Warning: This book contains really bad and uncomfortable romance, overused plot lines, horrible attempts at re-creating different languages with English characters, and explicit language. This review contains spoilers for this book. Do not read this book or this review if you are uncomfortable with any of these things. But thanks for stopping by anyways.
Disclaimer: I am not making you read an article about a super cringy book, you chose to be here, and I am also not making you stay. If you wish to preserve your sanity, then leave this article right now. For those of you who choose to stay, you have been warned.
Alright, you know what you’re getting yourself into. I had a rather optimistic mind when I started this book. A girl with rainbow hair living in New York, scraping a living together by hunting criminals, stuck in a hole of $3,450 in unpaid rent and $6,000 in credit card debt. Jeez, I thought it might be some fun. Boy was I wrong. After the police refuses to pay Emika (rainbow hair) the bounty on a criminal she caught because of a weird legal rule, Emi sulks and goes home. You then find out that she will be evicted from her apartment in 72 hours because of her unpaid rent. You then meet her roommate, of whom you never see again, and then you are told about a game called Warcross that everyone has on these strange VR goggle things. Long story short, Emi glitches herself into this huge tournament game that everyone around the world is watching and then gets sent to Tokyo to meet the creator of Warcross, of whom she’s had a crush on since she was 11. Hideo Tanaka (creator of Warcross) then offers Emi a job. So Emi accepts Hideo’s offer, and then spends the rest of the book trying to hunt down this cyber criminal called Zero (for whatever reason they almost always italicize his name).
Emi plays in the national Warcross tournament, has a few encounters with Zero, dates Hideo, and also finds out about Hideo’s dark past. You have such an exciting time while learning the same things over and over again about Emi’s dead father and how her mother left Emi when she was two, and you also love realizing all the overused plot lines. Just to name a few:
1. Main character has dead or missing parents.
2. Someone’s sibling has disappeared (Hideo lost his brother when he was 9. Quite literally.)
3. Romance with the emo child.
4. The person who you thought was bad is actually good, and the good guy is bad.
5. The villain lets the protagonist leave when they could easily defeat them.
I could go on and on. Instead, let me tell you the ever so exciting ending! Hideo has the technology in hand in order to stop all crime from ever occurring. The only consequence is the fact that this technology takes over the brain for about five seconds in order to stop the person from committing a crime. It turns out that Zero is actually Hideo’s long lost brother, and he’s been trying to stop Hideo from using this technology this entire time. The protagonist finds this out, and then decides that it is completely wrong, but does NOT give concrete evidence as to why when Hideo asks. They then break up, and instead of using this tech to control Emi and keep her from leaving or telling his bodyguards to stop her from exiting the building, Hideo makes the correct decision and lets Emi choose to leave. Emi then gets a text from Sasuke (Zero), and it is unclear whether she will go work for Sasuke or if she will choose to just let whatever happens happen. After reading this book and having to deal with Emika for some of the worst 353 pages of my life, I predict that she’ll definitely go work with Sasuke if the author turns Warcross into a series, which she definitely will.
Alright, now that the summary’s done, here are two lists on Warcross do’s and don’ts for those of you insane enough to be interested in reading it.
DO:
1. Read page 108. You’ll thank me later.
2. Actively look for the video game references mentioned throughout the book. It’s the one thing that kept me partially sane near the end.
3. Love Wikki for the amount of time that he’s alive. Wikki deserves the love.
DO NOT:
1. Read pages 248, 249, 263, and 264. You’ll thank me later.
2. Expect semi decent phonics of the Japanese language in English characters. Don’t ask me about the French, though I’m sure it’s awful, too.
3. Expect the people on Emi’s Warcross team to do anything in order to progress the story. Just don’t. You’ll be greatly disappointed if you expect them to do anything that couldn’t have easily been cut out.
4. Get attached to Wikki, the food bringing robot, even though he’s blatantly the greatest character in the entire book. It was soul crushing when he exploded.
5. Expect Emi to make any shard of sense in the last two chapters. It just doesn’t happen.
6. Expect a world in which everything that is mentioned is neatly tied off like it should be. I get that there might be a sequel, but I still want to know what the drunk Phoenix Riders (Emi’s Warcross team) reactions were when Emi came back to Karaoke about an hour late, when she simply left to find the waiter so everyone could order shots and play a drinking game while singing Karaoke. That might just be me wanting to know, but whatever. The point still stands.
7. Read this book for a sense of enjoyment and originality. (My brain: Pfffft, no one would even try to read this book expecting that. I don’t need to leave it in. I’ll do this, just in case anyone would try to read this book expecting that.)
7. Ask for decent plot lines and no romance in a book that claims it’s a “sci-fi thriller” on the inside cover. It would just be insane if a sci-fi thriller was actually a sci-fi thriller, now wouldn’t it?
8. Try to ask for a few games of Mario Kart to be played. They talk about it twice, and you only recieve a few snippets of one game, so it’s a waste of your time to even hope for something like that.
9. Expect Hideo to have a solid personality. He changes from one line to the next and the sense that he’s a logical, rational, unfeeling super genius that looks down upon the world that you receive from your first encounter with him never returns.
Well, that about does it for this review. I tried to find a picture of Wikki but no one’s ever drawn him, so if, for whatever reason, you read this book, please remember to love Wikki with all of you heart. Hold on…
Does that mean…I’m responsible…for this horrible, terrible, awful book? No, oh please no, why me, WHY ME—