multiple overlapping character arcs that were all decently well handled, so she stood out from the crowd as the best written character(s). Toji and Kensuke changed into pretty much completely different characters over the time skip, but as it didn’t really develop the process much it didn’t really feel like they went through character arcs. The same applies to Maya. Everyone else felt pretty much the same as in the main series. There’s also some light romance here, with Shinji/Asuka/Rei and Misato/Kanji, but it was handled pretty badly and didn’t leave all that good an impression.

The translation’s prose was decent enough I guess, but it felt really bogged down by technobabble at times. It also felt like there were a lot of obvious blatant mistakes, such as saying Ritsuko instead of Maya or getting the wrong Eva or Ayanami numbers. At times I felt like it was trying to do something interesting in using the wrong names to mean something, but others make absolutely no sense whatsoever so I think I was just reading too much into things. There were also some grammatical mistakes and such here and there. The art is great with mechs but not all that good with people. Some of the illustrations also felt somewhat low effort in the last volume.

A novel series that’s somewhat of a sequel to Neon Genesis Evangelion that does better in some areas and worse in others, but manages to be just as insane.

7/10

Masou Gakuen HxH (Hybrid x Heart Magias Academy Ataraxia)

This is very clearly an ecchi series, but it has a decent amount of substance outside of that. With that said, most of said substance isn’t that great. The plot is kind of dumb, but within that it still has a lot of interesting concepts. Such as an entire world being caught up in a situation where they have to conquer another world and enslave its inhabitants just to survive and whether it’s morally right to do so. Or a character ending up heavily attached to both factions in a war due to originally being born heavily involved in one but then getting amnesia and spending most of their life on the other until their memories suddenly return. Or gods having existential crises because becoming immortal and all powerful makes everything seem pointless. However, it doesn’t really explore any of these beyond a superficial level, and the resolution to everything is generally overtly easy to the point it feels pretty anti-climactic.

The plot also suffers from the author deciding that he was going to make every single antagonist eventually join the protagonist’s side. While it likely was planned from the start that many would, I don’t think the author committed to having every single one join until a good way into the series. And at that point in order to try to make it work he does some crazy things with the plot that in addition to being somewhat inconsistent and having characters deviate significantly from how they were first portrayed, also just kind of make the entire plot up to that point kind of pointless. Having a structure where every beaten antagonist is switches sides immediately after also lacks the satisfying punch of having beaten a major foe, wherein it would definitely be fine on occasion, but it happening so much gets kind of repetitive and made the plot feel like it was lacking in variety.

With that said, it’s kind of hard to think of who I would want to actually get beaten and disappear. The cast ends up pretty bloated, but at the same time the author manages to write pretty well around that by always giving everyone some presence even if he has to use bizarre gimmicks to do that, and the overall dynamics of the extended cast are pretty great. And though the vast majority of characters are incredibly flat including the main cast, they’re all written amusingly enough that they’re pretty likable. Some even manage to get pretty decent character arcs, mainly Nayuta and Gertrude. Things could probably be heavily rewritten with an improved plot and more depth given to characters, but it’s kind of hard to point at what I would want to change specifically. I’m not sure how to word this properly, but I suppose having a bad plot just works pretty well for this series because it’s more amusing that way.

With that said, the tangential aspects of the story were pretty well written. There’s some pretty solid world building and how the pacing of progression in regards to that was also pretty solid. The action was also surprisingly pretty good and the system in regards to abilities and power ups was fleshed out pretty well, even if what was powering everything was completely absurd. And finally, getting into the ecchi, it has a tremendous amount, and a tremendous amount of variety to it too that seems to hit in a lot of fetishes. It’s also pretty interesting how it starts out relatively light but slowly builds up to finally being straight up hentai in the final and epilogue volumes. And despite how much of a focus it was, it surprisingly felt well blended into the rest of the story. The art was also pretty great in general with pretty good designs all around, though I thought the upgraded mech designs were worse looking than the originals. The English fan translation isn’t all that great, but the prose in the original isn’t especially complicated so despite the translation’s issues reading it flows easy enough.

A very heavily H focused light novel series that does really well in that regard, but is also semi-decent beyond that.

8/10

Garbage Brave: Isekai ni Shoukan sare Suterareta Yuusha no Fukushuu Monogatari

This is the standard type of story where a bunch of people including the protagonist, get summoned to another world and the protagonist seems to be weaker than the rest due to his initial class seeming useless though he then turns out to be vastly overpowered. The particular subtype, which is also quite common, is the one where the protagonist was betrayed and left to die and thus becomes an edgelord that wants revenge. On average isekai light novel series aren’t very original and I’m totally okay with that or I wouldn’t have bothered to read this. Even considering that, I felt that this was exceptionally generic and a lot more blatant than usual about copying elements from specific other series. Still, even with that, if what is being copied is good and the execution is good, I’m generally not all that bothered about it. Unfortunately, while I do like the various concepts in a broad sense, the execution was immensely lacking.

The largest problem is that everything feels so disconnected and random without any sense of flow. This isn’t much of an issue in the first volume, wherein although it does go in a bunch of different directions with a lot of them ultimately being completely pointless, it still felt like there was some level of cohesiveness and I did enjoy the plot at times. However, as the series goes on, everything seems utterly random and arbitrary. The world building is completely nonsensical. The events that drive the overarching plot are all very very different with jarring transitions and usually just feel like unnecessary tangents until suddenly they’re not. This results in so many plot holes that it’s not really fair to call them holes anymore, rather it’s like the various parts of the plot are just floating around haphazardly in a void. And of course, there’s nothing even close to resembling any sense of tone or atmosphere.

The cast face similar issues. Firstly, let’s just get out of the way that there’s no real character development at all in anyone so it already fails completely in that regard. Secondly, everyone is just really inconsistent, especially the protagonist, Tsukuru. His internal monologuing makes him seem like a complete edgelord and he acts like one half the time, but the other half of the time his actions make him come across as a heroic pushover. There’s usually some attempt at explaining said actions in a way that fits with him being an edgelord, but these are usually laughable at best. As such, it’s completely impossible to take him seriously and he ends up seeming so incredibly lame, and that’s coming from someone that generally likes edgelord protagonists.

The same applies to the heroines, and especially to the relationship development between the heroines and Tsukuru. The heroine focused on in the first volume, Canaan, gets some pretty decent relationship development, but with everyone else it’s rushed to the point of completely lacking any substance. Honestly, if it was consistent with that and kept it up, I may well have gotten over it since it’s a true harem sort of situation and the romantic fluff it resulted in was pretty good. But in the last volume the protagonist essentially rejects a heroine because he wants to avoid rushing a relationship, which doesn’t make any sense at all from a character point of view or from a broader thematic point of view, and just puts an emphasis on the failings of the series up to that point.

In terms of the protagonist’s abilities, there’s one ability that makes his ability set completely broken from pretty much the outset and should make all the conflicts he’s in completely trivial. Thus, him not using it all the time is a pretty major plot hole. Still, if it was just that, I would be okay with ignoring it. However, as the series goes on, he just gets even more and more broken to the point that power ups should have no meaning, but there is still a considerable amount of time spent on showing the cast getting stronger which largely feels like a waste of time and completely unsatisfying. It also feels that considering how powerful everyone is, it spends way too much time on just mindless action where it doesn’t really feel like there are any real stakes and thus no sense of suspense at all.

The cover illustrations were all pretty good. The inner illustrations for the first two volumes were okay at best. The latter two volumes were handled by a different artist and were generally better, though they made the protagonist’s face look weird. The bigger issue though, is that the budget was clearly lacking, as there were very few illustrations and no color illustrations at the start like there usually are in light novels. The fan translation from the perspective of the English prose was a mixed bag. Of course there wasn’t anything long term like trying to give character’s consistent voices or trying to adhere to tone and atmosphere as you’d find in a professional translation, but for a fan translation there were times where it read pretty well without feeling overtly stiff. But there were also times where it was written incredibly stiffly and full of errors to the point of being barely readable. And everything in the middle.

A generic isekai that’s also really weak all around.

5/10

I only read this because one of the character’s names was Canaan. lol

Meiyaku no Leviathan (The Leviathan of the Covenant)

Meiyaku no Leviathan is a light novel series set in a world where dragons had suddenly invaded Earth and demanded that certain territories, including portions of a number of capital cities, be abdicated to dragonkind. The dragon lords were incredibly powerful to the point that humanity could not stand before them, so they grudgingly agreed. This satisfied the dragon lords, however the lower dragons, composed of the not quite as powerful as the dragon lords but still quite powerful elites and the endless but relatively weak raptors, still continued attacking humanity and the dragon lords had no intention of interfering. Thus, humanity had to protect themselves. Dealing with raptors was easy enough as they were essentially just oversized flying lizards and could be dealt with through conventional weaponry. However, elites were another matter entirely. Like the dragon lords, they were intelligent, capable of concocting various plans and even using powerful magics. Thus, in response humanity too resorted to the use of magic, and special girls known as witches who were capable of summoning artificial dragons known as leviathans stood on the frontline.

Creating leviathans wasn’t a simple matter however, in that it involved utilizing rare ancient relics that magic had been sealed in. Thus, the profession of treasure hunting suddenly became a lot more worthwhile. Such was the protagonist, Haruomi Haruga, originally. However, while assisting in a ritual to create a leviathan, he ends up getting caught in a fight with an elite dragon, and in the process ends up using a special artifact known as a flint, which suddenly gives him the power to stand up against elites. This power is difficult to control however, so he starts off mostly using it by transferring it to the witches around him. Thus, this series is essentially a story of Haruomi and the group of witches that gather around him working together to defeat the various dragons that threaten humanity.

This concept while not incredibly original is solid enough in and of itself. However, the execution was very lacking and thus series overall leaves a very faint impression. The first issue is that the series overall felt like it was lacking in direction and was just kind of spasming around in a haphazard manner without really going towards any sort of clear goal in terms of plot or characters. The plot is simply the cast dealing with various situations as they arise while trying to become more powerful along the way. It really doesn’t feel like there’s any sort of endgame established. There are a number of interesting concepts brought up, like everything with dragons basically being a game where the dragons are competing to become dragon kings and humans are basically just caught up in the middle of that, or how the preexisting magic organization was overtly conservative and stuck in the past so the protagonist has to rebel against them.

But in the end, it doesn’t really feel like it did anything substantial with them. In the end it’s basically just a bunch of fights. The fights also weren’t that great, in that the flow of battle just isn’t that exciting, though there are certain exceptions like the final battle in the last volume. That heavily comes down to how little structure there is to everything with things feeling really random most of the time, and thus the abilities used by the main cast and enemies alike just not being that interesting and the various power ups that occur just not being all that satisfying. There’s also a lot of world building which felt pretty consistent and interesting at first, but as the series went on it felt like it was getting more and more random, like the author didn’t want to stray constrained by whatever world building he had already done, and thus just forced in whatever he wanted and ignored whatever he no longer wanted to care about. As such, the world ends up having a lot to it, but it’s so messy that it’s hard to really get into it.

The cast too weren’t that interesting. Haruomi is too flat of a protagonist. He’s supposed to be tricky, but that only kind of manifests in battle at times and the rest of the time he’s just dense and lazy. He’s supposed to be a closet pervert, but he’s way too restrained for that to actually make him interesting. He also has zilch in terms of character development, so it’s kind of hard to get all that invested in his story. The heroines are solid enough in terms of their general archetypes, backgrounds, and concepts. However, the plot does so little with them so it’s hard to get invested in them or find them all that likable.

Hazumi get’s some character development, but it felt like it was glossed over. Asya also goes through a major character shift due to special circumstances which felt like it could be used for some solid character and relationship development, but that shift ends up lasting way too long which makes her kind of annoying to read about, and then it just kind of fizzles out at the end leaving me asking what was the point. The other two heroines, Orihime and Luna, don’t really get any character development at all. In terms of relationship development it’s the opposite, in that Asya and Hazumi don’t really get any relationship development at all. But what little Luna gets is completely frontloaded to her introduction arc essentially, and Orihime’s relationship development also doesn’t feel land all that well because of the awkwardness of their being bonds between Haruomi and the rest of the girls that aren’t properly dealt with.

There was some good romantic fluff at rare times, but for the most part it was only okay. The main cast and their group dynamic just all around wasn’t all that fun, so I suppose it stands to reason that the ending wasn’t that satisfying either in this regard. The final circumstances the series ends on I felt were pretty weak for the type of story it is, and what good there was the epilogue didn’t do all that good a job of highlighting. The side characters are also pretty lacking with no one really standing out, wherein I feel like the author was really trying to make a character known as President M seem mysterious and cool but I just found them kind of lame. The antagonists faired much better in that there were multiple really interesting ones, though that alone wasn’t enough to counteract all the other issues with the cast.

The cover art and color illustrations were pretty good but the rest of the illustrations weren’t all that strong, especially the designs for the dragons and leviathans. The fantranslation prose quality was pretty solid, wherein it wasn’t completely natural but wasn’t all that stiff either and the amount of errors was totally bearable, though I can’t comment on how accurate of a translation it was.

A decent although generic concept executed not all that well.

6/10

Megami no Yuusha wo Taosu Gesu na Houhou (The Dirty Way to Destroy the Goddess’s Heroes)

This novel series is an isekai with the main twist being that the protagonist, Shinichi, was summoned by the Blue Demon King to aid the demons against the humans. The demons aren’t that evil, with the reason that they ‘invaded’ the human world being that demon world food is awful, with even raw human world ingredients being better than demon world cuisine, and they only ‘invaded’ a completely empty valley at that. They only attacked the humans in self-defense and made sure to kill the humans in such a way that they could be revived with Resurrection magic, which turns out to be incredibly effective in this world and makes a lot of things that would be horrific otherwise not that bad. Still, the demons are in general more bloodthirsty than humans, and Shinichi himself turns out to be okay doing pretty much anything to accomplish his goals. Thus, while the protagonist’s side isn’t really evil at all, they do have a general aura of cartoon villainy which the writing does it’s best to emphasize. This is a pretty fine line to straddle but overall, I think the author did a pretty good job and it worked well in producing an amusing story with a pretty unique atmosphere.

The protagonist Shinichi is overpowered, but in terms of intelligence rather than straight up power. He inherently does have advantages that no one has due to the way the magic system works, with magic ultimately being based on how well and deeply one can imagine a spell functioning. For example, turning one thing into another with magic is essentially impossible for magic users as it would require too much magic power, but because Shinichi understands that coal is made of carbon just like diamond and understands the structural differences, he can imagine one turning into the other at a lower level, thus requiring far less magic, and thus being possible for him even though his magic power isn’t all that strong. There are various other similar examples, and though they aren’t really advantages he’s earned, the author explains things well enough that they seem fair. Still, that’s only a small part of what he does, as the majority of the novel is centered around him searching for information and using that to enact various plans. These plans are often pretty complicated, overtly tricky, and rely on a good amount of plot armor in order to function but I’d still say they’re written reasonably well and its amusing to see them being built up to and pulled off. He gets some background relating to his original world to explain why he has a twisted personality, but overall I found it pretty lacking and it didn’t really feel like he had much of a character arc.

The characters outside of Shinichi were a mixed bag. Of the heroines I found them all somewhat likable but none of them exceptionally so. Arian and Rindo felt like they were pretty well developed and felt like they had good character growth, though Celes felt somewhat underdeveloped in that though she got some background and was present quite a bit she never really got a character arc. The main villain was pretty well developed, with extensive development of their background and motivations, wherein even though it ultimately resulted in a pretty simple one-dimensional villain, how they became as such was fleshed out well. The rest of the cast had some amusing characters and there were attempts at trying to give some depth to a few of the side characters, but nothing really worked all that well. Thus, there’s some nice moments here and there but not any especially great characters overall.

The world building I found far better than I expected considering it started out so simply. The lore was interesting in how it fleshed out the mythologies of different people, the humans and demons, with them both being based on the same true events but from different perspectives and thus with different elements twisted and different actors portrayed in a different manner, with what really happened being quite a bit more complex than the mythology of either. I think it takes too long to build up to and then throws out too much at once, with the majority of the revelations being in the final volume of the main story, but what it built was pretty impressive. The rest of the world building regarding different human nations, role of the Church, etc. and such was much simpler but worked well enough within the context of the plot. Ultimately the world building and plot did have a few inconsistencies, but nothing too major. The majority of them were actually things that I was pretty surprised were even there as they could easily be fixed without any major changes to the plot, but they were mostly things from the final two volumes that contradicted things lightly mentioned in the first volume, so I suppose it may well just be that neither the author and editor noticed and I only did because I binge read the series.

In terms of the ending the battle that served as the climax was satisfyingly well done and fit the series incredibly well. After that there’s an entire volume worth of epilogue, which I was originally very excited for as I generally love extended epilogues. Unfortunately, I found this one only so-so. It wraps up a bunch of plot threads that hadn’t been wrapped up and explains past plot elements that were left mysterious pretty well. Still, at that point it didn’t really feel like it was necessary to spend as much time as it did on them. Or rather, there’s nothing wrong with that is there, but I’d much rather the author focused more on another aspect such as the relationships between Shinichi and the heroines. This is something that is lightly developed over the course of the epilogue and that does reach a conclusion at the end of the epilogue, but I still felt it was unnecessarily rushed considering the epilogue was an entire volume and that it should have extended past the quick and abrupt ending it gave.

Though I can’t judge the translation quality, the English prose is solid and flows pretty well with most character’s voices coming across well. The art and character designs were pretty solid, though neither really stood out that much and overall aren’t all that memorable.

A fantasy isekai series with with interesting plans, mostly solid heroines, surprisingly good lore, and a pretty amusing protagonist that pulls off being cartoonishly villainous without being edgy or evil.

8/10

Kawaii Onnanoko ni Kouryaku sareru no wa Suki desu ka? (Do You Like to Be Captured By a Cute Girl?)

Reading the description, it may feel like there are a lot of interesting elements to this light novel series, but in terms of execution very little of them have enough substance to matter at all. There is the Romeo and Juliet aspect, with there being a romance between Mikado, heir to the family that controls the light side of Japan, and Kisa, heir to the family that controls the dark side of Japan. This is very underdeveloped however, with it only being mentioned in passing for most of the series and just kind of thrown in there more explicitly in the last volume without doing much with it. There is also the love game aspect, wherein each is trying to get the other to admit they love them, which is somewhat like Kaguya-sama, but unlike Kaguya-sama isn’t written intelligently at all, instead being incredibly random and nonsensical. At times the love game will try to have characters be strategic about things, but in general everyone is really dumb and everything just works out through coincidence basically, so it doesn’t feel like there’s much value there. As it goes on the love game aspect becomes less strategic in favor of more just straight up action, but that relies on characters just suddenly having random skills and abilities and other characters just doing exactly what the author needs them to no matter how forced it is, so there isn’t much value there either. Ultimately how things ended regarding both of those elements was pretty dumb, pulling out a random plot element without any prior foreshadowing to just force tie up the plot up. Still, while the ending is completely predictable and not particularly interesting, it’s a satisfying enough ending I suppose.

The main couple isn’t all that strong either. Mikado is the standard dense overtly good protagonist. Him being dense I suppose is standard enough and usually not too much of an issue, but the series tries too hard to make him seem smart despite also having him be completely dense, which is possible but the writing here wasn’t strong enough to pull it off. Kisa as far as I can tell is supposed to be a cartoonishly evil genius character with tsundere elements. The issue with her is that it feels like her appeal is supposed to be gap moe stemming from the contrast between smart villain side and in love to the point of being stupid side, but the key to gap moe is the gap and this doesn’t establish that gap well at all. She’s pretty much always shown in her in love to the point of being stupid side and doesn’t seem like much of a villain at all for most of the series. The last two books have her seeming more like an actual villain, but it felt like too little too late. Thus, she just seems like an incredibly love-struck girl, which is cute to a degree, but lacking in substance, and doesn’t really stand out compared to the side heroines. There’s also no real character development in either of them, and though they do behave somewhat differently in later volumes compared to earlier ones, since there’s no clear character arc this just feels like inconsistent characterization. The romance between the two isn’t all that strong either. They don’t have very good chemistry which results in why they’re in love in the first place being a major question throughout most of the series. The last volume explains why by fleshing out their background somewhat, but once again, too little too late.

So what does the series actually have? Romantic fluff and comedy. Mikado and Kisa aren’t particularly well written characters and the plot surrounding them is nonsense, but it’s still pretty amusing most of the time. The side heroines are also really simplistic characters, but they definitely spice things up and make things more interesting. Rinka is the overtly obsessed lover type despite being a Yamato Nadeshiko so just reading about her craziness was pretty fun. Mizuki is an agent of chaos that does her best to screw with everyone and has fun doing it so that too is a lot of fun to read about. And while I wouldn’t put Kokage in the same league as the former two, her randomly being a weirdo and throwing in stuff about aliens and such also kept things interesting. The plot is still all sorts of nonsense, but it feels like it definitely crosses into so bad its good territory if you’re just turning off your brain and going with the flow. Throw in that Kisa, Rinka, and Mizuki all get a lot of romantic fluff and a good variety of it too and it begins to feel like this novel series actually has a solid amount of substance considering it’s relatively short length. And add the cherry on top that is incredibly good art work that shows off all the heroines really well and this turns out to be a passably good series.

I should also note that the fan translation has issues. There are a lot of sentences that straight up don’t make sense. Most of these sentences feel like they’re stemming from issues in misinterpreting the subject/object or unnatural word choice which are common mistakes for machine translations so there’s a chance MTL may be involved. But at the same time, there are also a steady stream of just straight up typos and misspellings which are not common in MTL, so I suppose the more likely source of the lack of quality of the translation is that the translator wasn’t paying much attention to the context of the story while they were translating and the editor wasn’t paying much attention to anything at all.

A LN series that wastes all of its foundational concepts but has good comedy, fluff, and art so is pretty decent anyway.

7/10

Seireitsukai no Blade Dance (Blade Dance of the Elementalers)

This light novel series starts off as a pretty standard harem battle academy, where the protagonist Kamito due to being the only male that can wield the power of spirits ends up being the only boy attending a school for training Elementalists who use spirits in battle. It is clear from the outset that the goal is to assemble a team to take part in an international tournament known as the Blade Dance and obtain qualification to enter it, and thus plot wise the first phase of this series is mainly a means of introducing the main cast and for explaining the fundamentals around the various mechanics of the world.

The winners of the Blade Dance have the opportunity to have any wish granted, and thus this portion makes good use of that in order to explain the background and motivations of most of the main cast, which at this point is composed of Kamito, his human like spirit Est, and his fellow team members Claire, Fianna, Rinslet, and Ellis. Kamito’s goal in entering the Blade Dance is to find his missing former also human like spirit Restia, who isn’t fully a main character yet, but it does establish the bond between her and Kamito quite a bit which makes it clear she will be eventually. None of the cast especially stood out but overall they were likable enough.

The plot then dives straight into the tournament arc, where it continues fleshing out the world’s lore and adding some twists to what it had already established, though still leaving a lot mysterious. This arc also uses the international nature of the Blade Dance to do some world building regarding the various nations of the world and such. After that, the plot naturally flows into a phase that makes use of that world building by having the main cast get entangled in a political mess that’s centered around conflicts between factions within nations as well as how that ends up playing into power struggles between nations, wherein the twists relating to the lore also remain a constant in the background that slowly gain more emphasis.

During both of these phases, the series also goes through a lot of development in most of the main heroines. This development feels somewhat overtly dense at times, in that how it generally works is that there will be occasional short periods where a single heroine gets a lot of development with not much development outside of that. But it also introduces a lot of side characters that have solid character arcs of their own, mainly Rubia, Muir, Leonora, and Greyworth, so it’s not like there’s a lack of substance outside of when its heavily focusing on a main heroine and thus overall it feels mostly well-paced in terms of how it handles characters.

This follows into the final phase where the elements built up to throughout the series centered around the lore become crucial to the plot with all the mysteries quickly being resolved and the main cast squaring off against the true mastermind. This phase had the clear issue of being rushed. The mysteries essentially have four interconnected layers to them with each being centered around a different time period: 3 years ago, 1000 years ago, 7000 years ago, and the beginning of the universe, and the narrative essentially goes backwards in time to reveal them. As such, how it handles fleshing things out regarding the first three layers is handled reasonably well as it gives things room to breathe. The final layer though is almost entirely confined to the final three volumes, and it really doesn’t feel like its handled all that well, which makes the direct build up to the final battle and the climax itself somewhat disappointing.

Character arcs also feel pretty rushed, wherein for the main cast it does technically wrap things up for everyone, but in ways that mostly feel like they don’t have much substance. The same is true for the side characters with prominent character arcs as well. They reach conclusions, but it feels like the conclusions leave things hanging. Furthermore, there are side character that weren’t all that important, but it definitely felt they were being built up to have more important roles in the final phase, but that instead just drop out of the narrative completely or continue to have minor roles that feel really weak for all the buildup they got. Still, even with all that, the ending is pretty great even if it is essentially the standard ending for such stories, so I’d have to say I am satisfied with the conclusion overall.

In terms of action the overall mechanics are fleshed out well enough. There were issues in terms of ability growth though. Kamito’s growth is handled pretty well from beginning to end with battles that clearly show growth. It also feels for the first half or so like it’ll handle everyone else’s growth well too since it begins to do a decent job with Claire and Fianna. Unfortunately, the latter half then just throws around a bunch of power ups super quickly in a pretty random manner in the end without really dwelling on it.

In terms of romantic fluff and slice of life, what’s there is pretty solid from beginning to end with slow and steady progress that builds up well into the ending. It should be noted though that there was a decline in terms of quantity as the series went on and it became more focused on the overarching plot, though there was a side story volume released right in the middle of all that that was purely fluff.

In terms of art, this series I went through three artists. The first was great. The second was just okay. The third I think was also pretty good, though their illustrations were inconsistent at times with the illustrations of the first two which felt off. The fan translation in terms of the quality of its English prose is somewhat rough and has lots of clear mistakes, but it flows well enough so overall I consider it pretty good for a light novel fan translation.

A not particularly exceptional but mostly well executed harem battle academy series.

8/10

Kokoro Connect

Kokoro Connect is an eleven volume light novel series that has also received a manga adaptation that adapts the first three novels, and an anime adaptation that adapts the first four. It is primarily centered around a high school club known as the Cultural Research Club (CRC) getting screwed around with by a supernatural entity known as Heartseed who causes various supernatural phenomenon to affect them, such as body swapping or types of telepathy, simply because it finds doing so interesting.

The volumes aren’t numbered, but are definitely meant to be read in release order, which is also chronological order outside of the side stories. There are essentially two types of volumes. The first type of volumes, of which there are eight, are those that include the word “Random” in the title, each of which contains a single continuous story about the CRC experiencing a new type of phenomenon, though the finale is a bit special in that it’s two volumes long and more complicated than the rest. The other type of volume, of which there are three, are those with “Time” in the title, the first two of which contain short stories chronologically from throughout the series, and the last of which is the last volume for the overall series and serves as an epilogue.

At its core Kokoro Connect is a story centered around pure unfiltered highly concentrated character and bond development in its cast of characters. The premise is that the cast is essentially being harassed by an omnipotent supernatural entity, but the circumstances of who that supernatural entity is or how anything works do not matter at all outside of the finale. What matters is the supernatural phenomenon the cast has to deal with and how those results in rapid character and relationship growth.

It is important to note that these phenomena are always the type that are best suited for such development, because rather than things like turning them into animals, giving them super strength, or other larger than life concepts like that, the phenomenon they have to deal with are those that tie very heavily into their psyches. For example, the first phenomenon they have to deal with is body swapping. This results in the CRC growing much closer as a result of literally having live in each other’s shoes for a time as one would expect. But beyond that, it also brings up more personal issues individual members of the cast are dealing with, such as a girl who’s androphobic making progress in getting over her fear of men, or a girl essentially having an existential crisis because she’s been someone very easily shaped by her immediate environment, thus only really having a sense of self arising from her physical identity, and thus with that too fluctuating she questions whether she really is someone at all.

And that’s just a single phenomenon. The main cast ends up going through seven phenomenon and going through major character and relationship growth alongside each one. Plus, there’s a good variety to the phenomenon so that keeps things from ever feel like they’re getting repetitive because they’re constantly showing off the main cast from a new angle. There eventually are some inconsistencies in terms of messaging, such as the growth in one character in an earlier volume being centered around how people always have a true them that exists deep down, while in a later volume a character’s growth is centered around how someone can change who they are completely if they really try, both of which are pretty positive standard messages but feel somewhat strange when looked at directly next to each other. Still, overall while not perfect, the writing is still incredibly high quality and does a good job of using the supernatural phenomenon for everything it’s worth to build up to and execute character and relationship development in a really satisfying manner repeatedly throughout the series with overall arcs to characters and their relationships being pretty consistent and feeling like they have really solid pay offs in the long run.

That it shifts focus from character to character to really get into the heads of the characters as they are going through growth works really well and it feels like the writing really manages to really cut deep into what the characters are going through and convey in earnest what they’re feeling. I think this is one area that the light novel really excels compared to the anime and manga, wherein certain characters and situations feel really different. The most prominent example of that is Inaba, who comes through as pretty amazing in the anime and manga as well, but has much more depth in the novels. Who she eventually grows into beyond where the anime and manga end would feel somewhat strange based on just what is shown in the anime and manga, but felt completely natural in the novel, and overall makes her an even more amazing and likable character.

Furthermore, I just overall feel that the cast is incredibly strong and really likable. Part of that is because it’s really easy to get invested in the growth they go through and just be really happy for them as they get over their issues. But another part, which sounds somewhat similar but is very different, is that the characters that they ultimately grow to become are amazing and the type of characters I can’t help but really like. That I tracked how they became such characters is probably a core part of why I like them so much, but I feel that the end result in terms of the characters and the dynamics between them would still be amazing even without that in that they have fun personalities and the bonds between them are really heartwarming. I was attached to the cast here to a really high level and felt really sad about essentially having to leave them when the series was over to a degree that was almost at the level of the Persona games, which anyone that has played the Persona games will know is really high praise.

Furthermore, the series also does a pretty great job with its side characters as well, especially as the series goes on, with a lot of them getting fleshed out pretty well and going through character and relationship arcs of their own. These aren’t anywhere near as deep as those of the main cast, but they’re very nice on the side and work well to complement the stories of the main cast and furthermore add variety that helps with pacing. Plus, some of these side characters have incredibly likable personalities, such as the amazing superwoman Fujishima, so it’s just nice to have as much content with them as the series does.

My biggest problem with the series is the finale, Asu Random, which I largely feel wasn’t at the level of quality as the rest of the series and thus not as spectacular of an ending as it could have been. The biggest problem is that I think it tries too hard to crank things up beyond the rest of the series in order to give a truly epic finale, but it largely just didn’t work. The writing was a lot more messy and much less focused, which resulted in what it was trying to convey, which was generally pretty crystal clear throughout the rest of the volumes, being much more muddled. It also finally tries to explain in more depth the supernatural entities and have the cast actively fight against them instead of just trying to survive them, which inevitably requires giving them limitations that can be exploited and such, but this didn’t feel all that well written and thus it just kind of makes things fall apart because it feels like it makes things feel less magical so to speak. There were some pretty good concepts there, such as a larger focus on the bonds the main cast have outside of directly with each other, while at the same time emphasizing how special the main cast has been from the beginning by contrasting them with how others react who also experience similar things. Still, I very strongly feel that all of this could have been much better executed if it didn’t try so hard to go well beyond everything before.

Fortunately, the weakness of the finale is greatly minimized by how fantastic the epilogue is. It barely mentions Heartseed and the supernatural phenomenon, instead basically being a tour de force on just showing off the characters at the end of their character arcs. That this manages to invoke such strong feelings, far beyond the finale which had a strong emphasis on the supernatural elements, I think shows very clearly that what truly mattered in this series isn’t the supernatural elements themselves or the plot surrounding them, but rather how the effect they had on the characters. Ultimately, I feel it was the perfect send off, and though I’m sad that it’s over, I’m still immensely satisfied with the series as a whole.

In terms of general comments, I don’t know Japanese and thus can’t judge the translation quality in terms of how accurate it is, but in terms of the quality of the translation in and of itself I think it was pretty solid, overall sounding pretty natural and flowing well for the most part. There were some choices that I was very not much of a fan of in terms of tone and voice, especially in the earlier volumes, but they’re not major issues. Also, just as an aside, I’m incredibly curious about whether some elements were essentially completely new material added in the translation or actually found in the Japanese. The presence of English specific memes is obviously something that was added in by the English translator, but with things like the references to Superman/Batman I’m curious because it could be either. The art for this is done by a KyoAni artist and very much looks the part, and thus even though it’s just basic high school stuff in terms of design, it still ends up looking pretty great.

A very well written story with incredibly dense character and relationship development.

9/10

Saijaku Muhai no Bahamut (Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle)

Saijaku Muhai no Bahamut, also known as Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle, is harem fantasy mech action light novel series that starts off heavy on battle academy elements though it outgrows them eventually. The general setting is one that is standard medieval fantasy, with the critical exception of there existing excavated suit type mechs that were left behind by a prior civilization and that serve as the cornerstone for pretty much all combat. The plot is centered around Lux Arcadia, a prince of the former Arcadian Empire which fell five years before when the series properly starts leaving Lux in a pretty complicated situation with regards to how he’s dealt with by the new rulers.

Lux is the type of character that is overtly kind and heroic, the type that wants to save everyone, even his enemies, regardless of how difficult or foolish that may be. His character arc isn’t really centered around him changing these convictions. Rather he starts off feeling very shaky about these convictions due to how they pretty much fail him completely in a pretty major way before the beginning of the series. However, over the course of the series he becomes more steadfast on them and becomes a more confident character, which is fleshed out decently enough. He’s the type of protagonist that is a complete pushover outside of serious moments though, so despite his growth in how he reacts to serious situations, he remains pretty flimsy in regards to less serious situations throughout, by which I primarily mean those relating to relationship development and such, which is a mixed bag in that it can be amusing at times but can also get kind of annoying.

Lux is a part of both Syvalles and the Seven Dragon Paladins, which are the two groups that make of the rest of the main cast. Syvalles is essentially the main combat unit of a what was an all-girls school dedicated to training Drag-Knights, which are what the mech users in this universe are called. As is often the case in harem battle academy series, various story circumstances occur and Lux ends up the only male there, which results in him interacting with a number of girls whom all end up harboring affection for him, and in this case all of those girls are members of Syvalles, with five of them essentially serving as the harem. The rest of Syvalles include a trio of girls that are incredibly interested in Lux but aren’t as much in the focus, as well as Lux’s sister who is very strongly affectionate towards Lux but with a very different dynamic from romantic love… mostly. Still, while these are side characters comparatively, overall I’d still say they’re handled pretty well.

The cast here isn’t particularly original, but they’re a pretty solid implementation of solid tropes, with each getting well defined personalities, fleshed out backgrounds, and both solid character arcs and ability growth. There’s also a good variety to them so their interactions with Lux and the dynamics between all of them independent of Lux are also really interesting and amusing. There’s a lot of good romantic fluff and comedy as is standard for such series. These characters are the focus for the first five volumes, the portion the anime adapts, where the story for the most part is pretty standard battle academy for the most part with some events that branch out of that and hint at shifting out quite a bit more.

That shift occurs during volume 6 wherein it pretty much stops being a battle academy series and gets quite a bit more complicated due to the addition and focus on the Seven Dragon Paladins, a group composed of the strongest Drag-Knight of each nation. The plot stops being as heavily driven by character and relationship dynamics and comes to depend a lot more on politics, with various nations having different goals and objectives with secret plots to push those goals further and a mysterious mercenary organization called Dragon Marauder in the background trying to push themselves into the middle of everything. This portion also opens up a lot more world building, in that in order to have politics and such affect the plot its necessary to explain what the political situation is and how it came to be. In addition, the plot eventually brings in elements that essentially relate to the history of the Arcadian Empire, explaining how it came to be, and how it relates to various other core mechanics of the world which involves a lot of sci-fi elements, which add another layer of complexity to the world building, and overall result in a pretty interesting world overall.

The Seven Dragon Paladins are a really interesting group of characters in that they’re all pretty original and unlike with the members of Syvalles where it was pretty clear that they would all turn out to be Lux’s allies eventually, with the Seven Dragon Paladins it isn’t so simple, and thus there’s a much stronger sense of danger that significantly adds to the suspense. A negative on the Seven Dragon Paladins though, is that other than Lux only three of them have proper character development, and even with those three their development is constrained to only the volume focusing on them with absolutely no further growth beyond that. Lux and the members of Syvalles are still very much present though and have solid progress on their character and relationship arcs, and thus the addition of a lot more outside of that even if lacking in some ways still makes the series overall a lot more interesting.

There’s another narrative shift in volume 15, which is where the true and final villain is revealed, with the rest of the series barring the final volume being dedicated to fleshing them out and building up to the final battle against them. The focus in volume 6-15 felt like it was equally split between Syvalles and the Seven Dragon Paladins, but here it switches to being much more focused on Syvalles, though the Seven Dragon Paladins are still present. The focus on the members of Syvalles is in a very different direction from before though, which is a really interesting twist and allows for major character and relationship development in all of them which helps reach the end of all their arcs in a pretty satisfying manner.

I found the final villain pretty disappointing though. The themes centered around him are much more abstract and nebulous than those centered around the rest of the cast. This is essentially intentional in that the themes chosen for him inherently have to be that way, but writing centered around such themes is kind of difficult and it didn’t really feel like the narrative really pulled it off here. Thus, while I do appreciate how the narrative advanced things in terms of characters, the plot itself I felt was rather weak. I do think that the author made a good choice in that there’s a full volume dedicated only to the epilogue beyond the main story which is solely focused on Lux and Syvalles which helps distance the final ending from the disappointing ending of the main plot. This volume is pure romantic fluff and nothing but, but its good romantic fluff, and the ending overall is pretty satisfying, though I think it would have been better if it had gone even further with what it was doing.

Next, I’ll finally talk about something that I’ve essentially been avoiding, the action. This is a mech action series so the action is a core aspect of the series so it likely did seem strange that I barely mentioned it so far. The reason for that to put it simply is that I found it the weakest aspect of the series and just overall didn’t like it much. I like the how it pushed the plot forward as well as how it was well integrated with all the world building. I also felt that the larger context resulted in some really hype moments. But in and of itself I found the action pretty dull.

The biggest reason for that is that it felt way too slow. As the series went on battles started getting longer and longer, eventually they became unbearable long. There’s a lot of descriptions of exchanging of blows that ultimately doesn’t do anything. This is fine in anime and even in manga I’d say because the art and animation can still make it exciting, but in purely written form it just didn’t do anything for me. For similar reasons, it also felt like it was getting repetitive. There’s some growth in Lux, and each of the members of Syvalles get a single major ability upgrade, but in the grand scheme of things considering how long the series is and how much action there was, that’s not all that much. Further taking into account how there is essentially no ability growth in the Seven Dragon Paladins, and how there is a lot of reuse of abilities in the antagonists results in the action feeling like it’s just going through the same motions again and again in a new context. The context is great, but that just had me wishing it would move on and just get to someone winning so the plot could advance.

The other main issue is that the plot uses the “not fighting at full strength” card way too much. In other battle oriented series characters after ending a fight characters are at 100% and ready for another one, which is strange in one way. This has the opposite problem, in that its constantly bringing up how characters can’t fight at their full strength due to fatigue from previous battles, at times even ones from over a week ago. I suppose that is kind of realistic, but it results in power levels fluctuating wildly which makes the action seem much more random and harder to get invested in. This is especially true for Lux, who at times is downright overpowered, especially during the beginning, but at others is completely outclassed by people he’d beaten before, which just feels kind of awkward and lame.

In terms of art, the series is excellent for most of it, with great character, mech, and world designs and high-quality art with a pretty great style and a good amount of images per volume. The number of images per volume starts drying up at some point, and then near the end it switches to an artist that simply isn’t as good. The cover art still looks good but the images inside, especially the black and white ones, are clearly lower quality. This happens near the end so the art for the majority of the series is still good, but it’s somewhat disappointing that the art for the ending was lacking as I felt it would definitely have helped it a lot.

Also, this isn’t factored into the score, but I thought I should make some notes about the fan translation. I don’t know Japanese so I can’t discuss the quality of it as a translation, but in terms of the quality of the English text in and of itself, it was really lacking. The vast majority of it simply hasn’t been edited at all. There are parts that are a clear improvement over the rest that have been, but those just make the issues with the rest stand out more. The language is often a mess that’s difficult to parse and just in general doesn’t flow at all. It’s not like it’s not understandable, but it takes considerably more effort than decently written, or even semi-decently written prose would, which makes it harder to enjoy.

A series that starts off as a pretty standard harem mech battle academy but comes to have considerably more depth and complexity, though the action is pretty weak throughout.

7/10

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