By Yuu Tanaka and Nardack. Released in Japan as “Deokure Tamer no Sono Higurashi” by GC Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by A.M. Cola.
This book does so many things wrong and yet I still greatly enjoy each volume. Honestly, I think I’d enjoy it far less if I were a gamer. I’ve never gamed fighting games at all, so the concept of “oh look, its HP is down to 30% so it’s changing its attack pattern” is something I’ve only experienced through light novels, which generally speaking cannot shut up about being the author’s game log turned into prose. And yet. Somehow, Yuto and his cute li’l monsters fighting don’t really bother me (it helps that I know I can sort of read much faster when I get to this point). Likewise, the “we get Yuto’s POV, then switch to other POVs” can be very aggravating if it’s just repeating the same events, but this book doesn’t do that. Also, like Bofuri, the Forum Threads work well. Most of all, I love watching Yuto being the biggest dipshit ever when it comes to knowing how good he is at this game.
We’re still in that weird combination of prehistoric monsters and island beach adventure. Yuto is ready to start searching for pirate gold… well, no, he’s just trying to follow the clues to the pirate shi0p that’s in an underwater cove, which leads to a lot of dead pirate skeletons. He then meets up with some of his friends, who are streaming, and once again accidentally reveals one of the most important parts of the event without knowing it’s important or realizing he’s doing it, which forces the mods to have to alter the entire big finale. The finale is pretty big, though, with lots of top line players, including Holland, the top player in the game. Will he ;pull it off and kill the Big Bad? Or will Yuto accidentally back into being awesome again?
I mean, the title of the book should give the answer to that question. If you enjoy Yuto being nice, generous, and deeply clueless, this is a fantastic book. Even when he’s spending his entire winnings at the end of the book to trick out his Japanese house into becoming a mansion that would cost upwards of 10 million dollars to buy in the real world, he’s framing it as “oh, hey, cool thing here, I bet everyone else is doing this”. Yuto’s isolation is the reason this all works so well. Yes, he has lots of casual friends in the game, and talks to them about stuff. He also occasionally buys information. But he never searches forums to solve problems, or reads them at all, really, except in very rare cases. As such, he has no idea how other people are normally spending their time or their money. His idea of “this is obvious, everyone else must do it” is everyone else’s idea of “WHAAAAAAAAAAT???”.
So yeah, arc over. I have a feeling the next book may be a slow life sort of break. We shall see. In the meantime, please enjoy the male Bofuri.
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