“I think, in the midst of that divine hunger, I became someone else.”
The main emotion that this book made me feel was confusion. Spoiler warnings for Gearbreakers and Godslayers. And I mean a lot of spoilers. You’ve been warned.
The Gearbreakers attack on Heavensday was successful, but has come at a cost. The Gearbreakers are on the run, Eris is being held prisoner in Godolia, and Sona is brainwashed into believing she is a loyal Godolia pilot. When Godolia starts a program to induct Badlands kids into a Windup program, will the Gearbreakers stop them, or will they be crushed under the boot of one of Godolia’s mechas?
I spent most of this book wondering what was going on. That’s partially because I forgot most of what happened in Gearbreakers and partially because this book was really confusing.
Let's start off with what I liked. The writing style definitely got better in this book. Gearbreakers’s main problem was definitely the purple prose, which cleared up in this book. I really like the way Mikuta writes now, it’s pretty and brutal and serves the book well. She has a strong voice.
Eris and Sona’s romance is cute, if a bit cheesy sometimes. I liked their dynamic and them as characters. The found family vibes were cute. I really liked the ending, it felt right, even if I think more people should have died. I’m glad that Eris and Sona got a happy ending, and Jenny being a diplomat makes a lot of sense. I really like Jenny as a character too, I want a book about her.
I like how Korean culture was more included in this book.
The overall message of the series is sweet. I like the hopeful element.
Now what I didn’t like, which is going to be a much longer list.
The introduction of the Hydras, a discontinued Mecha line that are piloted by Godolians that went rogue. They end up helping the Gearbreakers, but it felt like a cop-out to give the main crew a bunch of mechas, and therefore an advantage. It also made it so the mecha fights were mecha v. mecha, instead of Gearbreakers v. mecha, which was one of my favorite parts of Gearbreakers. The mecha v. mecha fights were less exciting and made battle scenes less fun to read. It was a really random choice.
Speaking of random, this entire book felt random. The plot was very disjointed, if you can even call it a plot. I would call it a bunch of things happening, the Gearbreakers reacting to it, rinse and repeat. Despite this, I still can’t name anything that happened in the middle of this novel. It didn’t feel like Godslayers had a direction it was going in, which made it hard to stay invested in it.
Godslayers also suffers from a too-big cast. In Gearbreakers, Eris’s crew all have fairly distinct personality traits and roles as a crew (ex: Nova is chaotic, and she’s the getaway driver). They weren’t the best side characters, they weren’t super fleshed out, but they still had their own roles. In Godslayers, that just disappears. They’re practically interchangeable and don’t have much pagetime, and I wasn’t really emotionally invested in any of them. It was sad when June died, but I wasn’t nearly as sad as I would have been if she had died in Gearbreakers, back when she had an actual personality. The addition of Jenny’s crew, the Hydras, and those doctors didn’t help either. They didn’t even feel like side characters, just names that would appear on the page occasionally and then disappear for a while. I cared about Eris, Sona, and Jenny. That was it.
Enyo as a character was really random. He wants to be good and help people, but has inherited the role of being a leader of an empire that has a lot of blood on its hands. He had a lot of potential to be fascinating, but it was never capitalized upon. He’s just there, and I never really understood him. His relationship with Sona also had lots of potential, and I liked the snippets we got, but it didn’t really amount to anything. They were just weirdly obsessed with each other, and there weren’t enough interactions between them or depth to his character to justify that obsession. I understood what Mikuta was trying to do with his character, and if it was done well it would have been amazing, but it was executed poorly.
The worldbuilding was kind of bad and confusing. I’m not really sure where anything is in relation to each other and what’s part of Godolia and what isn’t. I really wish this book had a map, because that would help me envision Godolia. It feels like the world doesn’t exist outside of the story, if that makes sense. The religion was fascinating, but not built-up, which is really sad. The idea of people worshiping man-made mechas that kill them is so cool and not well-used at all, even though it’s such a central part of how Godolia works.
There were so many time skips. I understand why they happened, since what happened between the time skips would have been horribly boring to read about, but it was still too much. They were also sometimes used to skip over dealing with the consequences of something, which I think is a really lazy and cheap writing tactic. I think that this series should have been a trilogy (despite the fact that there’s definitely not enough plot to sustain three books) just because of all these stupid time skips.
One of the things that is skipped over is Eris losing her hand. It is actually the stupidest thing to happen in this book. It has no consequences. It adds nothing to the story. It is literally pointless and did not need to happen. We don’t see her having phantom pains. We don’t see her adjusting to the loss of her hand, in physical and mental ways. We don’t see her dealing with the fact that her hand was blown off and all the trauma that comes with that. She loses her hand, there’s a one month time skip, and then Jenny’s made her a new hand so she’s good to go. It’s so lazy it makes me mad. Why did it even fucking happen if it wouldn’t affect the book or Eris’s character at all?
Sona’s corruption arc had the potential to be so good, and we got some good and angsty parts between her and Enyo, or her and Eris, but it kind of just disappeared. Again, a lot of potential that was wasted. I think her character development was okay, but it’s hard to say if Eris is really that different from the beginning of the series.
The Archangel showing up at the end of the book was so unnecessary and random, especially because they defeated it a page later. There was no point to it showing up.
Whenever any of the characters called each other “love”, I would imagine them saying it in a British accent. That’s a personal issue, but did not do Godslayers any favors.
Overall, Godslayers had a lot of potential and interesting ideas that were just wasted. The writing style improved, but everything else just got worse. It’s sad, since I know Mikuta has the ability to write a good book. Gearbreakers was genuinely fun and enjoyable to read, while reading Godslayers felt like I was in a confused haze. I’m not really sure if I’d recommend this series. I liked the first book a lot, but this was a disappointment. I do look forward to Mikuta’s future works though, her writing is good and this is her debut series. She’s got nowhere to go but up.