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Your Forma: Electronic Investigator Echika and Her Amicus Ex Machina

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By Mareho Kikuishi and Tsubata Nozaki. Released in Japan by Dengeki Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Roman Lempert.

Possibly the most difficult type of book for me to review falls under the category of “excellent book that is nevertheless not for me”. I can recognize the worth in this title, and think a lot of people should check it out, especially if you like the darker side of light novels such as Eighty-Six (whose author recommends Your Forma). That said, this is going to be my only volume of this series, which very nicely wraps up as if it was a single book. (It was a contest winner, and those usually do.) First, its genre, however sci-fi its coating may be, is police procedural, which I usually do not vibe with. Secondly, one of the two leads annoyed me throughout the book. Now, that’s deliberate on the part of the author, and there’s a very good, realistic reason behind it. Nevertheless: annoyed. That said… damn, this was compelling, and I loved Echika, the brilliant but broken cop who keeps losing partners as they injure themselves trying to keep up with her amazing brain.

In an alternate version of our present everyone has Your Forma, which is basically a sort of VR overlay in their head. Unfortunately, that also leads to things like viruses that make the user see horrible blizzards and puts them into the hospital. Echika and her partner are diving into the minds of the infected to try to trace where it came from. Sadly, her partner passes out, as I noted above, when Echika is simply too fast for him. Since she has done this for several partners in a row, her chief is a bit tired of it, and partners her with an Amicus – which is to say an artificial human. The question of just how self-aware they are is very much up in the air, and Echika for one despises them, for reasons that seem to have something to do with her past. Can Harold prove his worth to her and turn this into a fun Caves of Steel-esque book? Or is there something more sinister going on?

First off, as I noted above, I know there are some people who will want to know this, so: Your Forma is indeed a cop book, and there are cops here who do questionable things, including our two leads. So YMMV there. Echika’s past is something that comes out little by little as the book goes on, and her cold, seemingly emotionless exterior is chipped away by Harold’s charming, sensitive… and manipulative questions, as he needs to break through her facade in order to get what he wants. Honestly, as a long-time reader of books with realistically human robots, the question of whether Harold was a “real” person was one I took as read, and I think as a reader we’re supposed to. This also means I’m allowed to think that he’s an asshole a lot of the time frequently to provoke Echika into a reaction. The fact that he’s very charming while doing this does not really change it.

I do recommend this book to fans of crime dramas or sci-fi. The world it carves out is excellent, the action and set pieces are also excellent, Echika is terrific.

7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!, Vol. 1

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By Touko Amekawa and Wan*Hachipisu. Released in Japan as “Loop 7-kaime no Akuyaku Reijou wa, Moto Tekikoku de Jiyuukimama na Hanayome (Hitojichi) Seikatsu wo Mankitsusuru” by Overlap Novels f. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Julie Goniwich. Adapted by Aysha U. Farah.

The word ‘villainess’ has always had a loose definition to begin with, coming from a theoretical character in an otome game that never really existed, and usually being some variation on “mean girl”. Even that doesn’t really apply anymore. The villainess, for the most part, now seems to be any young woman who gets publicly shamed and has her engagement broken by a prince. We meet Rishe here, and there’s certainly no sign that she’s done anything wrong, but the script nevertheless plays out as we know it. Of course, as the title of the series implies, this is not her first rodeo. This has now happened to her SEVEN times. Perhaps she’s been reading a lot of villainess novels as well, and they’ve all blended together so much she keeps coming back to them. Amusingly, the “why” of the loop is irrelevant – it’s there to make her more awesome.

As noted above, Rishe Irmgard Weitzner is publicly shamed by her fiancee, who calls off their engagement to that he can marry Mary, a poor girl new to nobility. Having now done this SEVEN times, and knowing her parents will shortly be disowning her and barring her from the house, she tries to bolt back home to grab her things before this occurs. Unfortunately, she runs into Arnold, the Crown Prince of a different country, who had also been attending. He’s fascinated with her, mostly as she doesn’t seem to have any awe of him at all. Indeed, she wants nothing to do with him – every single time loop she’s lived to the age of twenty and died, and it’s either indirectly or directly because of him. This time, though, something new happens – he wants to marry her. Maybe, if she goes along with this, she can find out what makes him want to wage the war that keeps killing her…

I had a ball reading this. Rishe is definitely on the “smart” end of villainess protagonists, mostly as she’s lived 5 years of a different life seven times. First she was a merchant, then an apothecary, etc. She even disguised herself as a man to become a knight… but Arnold ran her through. In this particular loopy, Arnold seems, around her, to be the standard shoujo manga love interest. Unfortunately, he also seems to have a destructive streak about him, and Rishe can’t quite figure out what’s behind it. The antagonist of this book is his younger brother Theodore, who seems to be the stereotypical “evil sibling” but also turns out to have greater depths than anticipated. I also liked how many of the characters in the show who are seen to be “betraying” someone are doing so because they’re poor and desperate – this book is not afraid to show us the disparity in class.

At the end of this volume, Theodore may have resolved some of his issues but Rishe is still a long way from learning the truth about Arnold. I definitely look forward to more volumes of her finding out. Recommended for villainess fans, romance fans, and mystery fans.

Loner Life in Another World, Vol. 2

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By Shoji Goj and booota. Released in Japan as “Hitoribocchi no Isekai Kouryaku” by Overlap Bunko. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Eric Margolis. Adapted by Veles Svitlychny

It’s been almost a year since the first volume of this came out, and honestly I think I had forgotten how annoying Haruka’s narration can be. And trust me when I say that GOD, it is annoying. There’s only so much stream-of-consciousness you can take before you want someone to settle on a thought. That said, in this second volume, as a consequence of trying desperately to seek depth in this series, I am starting to notice a few things. Haruka’s blase discussion of how he effortlessly takes out every single monster disguises the fact that he pretty much immediately comes up with a very clever plan (based often on his Japanese memories) and executes it. We also see him refer to someone by their actual name. In the first volume it was because we were meant to know they were a Bad Guy. Here it’s for the opposite reason. Sorry, Class Rep, but there’s a new girl on the cover and she’s taken a lot of Haruka’s firsts. And he calls her, once or twice, by name.

After a few random chapters where Haruka tries to avoid getting lectured by the rest of the class, he winds up falling to the 100th floor of the dungeon by accident. (Unlike Arifureta, there are no classmates trying to kill him – indeed, all twenty girls in the class are clearly in love with him, especially Class Rep). There he meets and battles the Dungeon Emperor, a Dullahan, Lich AND Deathling whose stats are so high even Haruka can’t see them. That said, of course he defeats them anyway… and then accidentally used Servitude on her. Yes, her, the skeleton emperor is a girl, whose name is Angelica but who Haruka tends to call ‘Miss Glare Armor Rep’. Now the two of them have to fight their way UP through the dungeon, battling insanely powerful monsters, while the rest of his class tries to fight their way down to get to him.

Given that you see her as a pretty young girl on the cover, I kept waiting for the big moment when Haruka would find something that would magically give her body back. Instead, due to the fact that the POV is entirely from him and some textual/art trickery, it turns out that it had been happening right under our noses and we missed it. This was very clever. He also gets lucky with her at the end of the book, which also surprised me. I admit the servitude thing bothers me a bit, but it doesn’t seem to really influence Angelica all THAT much – the humor of half the book comes from his seeing Miss Glare Armor Rep staring at him with, he thinks, the same look he gets from the rest of the cast, but it’s really just her being in awe of him – and falling in love with him. That said, the rest of the cast (who are increasingly showing themselves to be, if not as eccentric as Haruka is, pretty damn eccentric) also are not glaring as hard as he thinks.

So yes, plowing through the narrative diarrhea is still worth it, and I must admit I wonder what’s going to happen next. The poor little town with a dangerous dungeon they were in is now a rich little town with a former dungeon. Will we see other cities now? Will this mean the town will stop having everyone carry around clubs? And will Haruka call anyone but Angelica by their actual name? The third volume may take as long to come out as the second did, but I’ll be reading it.