86

Boys and girls, who survived intense battlefields. The fiery sci-fi military action, you have never seen before begins.

There will always be war. People die for their future generations to never see the horrors of war, but it will never end the cycle of never-ending bloodshed. Wars, indeed, do not happen as often, however, instead of wars, there will be small conflicts and acts of terrorism that happen quite often. Where diplomacy is powerless, there is always war. Eighty Six takes place in the Republic of San Magnolia. For a long time, this country has known how horrible wars are. The Republic has been attacked by its neighbor, the Empire, which created a series of unmanned military vehicles to conquer San Magnolia. In response to the threat, the Republic successfully completes the development of similar technology, mecha-like machines that help the Republic combat the threat of the Empire. However, where there is a war, there are also dark secrets and Eighty Six is not an exception.

It is somewhat problematic to find more than 4 chapters of this manga on the internet and if you want to get a better understanding of Eighty Six, I would recommend you to read the light novel, or to wait for the anime. But what I want to say about this manga/light novel and the upcoming anime series is that Eighty Six is a masterpiece, because it shows how horrible a war is. It is an open secret for everyone that war also gives birth to various atrocities; it drives some mad and these people start to think that they have the right to decide the future of other people. Not to mention the fact that war changes people.

That is all I want to tell you about Eighty Six. I can, of course, tell you many things about the storyline and the characters, but this is something you need to find out by yourself, without reading any reviews. Do not expect to see some sci-fi, mecha, cute lolis, and random fan service kind of war. Eighty Six, while has sci-fi in its genres, it also has a grain of truth, of what has already happened and what is very probable to happen in the future. I enjoyed reading both 86 manga and light novel, because of the fact that they show what war truly brings to the humanity.

You should look forward for the anime adaptation of 86. It is going to be one of the best military dramas.

This is a spoiler-free review of the first volume.

Should you read this novel? Sure, but I think there are better novels you could read. I don't regret the time I put into reading this novel and I actually enjoyed reading it!

The novel has many issues such as its pacing, its lack of a compelling antagonist, and mediocre world-building. That isn't to say that the story is bad though.

This story isn't balls to the walls packed with action (while there is it isn't the focus) but rather a story of atonement, goodbyes, and how apathy can lead to atrocities. What the story does well is that characters feel authentic in their setting. The emotional moments don't feel heavy-handed and the struggles and motivations that the characters have feel genuine which lead to a believable three-dimensional character you care about.

The story tackles discrimination and genocide in a mature manner that makes you reflect on true historical atrocities that were committed in the past. It's interesting in a way that makes you consider things you haven't considered before in your history class and how it can feel to be apart of the oppressed. It doesn't feel edgy or preachy or guilts you for being privileged but rather shows how if we remove these labels, if we ask for their names and actually take the time to get to know the people of voices we never hear we can slowly remove these prejudices and improve our relations and ultimately progress as a society.

As for the action sequences, I'll have to preface this by saying that I'm not a mecha fan so take what I say with a grain of salt. The detailed drawings of the mecha's look really cool but honestly I'm not that into mechas fighting so as for the action scenes I wasn't really that hooked. I was left confused most of the time about what was happening and couldn't remember what the purpose and abilities of each mecha were. It wasn't all that satisfying to read except for the last action scene at the end of the novel which raised the stakes further.

As a one-shot, the ending feels satisfying. It doesn't feel like they ass-pulled anything and most relevant characters had a satisfying completed character arc. The emotional moments made me tear up at times while reading towards the end and made me feel glad I finished it.

My biggest gripe with the story however is the pacing. The pacing at the start is incredibly slow with boring exposition that introduces characters that are either not fully-fleshed out or never visited again. It honestly felt like a chore reading through the first two chapters. However, it does pick up speed during its final act. The antagonist of the story is human nature or to be specific - the Republic of San Magnolia. The problem with this is that it feels too simple and uninspired. For a military drama, you'd expect political intrigue or in my case, I expected a high-ranking military official with complex motivations but instead, all we get is "the true enemy is human nature" which is a theme you'd hear from a middle school literature class.

The side characters introduced that are NOT the Eighty-Six are very scarce and don't feel as developed as the crew in the Eighty-Six. They feel boring and uninspired and you can pretty much guess what they're going to say next. Lastly, another glaring issue I found was the mediocre world-building. The world outside of the republic (perhaps intentionally) feels bleak and uninteresting. The novel does get into the origins of the Republic but does not go into very much detail about the Giadin Empire who you don't see mentioned again until the very end. As a result, it doesn't make me care much about the world outside of San Magnolia.

These concerns I have brought up may be addressed in further volumes since I believe the first volume was supposed to be a one-shot and the author left a thread hanging so he could later address these criticisms. It does feel unfair for having such high expectations of it and expecting it to meet all those criteria while also being at around 250 pages.

I don't think I'll be continuing with volume 2 immediately since I wasn't that hooked and apparently volume 2 isn't a direct continuation of the events in volume 1. Maybe I'll come back to it in the future but it's good enough for me to consider reading the rest of the series which is why I give it the following rating:

86 - Eighty-Six - gets a 7.5/10 from me.

Edit: Forgot to mention that there's an anime coming out soon for this so you may want to check that out.

As a person who loves military works the truth I appreciate having known this novel.

Which is not yet well known and hopefully it will earn the value it deserves once the anime adaptation comes out and hopefully it lives up to it. 86, a work that shows us racial discrimination, cruelty and human stupidity at its best.

The 86 a group abandoned by their own country "the republic", stripped of their human rights, treated like cattle and being forced and sent to go to war against "the legion", machines created by the destroyed empire programmed with the sole objective to destroy the enemy.

As protagonists ?, a republican who repudiates the treatment given to the 86, and an 86.

The story behind them as you get deeper into the story is simply amazing.

After reading 3 volumes the story seems incredible to me, well explained, without fanservice, or meaningless powerups, or script benefits, well-written characters, literally all the points I ask for in a play.

Being a mecha work I thought they would have cliche aspects that usually accompany the genre, however it perfectly completes the military role combining action scenes and spoken scenes quite pleasant and well accomplished.

I will look forward to the anime adaptation in the hope that A1 Pictures will not disappoint us.

A gritty mecha, drama that shows just how xenophobic the masses can be, where they have sectioned off a portion of the population and refer to them by a numeric value. Where have I heard this before?

My review is going to solely be based on the first volume, as that is all I have read.

The author handles the story very well with great world building, the first chapter alone is spent explaining the history of the country where the main characters reside and the differences in social class between the citizens of the republic and those who are referred to as 86.

The pacing is hit and miss, it keeps a very high pace which is great at times because the volume covers so much but it often relies on tell don't show, it felt very lazy at times were important events were told through dialogue. Speaking of dialogue it's not great, maybe because the author forced the average age of the cast to be 16 to pander to the audience, the dialogue is extremely jarring compared to the seriousness of the story and when anyone but the main characters spoke I was eagerly awaiting for it to stop. There are two main characters who equally fleshed out but the rest of the cast are abysmal, apart from Raider, if you have a name in this series you are deemed somewhat important, but most of the cast is still limited to one character trait. Characters die off screen and I don't know if it was because the author was trying to cram this all into one volume or because he wanted to stress how easy it was to die on the battlefield but it felt cheap and none of the characters seemed to care say apart from one odd line.

The first volume, if you remove the very last chapter, is a complete story and I think it is a problem of light novels that every story needs to be tediously long. The final chapter, and the rest of the ending, is extremely contrived for the sake of prolonging the series.



What was immediately captivating about 86 was the highly detailed sketches of the mechs, these pages are spread out and when a new type of mech is introduced it is normally accompanied by one of these pages. You can really get a sense of how menacing these hunks of metal are. They also give descriptions on different types of weapons which had me looking back to these pages during fight scenes to see what the weapon being used was. I wish I could say the character art was equally as good but it wasn't, it was basic and lacked a lot of weight in combat scenes.

Whilst 86 does have a lot of good aspects it is ultimately weighed down by a one dimensional cast and a rushed 2nd half, it did show signs of great things I would be interested in reading more from the author and more from the series but I will need to temper my expectations.

Check it out if you have no other good novels to read.

This "Review Contains Spoilers" (This review will always be reissued over time)


86 has everything like to read, for example: Mecha, Action, Romance The story deals with very interesting subjects, such as: racism, authoritarianism, fascism, discrimination and reference to what happened in the Second World War.

The 86-District / are any other minority considered inferior by the Republic were systematically grouped, exploited to exhaustion and then summarily executed or forcibly sent to the battlefield to fight “The unmanned‘ Legion ’army of the Empire. Eighty Six, It was the last outpost that the Republic (the humans) stayed in when the “Legion” swept the continent - Only pigs that look like humans remained in the non-human area (area eighty-six) behind the eighty-five legislated areas . “Colorata”, this is the derogatory term used for people who are not citizens of the Republic (Albas), they lived as citizens of the Republic, but are considered inferior to humans by their own countries, they live outside the shelters, outside the Grand Mur and are always on the front lines.

Nine years ago. Year 358 of the Republic calendar, Year 2139 of the Anno Astrum. The northern country of the continent, the Gead Empire, which borders the eastern part of the Republic, declared war. The first wave of completely unmanned combat drones started the invasion. Faced with the overwhelming force of the military superpower Geade, the Orthodox Army of the Republic collapsed in just half a month. At that time, the military brought together all its men, and started with the tactic of demoralizing and delaying the enemy army, in the meantime the government of the Republic made two decisions. The first: Evacuate all citizens of the Republic to the eighty-five legislated areas. The other was to initiate presidential order 6609, the special wartime security law. This law meant that all Coloratas (Jews) (those who were not Albas = Nazis) residing in the Republic were considered as enemies allied to the Empire. So they lost their citizenship, and then they were sent to concentration camps outside the eighty-five areas where they are always monitored, that is, only those who live in area 86. Eighty-six. -That was certainly a betrayal of the legislation and the very meaning of the five-color flag that the Republic is so proud of. Any and all Colorata born in the Empire, except the Albas, began to be treated like animals and to be arrested, this was a very blatant form of discrimination and prejudice. Naturally, the Coloratas protested. However, the government silenced them using force. There were also some Albas who protested. However, most Albas supported this idea. They said that the Coloratas were not satisfied with the resources, land or positions they had. The rumors that the Coloratas were spies were much easier to accept than the sad reality that the country was left behind in terms of military technology. And with enemy forces increasingly leaving the Republic with no way out, humans needed scapegoats to discount their anger and resentment. And so then, racial supremacy instantly gained recognition and justification. The noble and humane first modern Republic in the world, ended up recognizing only the Albas as human, while all the Coloratas of the old-fashioned and inhuman Empire were considered inferior, were considered foolish and barbaric animals that only had the appearance similar to that of humans, but that failed to evolve to the human stage. All the Coloratas were sent to concentration camps and were forced to serve in the army, they who built the walls of the fortress. All the assets and properties of the Coloratas were confiscated and appropriated by the government of the Republic, meanwhile citizens praised the human government for letting them not go into the army, nor having to work or pay additional taxes even in times of war.

Discrimination against the Coloratas and the Eighty Sixers (considered inferior) began to occur among the Albas two years after it started. The soldiers were all composed of Eighty Sixers members, and all of those soldiers who were active were sent to the battlefields inside drones. -The Eighty Sixers joined the army because they and their families would receive Republican citizenship. Due to the great racism in all eighty-five areas, in the past nine years, since the beginning of the war it has never been revealed where they lived. However, probably many of them have returned to their old homes, where they spend all their days. -The Geade Empire, being a military and technological power, abused this philosophy and developed advanced technologies, and with that, created devastating weapons and incredible drones. They developed an artificial intelligence superior to any created in their time, an intelligence that would never be tired, irritated or terrified, since there was no human piloting them. No matter how many were destroyed, the factories were fully automated and located in hard-to-reach places on the land, the factories spit machines over and over, forming a large swarm of drones.

In the case of Jews / lower races in Germany, the first moment of this whole extermination process was through hate speech. The rhetoric against them was strengthened in the post-First World War when Germany was embarrassed and made them the scapegoats for German defeat. All sorts of conspiracy theory came to be distilled against the Jews, and when the Nazis came to power, the speech became action.
So the Jews were expelled from public service, then their stores were boycotted and attacked.

Persecution in the streets increased considerably, and cases of physical violence began to happen. Afterwards they were forbidden to marry non-Jews, citizenship requests for foreign Jews were denied, and German Jews were stripped of their citizenship.
Jews were deprived of their freedom and all rights as citizens. When the war started, the Nazis intensified the theft of their property and began to group it in ghettos.

The acts of the Republicans are very similar to those of authoritarian governments and today we can see that there are still those types of governments / countries in which they still have the same racist thinking and we see that humanity has not evolved at all, and that there are still people who idolize such ideas. 86 is a criticism of how governments like that are a mere idiocy of the human being and who suffers is the population of good who is at the mercy and without freedom to express themselves, not only the population but other races.




86 is undoubtedly one of the best or if not the best thing I have read during these years, and I always wanted to do something like that [write about].

Volume 1 is super well written with wonderful plots and not counting the main characters Shin / Lena, but it still ends up sinning even if it is a little in the secondary characters (although they are charismatic), I know they had a little development up to the volume current [V6]. But I still think that they were little explored until that time of the championship or it could be that in the next volumes [7,8 and 9] they may have an extra highlight.


"No country will mind giving human rights to pigs. Therefore: As long as language, skin color and ancestors are considered different, they will be treated only as pigs that look like humans; to repress and kill them with certainty will not be treated as a violation of human rights in itself."

M.Vladilena- (Memories)

"Valkyria Chronicles 3: Mecha Warfare"







86 is a lightnovel that revolves around a certain group of individuals, filled with different backgrounds, all fighting in the battlefield, in the hopes of being granted amnesty and freedom. Sounds familiar?

Well yes, but actually no.

Valkyr-I mean 86, weaves a story of racism and social discrimination in the form of "man vs machine" kind of setting, where the last hope for humanity, rests in the form of kids going all "neon genesis evangelion" on everything. Honestly, if that weren't enough to pique your interest then I don't know what will. Well, despite the decent theme of the story, the series is not without it's own fair share of problems. One thing that really stuck out to me, was the Para-RAID system. I mean, I get that the author wanted to incorporate the link between the handler and the operator in deep way, but still. Looking at it objectively, I really don't see it as something to write home about (It's literally just radio communication!). Nitpicking aside, I personally liked the way the characters were written. And while you might not feel a deep connection with the characters, as much as you did while playing danganronpa, the series still manages to do a decent job at delivering that warm fuzzy feeling we all know and love. /s

So with that biased opinion out of the way, here's the point-based tldr:

Story: 9/10
Art: 9/10
Characters: 10/10

Enjoyment: 8.6



As a note, if you're into lightnovels with serious plot elements like world-building and garterbelts :) then this book is for you. But if you're into "battle-shounen" esque lightnovels, and light-hearted fun, then you might want to skip this one out.

Gundam meets Ann Frank.

86 is my ideal story. It has everything that you could want. Action, drama, mystery, thrills, romance(budding at this point, but it's obvious, it's Japan), etc. What I love particularly about the story is how damn real it feels. It does not feel like you're reading a future anime or a light novel, but that you're reading a genuine war memoir.

The story is heavily influenced by World War 2 and it shows, the author even mentions it in the afterword. It relies heavily on the themes of racism, discrimination and ethnic cleansing, things that I feel would make a future anime adaption pretty controversial. However, this is a very realistic topic that we have had in our history very recently and must never forget.

The protagonist Shin is very reminiscent of some of the classic Mecha MC's, but he still is extremely well written with a solid backstory, good character motivation, character growth and a very realistic way of dealing with things.

Lena, the future love interest is also extremely well written and is sympathetic to the plight of Shin and the rest of the 86's(basically Jews), over the course of volume 1, we see their relationship grow from more of a commander/subordinate to genuine friendship and concern. Can't wait to get deeper in the story.

The side characters are also very well written and make you feel attached to them from the very beginning. Everyone is unique and offers diversity in terms of personality, characterisation and dialogue. No one is just a cardboard cutout like in many other LN's.

Pacing is great, story is original and well written and this first volume at least, has enough action to keep you satisfied and well entertained. Got volumes 2-6 and now off to binge them in Japanese.

TL;DR Check out this series, it's worth it.