Monthly Archives: August 2017

In Another World with My Smartphone, Vol. 4

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By Patora Fuyuhara and Eiji Usatsuka. Released in Japan as “Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomo ni” by Hobby Japan. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Andrew Hodgson.

Our little smartphone novel has grown up to a degree, and it’s something I view with very mixed feelings. Sure, we still have the occasional plotline that is just “Touya and friends lackadaisically do relaxing things’, but I can’t really call this a pure and innocent isekai anymore. It’s reached puberty and is trying to act up. Oh, rest assured, there’s no actual sex or anything. That would require losing an audience that the author is not prepared to lose. But Touya just seems a bit more cynical in his dealings with things, and he’s thinking about women a lot more than he did (though not quite to the extent of that short story in Vol. 2). On the bright side, the villains all still clearly delineate themselves into ‘evil’ and ‘SUPER evil’, so we don’t risk sympathizing with them at all then Touya destroys them. Rest assured, that will never change.

Yes, that’s right, there’s a new girl on the cover, and a new addition to the harem, though I’m amused that Touya describes his four fiancees as his “core team”. Lu is a princess of a neighboring kingdom, and personality-wise is very shy and blushy, similar to Shinobu from Love Hina. As we meet her, her kingdom is on the verge of a military takeover, with the general of the kingdom deposing the emperor and taking power with the help of a summoned demon adn some artifacts that make him almost invincible. That said, Touya barely reacts to this challenge, figuring out fairly quickly how to deal with him, though I’m not sure it’s a method he’ll ever use again. As a result the emperor is back on the throne, and Touya gets a very willing Lu as a reward, though he once again pleads for everyone to wait till he turns 18. (Yumina and Lu’s fathers plotting to use Touya politically is one of the best parts of the book, as Touya is always at his best when thrown off from his usual blandness.)

Elsewhere, Touya rescues a group of slaves and frees them up to become employees of the bookstore/cafe he creates, which ends up turning into a far-too-long joke about all the women in the entire kingdom being fujoshi (this was OK), and Touya thinking “no homo no homo!” about 865 times (this was not). We also resolve the ‘surely she’s a long lost noble’ plotline involving Renne, the runaway girl Touya took in as a maid in an earlier volume. Surprise! She’s a noble whose now-dead mother ran away from her family to marry an adventurer. This is also not as funny as the author would like, relying on a lot of jokes about Renne’s aunt Carol being a Christmas Cake. Oh yes, and the obnoxious nobles in Yumina’s own kingdom show up again, this time with a murder plot that will attempt to implicate Touya so that they can have their son marry and rape Yumina, possibly not in that order. When Touya hears about this, his response is… impressive, if a bit shocking. It seems out of character given he’s so mild-mannered, but given the circumstances I can’t blame him. Oh yes, and he’s awarded his own (tiny) kingdom, and builds a castle to go with it.

Overall this was a highly variable volume of Smartphone, which can’t simply rely on pure charm anymore and is therefore trying to decide what to do next. It works best when not crawling through the drudgery of anime cliches like “she’s angry people think she’s old” or “everything thinks he’s gay”. I’m still interested in the series, but honestly, I would not blame those who were having light, breezy fun with it for stopping here.

Also, he names his attack griffons John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Because of course he does.

Attack on Titan, Vol. 22

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By Hajime Isayama. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Bessatsu Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics. Translated by Ko Ransom.

“Tragic backstory intensifies” would be a good description of this volume, for the most part. Eren continues to have dreams that flash back to his father’s life before he was born, showing us the fate of Grisha’s first wife (she appeared in the story earlier than we think, it turns out!) and what our kingdom really is – an island kingdom, with most of the world very much not dead on the other side of the ocean. We also, as predicted, see Eren and Mikasa in jail for the orders they disobeyed in the previous couple of books, though that doesn’t last, mostly due to how important Eren really is. Oh yes, and much to Mikasa’s horror, we get a time limit on the Titans’ lives – they only live for 13 years after being titan-ized, meaning that we also get another major character death, though this one is offscreen.

Yes, in fine lesbian character tradition, Ymir writes a farewell note to Historia that confirms that a) she wanted to live the rest of her life married to her, but b) she can’t as she’s soon going to be dead. After Eren’s revelations, it’s pretty clear that this is meant to be due to simply living out that 13 year span rather than due to being executed. Reiner, at least, lets her write said farewell letter, though I wish we’d been able to see more of Historia’s reaction. I suppose it was unbecoming of a queen. So no happy ending for Ymir, though at least she doesn’t seem to have been killed off just for being gay. As for Mikasa, I’ve pretty much written off any hope of her character revolving around anything other than Eren, so her stunned disbelief through most of this is unsurprising. Not sure if they’ll find a way to stop Eren and Armin from dying. I could see it going either way.

There’s also more arguing over whether it was the right thing to save Armin or not – I suspect this may have been an argument that Isayama and some of his editors may have had as well. I wish that it had been one of the regulars allowed to take an opposing side, rather than generic military police guy, who is there to remind Hitch that Marlowe likely died terrified and to yell at everyone else, so immediately turns into one of my least favorite characters. I think it would have had more impact if it was a more familiar face on the Erwin side, though. In any case, however, we jump forward a bit and see the Survey Corps confirming what they’d found out from Grisha – that this is an island, and that there is ocean at the end of it. This leads to possibly the only really heartwarming scene in the book, with the members of Levi’s unit cheerfully splashing in the surf (though not in swimsuits – we can’t rewrite reality that much).

I didn’t see an “End of Part Two” at the finale of this volume, but it certainly felt like it. We’ve gotten a lot of our answers, but what comes next? In any case, Titan fans should enjoy this volume, though likely they will get frustrated with it as well. But we should all be used to that.

Clockwork Planet, Vol. 1

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By Yuu Kamiya, Tsubaki Himana, and Sino. Released in Japan by Kodansha. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by fofi.

Ugh. I hate the (2) that’s sitting in the URL up there. Why couldn’t this book have had a subtitle like some other light novels? In any case, as the URL shows, I’ve reviewed Clockwork Planet before: the first manga volume, which Kodansha Comics put out back in March. And now we have the light novel it was based on. When I had only mild enjoyment of the manga volume, I was told a few times that the light novel is significantly better. And indeed those people were right, as my enjoyment of the novel was significantly better – especially in regards to Marie, whose inner workings (so to speak) are a lot more explicit and sympathetic than they were in the parts of the manga I read. That said, you can definitely tell that a lot of this is written by Yuu Kamiya, the creator of No Game No Life. It has the same… flavor, so to speak.

The premise is that a socially ostracized boy with a REALLY acute sense of hearing has an automaton crash into his apartment one evening. This isn’t as odd as it seems, because as the name might imply, the Earth now runs on clockwork in order to stop its death. This particular automaton, however, is one of a very special series, and had in fact been dormant for the last two hundred years. Fortunately, Naoto is able to “hear” where the problem is and fix it, and now he has his very own robot girl, RyuZU, who is devoted to keeping him safe and happy and abusing him verbally, not in that order. (This is where the NGNL author’s fetishes come into play, as I mentioned above.) The other half of the plot involves genius teenage engineer Marie and her calm bodyguard/babysitter Halter, who is mostly a cyborg himself. They’re trying to fix a gravitational error that might destroy all of Kyoto. And then we discover that this error is, in fact, b\part of a VAST MILITARY CONSPIRACY!

As you may have gathered, subtlety is not on the menu for this book, but it’s a decent thriller, and I enjoyed the characters while finding them somewhat exasperating. Because this is written for a male Japanese audience, there is of course a large color picture of a naked loli girl in it, so as always this isn’t recommended for casual fans. But for Kamiya fans, or those who like “steampunk” type stories, it’s a lot of fun. The second half is definitely better than the first, as things swing into high and we show off what all of our heroes can do. And there’s a setup for future books, which we actually see a bit of in the prologue, as well as another robot girl that needs to be rescued from the government/military complex. Unlike a lot of “first volume” light novels that may or may not become series, this looks like it was designed to have more to it. Good thing we’re getting more. Recomme3nded.