Reborn as a Space Mercenary Volume 1-2 Light Novel Review

Satoru Takahiro has lived an unremarkable life. He's a middle-of-the-road office worker who isn't close to anyone. His one passion is video games. He's skilled enough at first-person shooters to qualify as one of Japan's best players, and he's devoted years to the popular science fiction MMO Stella Online. One day, without explanation, Satoru wakes up behind the controls of the ultra-powerful starship Krishna, his pride and joy in Stella Online. He hasn't been transported into the game, but he and the Krishna have been pulled into a galaxy that's remarkably similar to the game.

Taking his gaming handle “Captain Hiro” as his new name, the once ordinary salaryman throws himself into the thrilling, violent life of an intergalactic mercenary. He battles hordes of pirates. He meets and soon goes to bed with beautiful women who feel indebted to him. He travels the galaxy and plies his trade, all in the hopes of buying himself a nice house, enjoying the camaraderie of his newfound ladies, and maybe finding a carbonated drink in a galaxy that has never heard of them.

Satoru Takahiro has lived an unremarkable life. He's a middle-of-the-road office worker who isn't close to anyone. His one passion is video games. He's skilled enough at first-person shooters to qualify as one of Japan's best players, and he's devoted years to the popular science fiction MMO Stella Online. One day, without explanation, Satoru wakes up behind the controls of the ultra-powerful starship Krishna, his pride and joy in Stella Online. He hasn't been transported into the game, but he and the Krishna have been pulled into a galaxy that's remarkably similar to the game.

Taking his gaming handle “Captain Hiro” as his new name, the once ordinary salaryman throws himself into the thrilling, violent life of an intergalactic mercenary. He battles hordes of pirates. He meets and soon goes to bed with beautiful women who feel indebted to him. He travels the galaxy and plies his trade, all in the hopes of buying himself a nice house, enjoying the camaraderie of his newfound ladies, and maybe finding a carbonated drink in a galaxy that has never heard of them.

In theory, Reborn as a Space Mercenary is the tale of an ordinary man who finds himself leading a life less ordinary. In practice, Reborn as a Space Mercenary is the tale of a cipher whose grandest, most indulgent dreams are presented so poorly that they become lifeless and ordinary. Its inaugural volume is largely devoid of character, drama, or personality. Its second volume spices things up with a bit of character, but in practice that character is mostly loathsome. The rare moments of charm and intrigue only serve to highlight the rest of the novel's persistent hollowness. It is a bloodless, thoughtless waste of time that lacks even the courage to own its debauchery.

Satoru Takahiro's life prior to his waking up as Captain Hiro is all but blank. The most concrete things Space Mercenary establishes about him are that he likes soda and he's a talented gamer. His fondness for Stella Online has no grounding or history. His skill with first-person shooters is not discussed beyond his finding his ability satisfying. Why he's drawn to these specific games and that specific genre goes unexplored. While Hiro will occasionally allude to having been lonely and unsatisfied with his life as Satoru, he's sketched so thinly that his past is less a question to be answered than an uninteresting, unimportant swath of static.

Becoming Hiro does not seem to bother or confuse the former Satoru. Very little about waking up in a vast, dangerous galaxy that he barely understands bothers Hiro. He just goes with the flow. Pirates threaten him? He cuts them down without mercy. Killing people isn't a big deal when they're pirates. Luffy be damned, pirates might as well be orcs. A (worryingly) young woman and a space elf feel compelled to sleep with Hiro because he saved them from, respectively, sexual assault and being unjustly imprisoned alongside pirates who want to sexually assault her. Power dynamics, schmoe dynamics, space babes want him. He has the weapons and the skills to carve a path through the brave new world he's found himself in. Owning a house might be nice. And since no one in the galaxy seems to know what carbonation is, maybe finding a genuine soda would be good. Hiro is less a character than he is a receptacle for glory and laurels.

Hiro's flatness trips Space Mercenary up in two key ways. The first is that, when he does show signs of an identity starting late in volume one and continuing into volume two, his previous lack of personality means those signs make a big impression. That impression is repulsive, and it is not meant to be. Hiro is not a charismatic villain whose wicked ways are meant to be entertainingly appalling. He's (allegedly) a nice guy. A nice guy who dismisses his worry that his human girlfriend Mimi might be too young for him and that he's a monster for sleeping with her because the galactic age of consent is 15, so it's all good. A nice guy who keeps his space elf girlfriend Elma indentured to him because it's convenient. He sucks, and it sucks that his story is one of effortless victories and endless rewards.

Hiro's lack of definition and depth also undercuts Space Mercenary's attempts at being a power fantasy. The absence of his life pre-Krishna means that there is very little to compare his life post-Krishna to. In the big picture, yes, it's a big leap from “single company man” to “galaxy-trotting badass with a lady on both arms and more waiting in the wings,” but beyond the generic assumption that such a life would be appealing compared to 21st-century mundanity, there is no thought put into the whats and whys that make that life a fantasy. Hiro doesn't adore piloting the Krishna because piloting delivers real results as opposed to completing a project at work. He doesn't revel in cutting down pirates because he's been preyed on by gangsters. He doesn't savor Elma and Mimi both feeling indebted to and genuinely wanting him because he's used to an isolated life and purely transactional friendships or romances. He enjoys his new life because its nominally grand fantasy would obviously be enjoyable. There's no friction, no specificity, no texture, and even at its sleaziest, it's strangely timid.

The unequal power dynamics between Hiro, Elma, and Mimi get enough attention to suggest that they are supposed to be part of the fantasy, but when those relationships reach their climax, the novels shrink from even trying to craft erotica. Paragraphs are devoted to how Elma will face a grim fate full of sexual violence at the hands of imprisoned space pirates if Hiro doesn't save her from prison by covering her debt and functionally indenturing her to him. When Elma subsequently offers herself to Hiro, the cut to afterwards is abrupt and almost chaste, even accompanied by a pin-up of Elma nude beneath a sheet (artist Tetsuhiro Nabeshima's illustrations are Space Mercenary's best element. They're fine.). That Hiro insists on discussing the fact that he's in sexual relationships with thuddingly obvious entendres (“If you know what I mean” gets driven into the ground) only highlights how strange the novel's hesitance to go all in on exploitation feels compared to the rest of its material. If Space Mercenary owned and ran with being a sleazy fantasy that turned on the erotic appeal of unequal power dynamics, at least it would be consistent and have something resembling genuine passion. Its hesitance on that front is just one more way that Space Mercenary assumes that ticking boxes off the generic power fantasy checklist without craft or care qualifies as enough to spin something worth savoring.

Space Mercenary's insistence on sticking to the bare minimum in weaving its indulgences extends to its world and its supporting cast. Elma the space elf is a capital-T Tsundere. Mimi is so hollow that Hiro has to outright tell her what sorts of interests she could develop. The other players Hiro and company meet are even more archetypal than the heroines. The galaxy, with all its power players and complications, is strictly stock. It's less The Expanse than The Ehhhxpanse. Potentially interesting details and complications are treated as little more than background dressing. The rare sparks of life in Space Mercenary's world are explicit quotations from better science fiction. When Elma suggests dining on something that looks like a vacuum-sealed facehugger, or Hiro paraphrases Char Aznable, it's less an affectionate hat-tip than an unintentional reminder that watching Alien or Gundam would be a much better use of time than reading Reborn as a Space Mercenary.

There are so, so many better options out there when it comes to science fiction, power fantasies, and exploitation media than Reborn as a Space Mercenary. For all that it's allegedly about rebirth, there's precious little life to be found in its pages. It's a banal, bland nothing.