Paper short abstract:

"All You Need Is Kill" is a Japanese sci-fi novel with manga and film adaptations. It explores basic game mechanics—having to repeat a stage until the player learns to overcome the obstacles. The sum of these media renderings of a mechanistic premise results in a view of ontology as indeterminate.

Paper long abstract:

Do complex issues and transcendental questions necessitate complex narrative strategies? The straightforward nature of many myths belies such notion. Nevertheless, imaginative efforts aiming at exploring alternative modalities of conscience and of existence tend to rely on narrative strategies designed to suit the new epistemological coordinates associated with such ontological leaps. That is the case with the exploration of disembodied consciences, hive minds, and brain diving in works by creators such as Masamune Shirō and Oshii Mamoru.

This is also the case with "All You Need Is Kill," a novel by Sakurazaka Hiroshi that has been adapted to manga by Takeuchi Ryōsuke and Obata Takeshi, and adapted to film by Doug Liman ("Edge of Tomorrow"). The story sets a premise that alters our commonsensical understanding of life as a single timeline. The protagonist is smack in the middle of a battle to the death between humanity and an alien invader. Every time he dies, he wakes up on the very same morning of the very same day in the past. Thus, we have an unusual case of "syuzhet" complexity being mostly a reflection of a complexity already present in the premise of the "fabula" and its successive turns after each consecutive reset. We will analyze the formal and content differences amongst the three versions of "All You Need Is Kill" to illustrate how they achieve different aesthetic and epistemological conclusions, and their degree of success in replicating the gaming experience.

The parallel reading of these materials provides an alternative to univocal explorations of sci-fi premises that contemplate only one possible journey and outcome for the characters. Not only does this offer an engaging alternative to the trite "expanded universe" resource, the narrative exploration of the three "All You Need Is Kill" renderings achieves the opposite result that the plot axiom would imply. While the rot memorization of game mechanics that inspired Sakurazaka equal a deterministic view of the universe and the laws of Nature, the ensemble reading of these three media explorations constitutes a complex and nuanced refutation of the Laplace's Demon thesis.