Picked up this novel because it’s by the same author as All You Need is Kill, a story which does the Return by death mechanic well. The Tom Cruise movie adaptation is fine too.
There are no pictures in this light novel except for the one on the cover. It’s a single volume and not very long—only 210 pages. The protagonist is an apathetic college freshman who gets addicted to an online fighting game while trying to balance it with his relationship with his girlfriend. The story reads more like a short story. The characters are underdeveloped, and the protagonist’s ideas, which he shares with the reader in long monologues, are rarely challenged because he seldom voices them to the few characters around him.
The narrative alternates between two settings: the protagonist’s time in the video game and his life in the real world. The video game feels a bit outdated, as all the characters are described as blocky pixels, but the game world is otherwise well explored. On the other hand, the real-world setting and the characters in it are underwhelming. For instance, it’s unclear why the protagonist’s girlfriend likes him. Her characterization is limited to being a hardworking, organized, and cute girl. Her only motivation seems to be finding a blue cat from an urban legend, which they eventually locate in an anticlimactic way. The quest for the cat feels more like an excuse for the protagonist and her to spend time together and buy ice cream. Another character—a woman in her early thirties who also plays the video game—is barely developed and feels completely unrealistic.
The story’s premise is interesting enough, but perhaps I was looking for something more depressing like Welcome to the NHK. However the real issue is that the characters are not that memorable. On one hand, there’s little reason to care about the protagonist’s relationship with his girlfriend, and on the other, it quickly becomes clear that he isn’t genuinely addicted to the game. Instead, his main motivation is to defeat a specific player, ‘Ganker Jack,’ as a personal challenge. The premise wasn’t what I expected, and I was disappointed but I wouldn’t say that it it’s an implausible story. I wanted to read about someone facing serious negative consequences due to a video game addiction, but instead, the protagonist is mostly fine both in real life and in the game. Again this isn’t unrealistic, in fact it’s probably more realistic than scaremongering about addiction to mmorpg “virtual worlds.” However I didn’t find it that interesting to read because the obstacles were all so banal. The worst consequences he faces are missing a few lectures and getting a lower grade on an assessment. Even when he skips a date with his girlfriend to play in a game tournament, she doesn’t dump him. I guess that the book is trying to say that in order to be good in the game world you don’t need to be a failure in the game world, however at the end the protagonist having achieved his goal of beating a certain player, decides to put the game away for good which when I first read the book came off to me as some sort of betrayal.
Now four years after originally writing the review, and no longer being an angsty teenager, I realise that it’s fine to let go of things and move on from hobbies like that. It’s not like we live for hobbies, the hobbies exist for our sake. It’s not that we become wiser as we grow older, as much as the intensity fades both for joyful and anger-inducing experiences from media. I guess when I was younger I couldn’t accept that things that will come to and end could also be good. I wanted the stories I read to go on indefinitely because I genuinely loved and wanted to see more of the characters and their adventure. It’s the same with this story. If you look for it you can find my old review for this story and you can see that frustration that I had with this story raising all these interesting flags about players in the game just walking around in the real world but never meeting the protagonist properly. Now I just want to get it over it to move on to the next story and add this story to my collection if it is good. Rather than being obsessed with one story it feels like I am more at a buffet of life tasting different stories but is that departure from childish attachment only a good thing? Becoming less desperate also might mean becoming more apathetic like the protagonist of this novel.
I am playing an old school mmorpg myself right now, called Toram Online, with a kind of pixelated art style reminiscent of what’s described in this story. It’s more of a player versus environment type of game, so I doubt I will have any rivalry with players but I do have goals I want to accomplish and once those are achieved I will log out for good. I guess what I am trying to say is that maybe I have become more like the protagonist of this novel lol so I get it now.
The final “bonus” chapter focuses on the protagonist’s friend, who dropped out of university in Tokyo because of a video game addiction. He now lives at home in Hokkaido (a sparsely populated region in northern Japan) with his parents and spends most of his time playing the same online game. Honestly, he would have made a far more interesting protagonist.
I give this book a 5/10.
Published: Monday, May 4, 2020. [If not earlier originally, I have lost track of where I posted this first].
P.S. If you want to play a fast paced pvp mmo game with the kind of physics and graphics described in the novel then check out GunZ: The Duel. It’s an old game but they’re reopening official servers on steam recently.
