All You Need Is Kill #1-10

All You Need Is Kill #1-10

Originally released in 2014

Written by Ryosuke Takeuchi

Art by Takeshi Obata

The manga that I chose today was based on the novel of the same name by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, which was adapted into the movie Edge of Tomorrow starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt.  Humanity has been attacked by invaders of unknown origin known as Mimics, and new recruit Keiji Kiriya is brutally killed by one on the field of battle.

He wakes up the previous day, perfectly fine.  Keiji is caught in a time loop that starts the previous morning with a memory of the previous days in the loop, and now he has to find a way to maximize what little time he has to gain the skills that he needs to survive.

The Mimics have spread throughout most of the world and have made it to Japan, with the Japanese defense forces being backed up by the United States.  The ace of the American forces is Rita Vrataski, though the Japanese forces figure that the effectiveness of the American forces is propaganda, and that Rita is nowhere near as effective as she's been built up to be, with some of the Japanese soldiers assuming that she's just a figurehead.

The last part, at least, is quickly proven wrong once the battle starts.  In addition to the mechanical armour that is worn into the battle with the Mimics, Rita also uses a massive battle axe.  Larger close-range weapons are more effective at beating the Mimics, as they can shrug off bullets, and with the main close-range weapon (a pile driver) having limited ammunition, Keiji eventually requests a similar axe, though it takes a lot of loops to sneak into the place where it would be made.

The base's senior officer helps Keiji with training as best as he can during the early loops, but he makes it clear that the best teacher is experience in life-or-death battles.  Under normal circumstances, this advice would be useless to Keiji, who would have normally died a few minutes into his first conflict with the Mimics, but with seemingly infinite lives, he can take full advantage of it.

As the series progresses, and the time loops get more and more numerous, Keiji starts to be framed in a more sinister light.  This is where the fact that this shares the same artist as Death Note starts to stick out, as Keiji is framed like Light Yagami at times, which doesn't seem like it bodes well for his future.

In addition, the loops start to wear on him as time goes on.  There might be no limit to the amount of loops that Keiji can go through, but around the fiftieth loop, he starts to get headaches, which seems to indicate that as he gets further into the amount of loops, his body and/or mind will start to break down.

Keiji occasionally crosses paths with Rita on the battlefield, and he starts to develop feelings for her, though he knows that he can't act on them because, thanks to the time loops, she'll inevitably forget. However, something he says or does on the battlefield gets her attention, and she asks him a question that changes his understanding of what's going on.

Chapter 8 focuses on Rita's backstory, though her name is redacted throughout it. She came from a small town in the middle of Illinois - her father figured they'd be safe from the Mimics since they attack coastal areas, but that winter, the Mimics launched an assault.

Three Mimics slaughtered most of the town, including both of the girl's parents, before the army arrived to stop them.  She was too young to join the army, so she forged an ID with the name Rita Vrataski and enlisted with only one goal.

Six months after joining, Rita kills an unusual looking Mimic with a tentacle-like antenna on top of its head.  Killing it causes Rita to be caught in a loop that lasts about thirty hours, like how Keiji getting killed by a similar Mimic kicked off his time loop. As Rita's loops continued, she finds that more and more Mimics are guarding the one that she killed.

The reason why the Mimics are on Earth can only be speculated, but they are shaping any area that they pass through into something that's inhospitable for human life.  It seems like they're terraforming Earth, either for themselves or for whatever species created them.

The Mimics undergo a similar time loop process, allowing them to have advantages over humans despite their lack of creativity, and an off-hand remark about servers and back-ups allows Rita to break the loop that she's trapped in by killing certain types of Mimics in the area in a certain order. However, once the loop is broken, she discovers that a lieutenant with a newborn baby died when he didn't die in previous loops - try as she might, she can't save everyone, as survival on the battlefield comes down to luck in the end.

Rita now knows that someone else is going through the same experience that she went through. The manga is only seventeen chapters long in total - rather short, all things considered - but I thought it best to stop at the end of Rita's flashback for today. The death loop concept results in the early chapters of the manga being more gruesome than a shonen manga (this was aimed at an older audience), and while I definitely recalled plenty of elements from the Tom Cruise movie, it seems like this adaptation is aiming for a darker tone than that one did. (At the very least, Keiji's portrayal seems more ominous and sinister than I recall Tom Cruise's character being)