In an alternate world that appears similar to our Cold War-era Europe, governments are raising new generations of spies to carry out the unglamorous side of warfare. There used to be a team of elite spies who took on the hardest missions but with nearly all the previous members gone Lamplight has to rebuild, and using spy academy washouts for some reason. While Klaus tells his new recruits that they won’t die on their “Impossible Mission” one month from today, he’s apparently terrible at teaching so it sure seems like the girls are being sent on a suicide mission to die. Klaus says that if the girls spend the next month trying to “defeat” him that will be training enough but, without any details on what skills they’ll need in the mission and given the reputations that these girls bring along with them, will that really be enough?
I had seen a trailer for the anime adaptation before I started reading the manga adaptation and was puzzled why the trailer had clearly mentioned only 7 girls while there were 8 present here; since I couldn’t remember which one had been missing I then spent these two volumes expecting a betrayal to come from one of the girls at any moment but nothing so far! (I did in fact discover what was going on after I had read both volumes and the anime had started airing, so put down your keyboards and no spoilers in the comments!)
From the title and premise, I expected something a bit similar to Assassination Classroom (where the kids spend an entire year trying to kill their teacher) but even though that series was a 21 volume, Weekly Shonen Jump title (aka, very episodic) I felt like AssClass had tighter pacing and focus than these first two volumes. While each girl’s plans to take down Klaus vary widely (unsurprising given that each girl has a different specialty, from poisons to using animals) they all feel rushed and half-baked — there’s no suspense at all regarding who will win any given encounter. It’s obviously going to be Klaus and where’s the fun in that?
The art was also an immediate turn-off for me. While the covers look fine (and the art there looks rather similar to the art seen on the covers of the light novels) the actual comic itself looks like it was submitted before the artist had a chance to correct character models (even accounting for the fact that at least half of the cast have the exact same facial structure), finesse the shading, or even adding variety to their line weight. This isn’t the manga-ka’s first series, in fact they’ve even done another manga adaptation before for WorldEnd, but the art seemed incredibly clumsy and amateurish. If the art had been more polished then I might have been more forgiving of the presentation as a whole but given how awkward the story already felt this was the unfortunate cherry on top for me.
Before I started reading this manga adaptation I was looking forward to the anime adaptation and also curious about trying out the light novels, since I had heard good things about them. After reading these two volumes however, I had negative interest in either the anime or the light novels. From what I’ve heard, the light novels are the best version of the bunch but given how weak this iteration was in every single way, I’m not terribly interested to find out how “good” they actually are.