Tag: Eighty-Six

Eighty-Six Volume 4 Review

by macksamson, posted in Eighty-Six, Light Novels

Last time on Eighty-Six, Shin’s team sets out to fight the Morpho, the giant Legion that fired the railgun at the Federacy, and is controlled by the mind of one of Shin’s relatives, Kiriya Nouzen. Well, he beats it, to say the least (and by himself, of course). And just like it was foreshadowed in volume 1, Lena shows up and they meet IRL! Now we can FINALLY know what happens next!

So, I haven’t been enjoying the past two volumes of Eighty-Six. A lot of it felt like torture porn as Shin and the others get exploited, and have to fight to save people who treat them like crap, even in the Federacy. There were also a lot of boring military people who got all introduced at once and had really boring personalities. 

But now… hoo boy, Lena is back, making the power couple that carried Eighty-Six’s first volume so good! I know I normally don’t like romance, but these two established themselves as one of the most organic and interesting relationships out there, and it once again shows. They even had some great interactions together (even if it resulted in some misplaced comedy scenes).

Since this is the first volume with Lena in a while, this it’s going to be about her. As established, she transferred to the multicultural Federacy from the whi- I mean- Alba Supremacist Republic. The racist practices of the Republic are well known to the Federacy by now, and because of this, Lena gets crapped on from the powers that be. Fortunately, Shin exists as a cushion for her guilt complex. It’s actually something that I felt when I was a kid, when I first learned about Martin Luther King. I wanted the African-American kids in my class to bully me, so I could be punished for something that I didn’t even do, just because people from a generation ago did it.

But Lena doesn’t have much time to get used to her situation, for today’s mission actually starts pretty darn early (much sooner than taking a whole volume and a half in the previous arc). This mission involves going into what’s left of the Republic that got overtaken by the Legion and, well, taking it back. This means going back to Nazi-Germany-Meets-Overly-Patriotic-White-Supremacist-America once more.

And as you can expect, the only thing waiting for Shin, besides some angry Legion, is racism. While the racism came off as torture porn last time, this time we get some interesting and differing perspectives from Lena and Shin. The irony here is that Lena, a whi- I mean- Alba person is much more offended than the actual victims. It’s almost implying that certain people shouldn’t respond to certain other people who are just being jerks, or trolls.

Overall, the only problem I had was kind of telling where people were in 3D space. A lot of times, during the actual operation, the story would flip perspectives rapidly, and it confused me a lot. It also was pretty inconsistent with whether or not it wanted to mark transitional points with a simple page break, or an actual symbol. Maybe if they- say- used the symbol to transition between P.O.V.s in particular, I would’ve understood what was going on a lot better. 

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Verdict: 8.9/10

Finally, Eighty-Six is back with a vengeance! My interest in the story is reinvigorated, especially with the new development at the end, and now I can’t wait for the next volume. Here’s hoping that it stays strong all the way through!

Eighty-Six Overview (Volumes 1-3)

by macksamson, posted in Eighty-Six, Light Novels
Covers of volume 1-3

I’ve been reading Eighty-Six since its English release courtesy of Yen Press. Due to the fact that volumes 2 and 3 all happen during the epilogue of volume 1, I decided to cover all three of them in one blog post because it’s technically still a review of volume 1(?).

Eighty-Six is set in the Republic of Mongolia, in a world at war with the Legion: surviving robot weapons of an empire long gone (supposedly). The pale-skinned people of Mongolia live in paradise within the 85-sector city, leaving the dark-skinned people in the 86th sector to fight the Legion. It’s justified because the Eighty-Six (the derogatory term for this people) are considered pigs, and nobody cries when pigs are killed. …Yeeeeeeah, this is a light novel about racism. 

Racism is such a universal issue that it can also be used, in writing, as an easy emotional hook to make something that sucks seem good. However, the portrayal of racism in Eighty-Six is executed really well. The writing is so evil and devious, it’s as if each passage is like firing a railgun bullet straight into your throbbing aortic pump.

The biggest strength of Eighty-Six lies in the main protagonists.. Like in classic forbidden romance fashion, the lead female is a white girl in the military- Lena- who is assigned as an operator who corresponds via some kind of brain-Skype to a squadron of Eighty-Six soldiers, captained by the male lead Shin. The experiences that they have with and away from each other are very engaging, and makes their relationship one of the better romances, despite how they don’t communicate in person (at least not yet). 

Unfortunately, they are marred by a lackluster supporting cast. It seems you need to be SERIOUSLY emotional and not analytical, because the rest of the characters are either blatantly wearing red shirts, or are of almost no consequence. These people tend to be really one-note and forgettable. The only character I liked besides Shin and Lena was Frederica, a military loli introduced in volume 2, but that’s only because she actually has plot relevance. You’d think that the characters who are higher-ups in command, such as *takes out notes* Lena’s supervisor, Karlstahl, or Ernst Zimmerman from the city introduced in volume 2, would be very important. However, these people just end up twiddling their thumbs, stalling out the story discussing different strategies when we KNOW that Shin’s squad is going to just tackle any given conflict head-on because Shin is a lead protagonist. If that’s meant to be a commentary on the actual military’s competence, then I applaud the author on that one. 

Due to this miserably sad cast (both in the emotional sense and the writing sense), a lot of Eighty-Six really drones on. The basic formula seems to mainly be slice-of-life and drama, followed by actual battles. However, since I didn’t grow emotionally attached to these characters, I got bored fast, especially in volume 2, which didn’t even have a fight. There isn’t much character development outside of Shin either; most of his squad complains about how miserable they are, while other people complain about how unjust it is for kids to be in the military (yet Shin ends up getting sent out anyway). In a manga very similar thematically, Attack on Titan, I could at least grow attached to the characters because there were more defining traits, and instead of Shin being the only one who matters, everyone in Attack on Titan (well, mostly everyone), has some important role to play in the story. Shin could literally be a one-man squad and nothing would change in terms of what actually goes down on the battlefield.

The art is middle-of-the-road for me. The characters look okay, but the real juicy stuff is in the schematics of various Legion and other machines as well as maps of the areas where strategies are being planned. The color art’s also great.

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Verdict: 8/10

Eighty-Six is torture porn, but damn good torture porn. Despite the low quantity of good characters, the series has great worldbuilding, and great tryhard writing to boot. Now that volume 3 has contextualized volume 1’s epilogue, maybe we’ll FINALLY GET TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IN VOLUME 4!!