By Satoshi Hase and redjuice. Released in Japan by Kadokawa Bunko. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Ben Gessel. Another long, long book – the longest light novel I have digitally, in fact – and again, I feel it would have been fine if Beatless had been four lengthy books rather than two huge ones. That said, the author clearly thinks of it as one story, as the second volume just picks up where the first one left off and moves forward. There’s lots of cool action set pieces, lots of dead extras, lots of dead hIEs (who then come back to life quite a lot), and a whole lot of philosophizing on the nature of artificial intelligence and the way that it interacts with humanity....

Manga Bookshelf