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.

I’ve mostly given up on trying to make sure these reviews don’t repeat themselves. I can manage it with books where the plot is “awkward teens in love” or “Guy with a +2 Sword of Awesome and His Catgirl Maid Harem”, but this is one of those slow life books that genuinely IS a slow life book, and it doesn’t even have the decency of being a reincarnation or an isekai. This is a game, and the only reason we know that the series will eventually end is that Yuno took two weeks off his job just to play it all the time, and eventually those two weeks are gonna end and he will presumably go back to being a salaryman. The goal here is to find new awesome things to use in the game and cute things to gawk at in the game. Well, that and to rubberneck as Yuno ends up doing ridiculous bullshit without realizing it. Let’s face it, most light novels have the reader imagine they’re the hero. We can’t even. We’re one of the schlubs gushing about the hero.

Yes, that’s a new tamed monster on the cover. After leveling up the bit of the sacred tree that he planted at his farm, he finds it summons a demon… a demon who is immediately, and really easily, tamed. She’s called (of course) Lilith, and she’s just as goofy as she looks, but she also helps Yuno with some fairly useful skills. He also manages to figure out a really obscure way of evolving his olive treant, who now becomes another wood nymph, which is to say a cute… well, a cute non-binary child. (There is a literal debate about Olea’s gender on the series’ equivalent of Reddit.) He manages to traumatize Alyssa even more just by telling her about the completely ordinary things that he’s done, which of course are anything but. And he has five of his tamed monsters create things to put up for an auction… not realizing that they will sell for ludicrous amounts to fans of Yuno and his crew.

There is a cliche in light novels that all a romantic lead has to do is be nice to a girl once and she will immediately fall madly in love with him. Here, in a series with no romance at all, we see how it actually works when you have a genuinely nice, selfless hero. At one point Yuno triggers an event where he’s thanked by the Gnome Chief for being so good to Olto, and that they should help each other grow. No one else got this event ending, and we find that’s because no one has raised the affection level of their tamed anything more than Yuno has. And he does this by involving everyone in his daily life, helping them when they need it, helping them fight, and caring about their opinions more than his own (except when they try to dress him in tacky yukatas). He cares about his tamed monsters and sees them as a family, not as cute NPCs, not as pets, and not as glorified fetishes. It makes a difference.

So yeah, still enjoying this series that is nothing but watching a guy game real good the only way he knows how.

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.

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.

If you read this series to watch it tick boxes, this is a very good volume. As you can tell from the cover, we get to tick the box ‘beach episode’, as Yuto and his tamed monsters get to dress in swimsuits for the beach (though apparently the non-human ones have to wear one-piece suits, presumably so we don’t have to deal with penguins in bikinis) and also got to have their very own Jurassic Park event on an uncharted desert island (which, of course, he manages to complete by himself purely on instinct and luck, something which absolutely boggles the mods). Admittedly, he doesn’t come out unscathed, as there are two sacrifices for the cause… but this is a fluffy game, so when the tamed monster dies they just literally go back to the ranch. There’s no end goal to this series at all – it ends when Yuto’s two-week vacation finishes and he has to go back to being a salaryman again. The fluff is all there is.

It’s time for the Summer Event, which means Yuto and his crew get to hang out on beaches, go fishing, and try to fill up an encyclopedia of animals and insects. This is right up Yuto’s alley, as he is exactly the sort of nerd that went looking for rhinoceros beetles as a kid, though the rest of the tamed crew are a bit less enthusiastic. He also gets to (after many attempts to get past a strong current blocking the player from advancing) to an island that has prehistoric life, ranging from rare fossils to tyrannosaurus rexes to raptors straight out of that movie that dare not speak its name. (Sadly, it’s not WcRassic Park.) Unfortunately, Yuto is not really powerful enough to take on a t-rex, especially when they also come across a huge brachiosaurus. Nothing left to do but get killed… or is there a way to beat this using smarts? And what effects will accidentally streaming everything have on the event?

It’s getting increasingly hard not to call this series “the male Bofuri”, and if Maple kept to herself and got a few more animal friends, they’d basically be the same. Yuto is not trying to break the game, he just keeps doing it. It’s not just that he happened across the one way to actually win the dinosaur battle without a party wipe, it’s that he accidentally streamed it so that EVERYONE ELSE also knows. He didn’t even have to give the info to the increasingly despairing info brokers this time around (though rest assured, he still has plenty of info, and it’s still breaking their bank to buy it.) But Yuto is not really trying to get involved in major game stories. He’s here to try to catch a coelacanth, or get back to shore before he has to pay extra on his fishing boat. Like Maple, he’s simply a game-breaking force of nature, and if the teaser for the next book proves true (think sunken pirate gold), that won’t change. Looks like the head developer will have to get a divorce.

So yeah, this has no plot, and it’s never going to. It has no romance. Hell, it barely has friendships – Yuto doesn’t really hang out with other players this volume. But it’s fun. I like it.