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.