All You Need Is Kill

Edit

What would you like to edit?

SynopsisBackgroundAlternative TitlesPictureChapters/VolumesPublishing DatesRelationsTypeExternal Links  

If you've read some of my other reviews, you know one concept that interests me is that of immortality. Time looping is another concept I find enthralling. It's almost like being immortal, except you live the same time period over and over again. In some ways, I feel this could be even worse than immortality, since usually the situation that is repeated is an unpleasant one.

Before we dive into the story, I'd like to mention the artwork. It's absolutely top notch. Every panel has a painstaking amount of detail, from the character designs, to the suits, to the environments. Obata Takeshi is responsible for ... the designs, whom some of you may recognize as the illustrator of Death Note and Bakuman. While I haven't read either of those manga, I can only assume his work is in top form here.

Aside from the time loop aspect, the story isn't that special. I won't spoil anything, but expect a typical sci-fi mecha setting. The time loop is what makes things interesting. The main character slowly learns the rules of the loop, and the reader along with him. If you have a scientific mind, the implications of each rule will leave you fantasizing for at least fifty loops.

An important aspect for a time loop story (especially one where the main character remembers the loop) is how the character(s) adapt. Do they resolve to find a way out? Do they learn to accept it and endure for... well, eternity? Or do they lose their minds? There are so many ways for a character to react. Yet, the one that makes the reader's blood boil the most is when a character strengthens their resolve and soldiers onward (literally).

The main character is many people's definition of "cool", and it works for this setting. Unfortunately, not all characters are created equal. The main character and main heroine get some pretty heavy development, but none of the side characters do. It's understandable considering the nature of the story. Not much can change after all. However, we never even learn much about these characters. They're just faces that pop up every once in awhile. This, for me, was probably the weakest aspect of the manga.

People who don't enjoy gore should avoid this, as the artwork is very... detailed. I'd recommend this for people who like sci-fi or heart pounding action sequences. I enjoyed this manga, and it wasn't that long of a read. If you find yourself with nothing to do, this manga won't leave you asking for your time back (unless you're just selfish, then shame on you).

All You Need is Kill tries to experiment with the idea of time loop, which is already a pretty overdone idea in the si-fi genre, and sadly not even this manga succeeds in using it in a fresh and original way. The story doesn't focus on the concept of time loop itself but rather the psychological burden that the victims of the time loop have to bear, and its mental consequences. It is a captivating idea on paper, but in practice that is an internal turmoil that we only hear about from the narrator in a very cold and plain way, rather than seeing it ... reflected on the character's actions. Plenty of dramatic monologues to express their tattered mental state, but never does that mental state play a part in their decision-making or lead to any sort of emotional climax: the whole experience feels rather dull, also due to a pretty rash pace. As if to crown this general flatness, the two main characters are alright, but the supporting ones are so forgettable and underutilized that it begs the question of why were they created in the first place. A couple of cool situations and a fascinating poignant moral drama in the finale make this read appreciable, but somewhat vapid.

One of the most compelling thing about manga as a medium resides in its capacity to convey the story conjugating between what is shown and what is told to the lector. You can make the same argument about every other media really, but there is something in the black and white panels, the moderated exposition compared to western comic and how the drawing is different from how scenes are portrayed in anime or animated shows. It's always incredible when you feel like you're being told a story from the manga itself instead of the author talking directly to you... Right? Well, you see, that's one ... of the most heavy sins that I think literature can do as a whole; novels and manga being the ones that most fall under this, how things are told. "All you need is kill" is a manga adaptation from the light novel of the same name written by Sakurazaka Hiroshi, and I think every problem in this manga could be explained by this fact, and adaptation that didn't know how to make the transition from a light novel to a manga.

"All you need is kill" follows the story of Keiji, a soldier stuck in a war against alien monstrosities called "mimics" who destroy everything they come across as just how those creatures are just really, really hard to kill and ruthless in killing people. He goes in his day normally as Vrataski, the elite of the elite, comes to their base... So yeah shit happens and Keiji dies... A lot... But a whole lot, poor guy didn't catch a break in any chapter of the whole manga. I've heard the novel was well-received and praised, thus making it into a manga adaptation.
You see, when Ryousuke Takeuchi made the storyboard to this manga, it seems like it didn't sink in the idea of explaining things from a visual angle and with a more orthodox narrative of a novel in a medium that is not a novel: the exposition feels bad and rushed, I don't know what were we supposed to go from chapter 1: The mental downfall of the protagonist? An atmospheric manga about war? And action and frenetic work to gobble ourselves in its viscera? I don't know, and the manga don't know it either. In the first chapter everything feels so scripted to the point of being unnatural, we're being told about everything happening in the world because the narrator just fills us in with every word he can muster until we're exhausted... It's not that is dense or anything special because it comes as a simple war premise, but is just that it doesn't take advantage of the setting to make anything appealing, the setting and every character's main traits are told to us in the most straightforward way possible in that we don't even get to explore character's mentality: Keiji, Yonabaru and Shasta doesn't feel human at all, the only point of the first character was to show how our protagonist becomes a killing machine whose all he need is to kill (no fucking way...), but how the protagonist is going insane is just nos attractive for the lector, why? Because as the setting and characterization is poorly presented, as being too unnatural making it for us to feel the raw pain and desperation feels like out of nowhere, and it just doesn't concern us at all.

The characters are also kinda... Lacking? I don't know, it's not like I don't exactly know, is just that there is so little to say about them. Everyone here's just have dialogue concerning the battlefield and mimics, it just feels soulless that the narrator tell us everything, from every one of Keiji's loops and then having the character talking about more battle and more killing feels redundant, few moments are when character talk about themselves honestly without the use of such a straightforward dialogue and even those moments just feel so short compared to all the narration doing the work of over exposition in the world building, I just don't see a moment when characters are really themselves, I would understand if this were just a manga directed towards fighting and being almost like a gore fest, but even the action scenes have a weird paneling in which actions scenes don't feel frenetic neither interesting nor including anything charming neither crude about it. Just showing our protagonist dying and dying over and over isn't enough for me to make it frenetic or interesting, it just goes from start to finish without doing nothing in between.

And the main dynamic isn't that interesting neither, it isn't awful nor terrible, but it just feels shallow and made up in the last chapters, they build a relationship made from an understanding and interlinked pain no one has ever felt: the pain of coming back from death, to hours before you died. As it seems like an interesting dynamic, due to the little screen time we can't really grasp the feelings of neither of our main duo (letting aside that all the other character aren't relevant at all) but its the closer we are to get humanity from this adaptation.

The art is good, I like the drawing and expressions when the protagonist died, sadly it wasn't used as good as it could due to the try of iterative narration to not make us bored from those aspects, which is a weird choice, why would you skip some moments from your story while also keeping everything related to the worldbuilding and characterization to a narrator? Is just like a mess of dissonances between narratives that just makes no sense when we analyze the pacing of the series alongside the cohesion between chapters, its like if they are so far away because we never see the journey to reach them, we just see the story progressing so straightforward that it just cast everything aside to tell us a story in the most mundane way possible, it's not that it is awful but just feels incomplete, the ending of one chapter and the continuation of the next feels so anticlimactic that I just enjoyed some of the art with some actions scenes... The ending itself just felt like an excuse to make it more tragic, with such an asspull of explanation that I couldn't bring myself to feel bad for our main cast.

Well, it seems everything about this manga was bad in my eyes, that's not true. The art is great, some expressions are well-defined, the actions scenes aren't that bad either and at least the manga try to make a meaningful interaction between our main cast (although it mostly falls apart). But I won't say this is good because I feel like the core and essence of what this could have been got lost some place between the narrative; bad character, a downright awful narrative with just one dimensional characters with boring dialogue and a weird progression is what comes to mind when remembering this work... I love media about war, because it shows tragedy in such a realist yet with also an excuse to make everything to dense and heavy to the lector, even better if you add dark fantasy or sci-fi elements as the fear to the unknown and body horror are my main dish when it comes to uncomfortable and horrid moments... But this one just doesn't get it, this one just glorifies and rejoices in its own little world of dying again and again and again with too little relevant in my mind to keep it near my memories, a missed attempt and a forgettable work at this caliber it is sad to see yet make us appreciate literature and story telling as a whole.