If the hook for you was Keiji Kiriya dying, resetting, and sharpening his skills until he can finally stand beside Rita Vrataski, Replay gives you that same addictive escalation. Jeff Winston relives his life over and over, learning, experimenting, and carrying the burden of memory the way Keiji does after countless loops. It’s less about battlefield tactics and more about the consequences of iterative mastery—how repeated do-overs change your choices, your ethics, and the people you’re willing to become.

Like Keiji’s relentless push to break the loop and win the war against the Mimics in his Jacket, Old Man’s War keeps the mission front and center: survive training, deploy, and defeat hostile species. It’s brisk, visceral military SF with high-stakes ops, brutal engagements, and that same "win or die and learn fast" urgency that made Keiji’s sorties so gripping.

If Rita Vrataski’s tough-as-nails coaching of Keiji was your favorite thread, Ender’s Game delivers a similarly intense shaping of a prodigy under pressure. Ender is hammered into a weapon through escalating simulations and commander mentorship, much like Keiji’s drill-to-kill cycles under Rita. The focus on tactical growth, harsh lessons, and the cost of becoming the perfect soldier will feel right at home.

If the appeal was Keiji in a Jacket tearing through Mimics, dying hard, and clawing through the next day, Armor is your kind of gauntlet. Felix’s powered suit is the only thing between him and endless ant-like aliens, and every sortie has that same pounding, near-hopeless survival energy you felt in Keiji’s repeat assaults—right down to the psychological toll of living through too many deaths.

If Rita Vrataski—the red-suited legend who turns Keiji into a killer—was the standout, The Light Brigade centers a fierce front-line soldier who’s hurled through time by battlefield tech. Dietz’s transformations, fractured timelines, and relentless combat echo the intensity of Rita and Keiji carving a path through Mimics, while putting a commanding woman warrior at the heart of the war’s biggest revelations.