All You Need Is Kill

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All You Need Is Kill – Spoiler Free – Recommended

TLDR
Story – 9/10 – 9 x 0.275 = 2,475
Art – 9/10 – 9 x 0.2 =1,8
Characters – 8/10 – 8 x 0.225 = 1,8
Enjoyment – 9/10 – 9 x 0.3 = 2,7
Total: 8,775 -> 9

Story – 9/10
It is hard to describe All You Need Is Kill in a few sentences. It is packed with action, although it isn’t the central point, and full of plot twists while still being engaging and interesting throughout the manga. It is also tough to talk about the story—and a very short story for that matter—without giving any spoilers. It explores ... the themes of death, resilience, immortality, and time with quite a proficiency, where the mecha aspect serves as a background for the action to happen. Don’t expect this to be a common mecha where action happens for its own sake alone.

Art – 9/10
The art style is impeccable, full of detail, and well-polished. Action scenes are technically superb, and character design—although the number of characters is quite low—is also well done.

Characters – 8/10
The story revolves around the two main characters – Keiji Kiriya and Rita Vrataski – who receive the entirety of the character development in the manga. My rating only applies to them, for other “characters” are more of placeholders or figurines other than actual characters that play any role whatsoever. This was a good play by the author, as it would have been quite challenging to develop more than two characters in a two-volume manga quite well. The characters are well development and fit perfectly into the atmosphere of the story.

Enjoyment – 9/10
Enjoyment is definitely one of this manga's biggest strengths. Its story is compelling and engaging from the very first chapter, the art style makes it very easy to read along, and although it is only two volumes long, its length just feels right. All You Need Is Kill is a statement on how to do a short story correctly, showing that long stories aren’t necessarily better just because they are big. For a brilliant execution of a good premise, it more than deserves a recommendation.

tl;dr: A manga carried by having a really interesting core concept, but that overall feels like a waste of potential.

This manga is an adaptation of a novel that was also adapted into a Hollywood film, though the film is quite a bit different from the novel and manga. The central premise is that humanity is in a war against a mysterious alien force dubbed Mimics, and in the midst of that a soldier named Keiji learns that he loops back 30 or so hours upon death. It’s a very interesting concept and the first volume uses it really well. It fleshes out Keiji’s panic and ... confusion at his circumstances, and then shows him ultimately accepting his situation and then exploiting it to grow from an amateur into an incredible soldier, both in terms of skill and mentality. It’s well written and pretty satisfying.

The second half doesn’t fare so well, largely in part because it feels so rushed. A core part of the second half is Rita, another soldier whom Keiji grows very close to romantically. However, neither Rita’s character nor her relationship with Keiji is developed all that well, and thus the emotional beats centered around her fall pretty flat. This is especially disappointing because the premise with one person remembering everything and the other person nothing could have resulted in a really interesting relationship arc. It’s similarly disappointing that none of the rest of the cast got much focus either. There aren’t a lot of supporting characters and the few that there are aren’t developed all that well. Still, in what little we see of them it felt like there was a lot of potential to showing how they react to Keiji as he grows and changes which was left unutilized. It should also be noted that the plot gets a bit complicated towards the end. Not extremely complicated to be clear, but enough so that the rushed writing results in things being more confusing than they needed to be. This combined with the aforementioned issues with Rita results in the ending overall being pretty unsatisfying.

The art is pretty great, with good designs, consistently high-quality art, and a style that fits well.

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.