- #1
I generally try to be pretty strict when evaluating stories, and try to avoid doing it immediately after finishing a story, to get some emotional distance. So I could certainly make some critiques of this story, and point out some things that might have been handled better. For example, the idea of advancing from actual medieval weaponry to fairly modern firearms in the span of a decade stood out to me as a bit of an absurdity, magic or not.And on the note of magic, whilst maybe a bit better done than in its inspiration, Youjo Senki, I certainly feel the story had a bit of a missed opportunity. Aside healing magic and a few types of magic meant for combat, surely there could have been a lot more different applications for magic in a world war scenario? I think that's something I'd personally really focus on, if I ended up taking the same premise, of modern, industrial scale warfare in a world where magic exists.But I don't really feel the need to extensively nitpick the work. Regardless of some small missteps along the way, it was an incredibly immersive read. The visceral portrayal of the horrors of this type of warfare left an impression that easily overshadowed small quibbles about realism. It's a genuinely memorable story that really stands out on its own merits. To point out just one of the things that stands out, the characters were often likable, and even the ones that weren't meant to be liked were always interesting, and interacted in very authentic ways. The elements of military strategy discussed are plausible enough to also make the portrayal of various geniuses believable, which is where depictions of warfare stories can often fall short.