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(3.67/5)Everything that happened in this book felt like a plot device to trick me into reading a thinly veiled tragic love story. If this book had focused entirely on ケイジ or entirely on リタ it might have ended up being decent. The premise is definitely interesting, but this is a short book, so the only way it would have been able to make good use of this premise is if it had been concise and focused on one thing.
Instead we got a lukewarm hodgepodge where the author tries to make you care about certain characters and elicit certain emotions, but I couldn't care less about anything that happened, and at some point I just wanted to be done with it sooner rather than later, and move on to the next book, because it was clear that nothing interesting was going to happen from that point onward.
The most interesting part for me was when ケイジ went through his first few loops, slowly discovering how they work, slowly improving his approach and fighting ability. Then the book skips 50 or 100 loops and ケイジ somehow is a fighting god at this point. The time loop basically loses all its meaning and exists solely as a plot device. By the way the way the book ends doesn't even make sense. Like why would ケイジ not kill himself after the ギタイ surprise attack to reset the loop and start the fight off in a more favorable way? Why would the ギタイ only have a single Server-ギタイ? Why would killing the Server-ギタイ somehow reward you with the same ability? Somehow a space faring alien civilization capable of terraforming planets with nanomachines and creating a messaging system that can send messages back into the past managed to come up with such a shitty system? Whatever, I guess. It's just difficult to care about anything in this book at all.
Fast-Paced and Atmospheric Sci-Fi War Story
This was a fun, if somewhat difficult, read. The military and battle-related vocabulary took some getting used to, and reading a physical copy wasn't the most helpful for lookups.
With that being said, it was a really interesting read. I seldom read sci-fi, and the story of experiencing a time loop while fighting an alien invasion was exciting. The author did a great job conveying the chilling, bloody, and merciless atmosphere of the battlefield. The fast pace of the story and the plot twists kept me reading. The ending was a shock, but it fits the vibe of the story - war is heartless and unforgiving.