Best of the three English-language novels

The third Junk Force novel (and the final one to be translated into English) presents us with five mini-stories detailing the ongoing adventures of Liza, Louis, Wooty, Mill and Mamet in their hostile, post-apocalyptic world.

While Hideki Kakinuma does a marginally better job in the narration department, his writing is still largely that of a scriptwriter, so at times the book can be a little awkward to trudge through. However, Dr. Master's editing team presents a noticeably improved effort, with far fewer errors and formatting problems than the previous two entries, earning this volume an extra half-star from me.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it truly is a shame novels 4 and 5 weren't translated; Junk Force is a very fun series with good concepts and stories and with the right marketing it could have been much bigger than what it was. I hope another English-language publisher might one day give the series a chance, though that certainly looks unlikely.

I really think this would work well as an anime series, and I get the feeling from the novels' episodic nature that Kakinuma was trying to get it going as an eventual anime series, and just wasn't able to gain quite enough momentum. He did manage to get two audio drama CDs out of it, so at least the characters eventually gained voices, but that's as far as the series ultimately got. Shame, too, as the top-quality illustrations look like something straight out of a fully animated cartoon; they add a lot to the books.

The book ends with a bang as the final story, "On The Road Again," has quite a lot of tension and action and feels almost like a season finale. On the whole, it makes a better read than the other two Junk Force novels, though it never quite approaches the quality level of the manga. Still, the improvements here encourage me to believe that the fourth and fifth novels, had they been translated, would have continued this trend in improvement. Alas, we'll never know.

Junk Force fans should check this out. The series had enormous potential and only barely scratched the surface of what it could have been, but what we got is worth having.

7/10