Full Metal Panic! Novel Vol. #01 - Fighting Boy Meets Girl

By Greg Hackmann     September 04, 2007
Release Date: September 11, 2007



Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Writer: Shouji Gatou / Artist: Shikidouji
Translated by:Duane Johnson
Adapted by:Ben Arntz

What They Say
Jindai High School was a relatively safe place, right up until Sousuke Sagaka transferred there. A total nut, he wreaks havoc on the school's student body and gets into a world of trouble with the teachers! But there's more to Sousuke than meets the eye - not just a hell-raising student, he's actually a member of an elite military unit, on an undercover mission to protect the beautiful schoolgirl Kaname Chidori from the KGB.

The Review
While the first Full Metal Panic! novel may not tax many brain cells, it's a good light read through to the end.

Packaging:
The front cover features Sousuke and Kaname posing together, the former wearing a grim expression on his face; the ARX-7 Arbalest looms in the backdrop between the pair and a wall of flames. The back cover features a splattered gun illustration layered on top of the flames, a motif which Tokyopop recycles throughout the novel as chapter headers. Tokyopop's standard back-cover marketing spiel gives a brief overview of Sousuke Sagaka's [sic] mission. The bright flames are certainly attention-catching, but typos aside, there's really nothing extraordinary good or bad to say about Tokyopop's cover choice here.

The sole extra is a short afterword from the author, in which he issues a tongue-in-cheek apology for his unrealistic treatment of military terminology and high school girls.

Text:
Inside, the translation reads very smoothly without any noticeable typos or grammatical gaffes. Though comedy can often be a sticky point when adapting Japanese source material, Johnson and Arntz do an excellent job of ensuring that the novel's humor translates well into English.

Tokyopop's print quality is crisp and clear, with Shikidouji's illustrations (about 10 or so in all) coming out cleanly alongside the printed text. The typeface is perfectly legible throughout, which is more than I can say for some of their other titles. As usual, Tokyopop has jettisoned the Japanese honorifics in their translation, a move that may aggravate some hardcore fans.

Contents: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
We are introduced to teenaged Sergeant Sousuke Sagara at the tail end of a rescue mission being carried out by the undercover military organization Mithril. Though Mithril loses an agent in the process, Sousuke recovers a CD of confidential KGB research data as well as a young KGB hostage. Almost immediately afterwards, Sousuke and fellow soldiers Melissa Mao and Kurz Weber are assigned a curious new mission: to monitor Japanese high school student Kaname Chidori, who Lieutenant Commander Kalinin believes to be a potential KGB kidnapping target. Because Sousuke is the right age to enroll in high school, he is ordered to go in undercover as a transfer student. Meanwhile, Mao and Kurz are to provide support by way of one of Mithril's Arm Slaves, a military-grade robot equipped with advanced optical camouflage technology.

Sousuke, who has spent his formative years on the battlefield, finds adjusting to civilian life to be a unique challenge. To make matters worse, his mission is strictly top-secret; for her own safety, not even Kaname can be aware that she is being tracked. Sousuke's tendency to apply his military training to everyday school life raises a few eyebrows, especially when his efforts to keep on Kaname's trail lead him to barge into the women's locker room and jump through train windows.

In the meantime, mercenary-for-hire Gauron strikes a deal with the KGB to abduct another of the so-called Whispered, a handful of teenaged girls who have some undisclosed power that could shift the Cold War in the USSR's favor. Gauron selects Kaname as his target, and he begins plotting a way to circumvent Mithril's constant surveillance. The opportunity presents itself when Mithril Captain Teletha Testarossa launches a missile strike on the last known Whispered research facility in the USSR. Believing that they have completely wiped out the USSR's Whispered program, Mithril declares an end to the surveillance mission, and issues an order to withdraw Sousuke from school after an upcoming class trip.

Needless to say, Gauron has other plans. He organizes the hijacking of the class's plane, diverting them to North Korea under the guise of a politically-charged hostage situation. After landing in North Korea, he takes advantage of the ensuing chaos to whisk Kaname away to a military trailer, where she is forced to withstand hours of strange experiments. Sousuke, of course, doesn't intend to simply let the hostage situation play out in the meantime. At the risk of blowing his undercover status, he regains communication with Mithril and begins planning a recovery operation.

While rummaging through the plane's cargo hold, Sousuke discovers that the situation is more urgent than he thought: Gauron has planted a massive bomb inside the plane. Sousuke, having previously met Gauron at some undisclosed point in the past, realizes that Gauron is sadistic enough to cover up Kaname's abduction by blowing the plane up during its return trip to Japan. Placing the safety of the other passengers in Mithril's hands, Sousuke takes it upon himself to locate and extract Kaname from Gauron's clutches.

Comments
Full Metal Panic! isn't exactly a sophisticated or complex body of work. Back stories are virtually non-existent, characters wear their motivations on their sleeves, and settings are only fleshed out to the point that Mithril has something to blow up. Readers looking for the depth of, say, the Boogiepop novels will want to look elsewhere.

But really, Full Metal Panic! isn't trying to be that sort of novel. Gatou's self-professed goal was to make the light novel equivalent to a B-grade action movie; and that describes the end result pretty well. Even at a relatively massive 300+ pages, the book is a quick and entertaining read. By shuffling among about equal parts melodrama, action, and comedy, Gatou never lets the story take itself too seriously or linger too long in a scene that doesn't work. People who like their robots massive, their comedy silly, and their banter snappy should not walk away disappointed.

Now for the question that fans of the anime series are probably most interested in: is there enough "new" material in the novel to make it worth picking up? Honestly, it's a tough call. The TV adaptation deviates very little from the source material, both in terms of plot and tone, and covers the novel's entire storyline in the first seven episodes. Ironically, this faithfulness means that many readers who were already exposed to the novel's anime or manga siblings will find their original incarnation largely superfluous. Nevertheless, its low price point makes it a tempting pick for existing fans who are looking for more material out of the franchise and who don't mind retreading old ground.