Since no one had made a review on the Baccano light novels, despite the anime being an old time classic among anime fans and the tons of reviews on the anime itself on this site, I took the liberty to make my first review on this site and the first review for the Baccano light novels not only because it deserves it but the reviews for the anime doesn’t reflect all the good things this series has to offer. By the time this review is out, I have already completed all of the light novels and it’s completely spoiler free.

Story

To start, most of you that are reading this review here have most likely watched the anime and know what you’re into, but I still suggest all of you to read the summary first, whether have you read it or not. After you’ve read the summary, you can notice that there seems to be three summaries for three different stories in three different eras, and you’re exactly right. This series takes place in three eras that jumps in between each other, which makes this an achronological series. But the reading order is simple, just follow the release date of the volumes and you’ll be fine. Don’t skip any volumes just because you’ve watched the anime, you’ve been warned. Having three eras benefits the series greatly since the stakes in the story will be way higher, and with Narita’s masterful writing, plot twists are cleverly made and placed which makes them more impactful. It also makes the character interactions way better as you can see characters that have beef with each other meet after decades. It also fits the immortal theme well.

Author and his writing style

Yes, you’ve heard it. Immortals, as you can see on the summary given. With this, I have masterfully changed the topic to the author and his writing style. Yay! The author for Baccano is Narita Ryohgo and he is a master with characters and chaos, as evidenced if you’ve watched the anime or Narita’s other series like Durarara, the recent Dead Mount Death Play anime or the upcoming Fate Strange Fake anime. For those who has never consumed any of his works, let me give you an idea of how he writes characters and chaos.

Characters

The characters, are very interesting and fun to watch. There are many different types of characters with many different personalities that are compelling and fun. Some are absolutely fun to watch them fuck around. While some are generally heartfelt characters that made me cry. With the variety of characters that Narita writes, in both quantity and quality, you are bound to find someone you like. You can find a camorrista that treats his family and friends with care and will do anything to protect them.

You can also find a crazed assassin who kills with an intriguing moral code. You can find a pair of thieves that brings smiles to those around them. You can find an immortal that wants to make everyone smile. You can find a con man trying to redeem himself. You can find a gang leader who’s a coward and a crybaby. I can name a ton more but I’ll leave it at that. With so many characters in this series, Narita had a specific writing style that utilizes them to the max. In each arc, there is a different cast from the previous one, with a few returning characters from the previous arcs. Each character from the arcs is all given focus equally with different point of views to look at. With this writing style, it gave every character a chance to shine, which in turn made every character a protagonist depending on who you want them to be, even Narita himself said that this is the optimum way of reading the story.

What’s worthy to note is Narita tends to love to incorporate supernatural elements in a normal world. In that case, you can constantly see supernatural characters interacting or fighting against some regular people, which could or could not have, superhuman strength. With this little habit Narita has, he manages to increase the quality of character interactions to another level. Which you can see serves as a great foundation to Narita’s chaos.

Chaos

I’m sure not much will understand what I meant by the chaos. But in short, it’s an ensemble cast where all the related parties in the story meet up at one location. This, is my favorite aspect of Baccano. The way Narita writes ensemble casts is so unique that not many authors and series are able to do it. With an insanely huge number of entertaining characters, great character interactions with interactions between supernatural and human characters adding more to the flavor and the complete randomness in Narita’s writing, mashes together to become an event that is absolutely peak, hype and fun to read. Just reading about pre-established characters with different goals and motives meeting each other for the first time is absolutely fun. And with a huge cast of characters and the randomness from Narita, the pairing between characters and the interactions between them are highly unpredictable, so it makes them entertaining and hype every time. What makes this better, is that due to Narita’s writing style, there will be old and new characters in this ensemble that will interact with each other. And since Narita likes to treat everyone as the protagonist, it feels like a meetup of different protagonists, similar to a crossover, this evaluates the interaction to another level.

Art

For the art, it was pretty great overall, Enami Katsumi went through a literal evolution as he was drawing Baccano as the arts gets better and better after each volume. The scenes being picked for illustrations are also good choices, though the number of illustrations has gone down for the recent volume.

From this

To this

Overall, this is the series that made my day, and I’ve enjoyed every single part of it. Although it’s currently still on hiatus, I hope that we can get the final few volumes as soon as possible and hope for the best while Narita is rewriting on 1935 E.