Juuni Taisen
Juni Taisen: Zodiac War

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There are usually two problems with works of battle royale genre. One is that most of characters only serve as cannon fodder and are seldom developed in any way. The other one is that my designating the protagonist, the reader can very much assume who is likely to survive until the end (spoiler: it would be the protagonist).

Juuni Taisen dodges both of these problems by one decision – there isn’t a central protagonist. Rather than that, the narration is switching from character to character. Not only this makes it likely that even the current narrator might get killed and increases the stakes and unpredictability ... of the story, it’s also a nice opportunity to explore the whole cast. Internal thoughts is a handy tool to create more in depth characters, but information that could be told to reader in such way would be difficult to convey if such character isn’t the POV. But here, the characters are properly introduced and panned out, despite the length of just a single volume.

Sure, the story could have been milked with multiple volumes with more filler and prolonged battles, and some authors could have made this choice. Luckily, NisiOisiN wrote the length just right so it isn’t rushed but also doesn’t feel like it’s wasting your time.

Compared to other NisiOisiN novels, there is noticeably less wordplay other than names of the characters, so if you expect that you might be disappointed. Or well, at very least only the character wordplay was in some way reflected in the English translation if there was more in the original.

Keep in mind that this review is written without watching the anime or reading the manga versions.