Note: This is Volume 7 of a series, there are likely to be some spoilers in this review so please be aware. Why did I start reading I mean, it's volume 7 now. I'm starting to think I will skip this section for future Magical Girl Raising Project books.
What is it? In a series about magical girl death games, we enter our fourth blood bath. This one starts with the creations on artificial magical girls, something bound to piss off the magical kingdom and throw this already unstable world upside down.
What are the characters like? Like always, I fell in love with many of them. You think I would lean with this being a book about murder but...it's hard.
Anyone particularly cool? Returning best girl, Snow White is back! We saw in the second death game how she had changed and grown-up but now we got to see it much closer. Admittedly, any scene from her point of view was taken over by the artificial fairy Fal, an unwilling facilitator of the second death game, but the artificial fairy's caring and concerned point of view is an interesting perspective. It gets through just how far Snow had gone since the first book. Other than that there were definitely some interesting girls and some heartbreaking deaths as I wished for them to stay alive. Faves for me were Styler Mimi, Marika, Filru. Styler Mimi was a bit of an unwilling participant. With her magic being non-combat I didn't expect her to last too long but she was one of the most skilled in combat. It was impressive. Marika was her partner in crime that, at the start, annoyed me. She was portrayed as the biggest asshole in the room but you quickly come to understand she was just a combat junkie, she did everything she could to make people fight with her and...there's just an interesting bit nearer the end with her character D: Filru was a character if felt sorry for, her motive was pretty innocent, she was just there in hopes it would lead to a job. Maybe I'll do a spoilerific rant as to why I loved her at another point.
What's the bad news? The pacing was kinda frustrating in this volume. There were a number of times where we are heading up to an interesting event and we suddenly jump to a different girl doing something else. I get that in theses stories there tends to be a lot going on at once, a lot of characters to juggle and a lot of backstory to get in before they kick the bucket but, this book had a particularly bad time for it. Sadly, the ending was also pretty anticlimactic. There was a lot of desperation and suspense in this book only for the ending to just quickly sweep up and summarise things I really would have liked to have been witness to or understand what happened better.
And the good news? The world of Magical Girl Raising Project is just getting more fleshed out now. This book shows that there was a lot of fallout from the last book, the reason at least three of these girls ended up in this situation was directly because of events caused by the last death. We also have interludes where nearly every survivor from the last few death games appears, slowly building background conspiracies that are just making me so excited to see where it will all go!
Would you recommend? There's no reason to stop now that the overarching story is gearing up! bring on the next book!