Monthly Archives: July 2020

I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level, Vol. 7

Leave a reply

By Kisetsu Morita and Benio. Released in Japan as “Slime Taoshite 300 Nen, Shiranai Uchi ni Level MAX ni Nattemashita” by GA Novels. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jasmine Bernhardt.

I’ve gradually gotten used to this being the isekai version of K-On! (the illustrations helping along, as they get more and more ‘moe’ with every volume), and this volume in particular reminds me that Azusa’s laid-back style works so well here because the entire world is laid-back. The idea of someone being killed off or an evil villain trying to take over the world feels so foreign to everything we’ve read here to date, and the result is that you have a reader who is completely relaxed in reading this book. There’s never any serious conflict, and that’s good! The characters are all various varieties of “cute girls doing cute things’, and that’s good too! There are no stories in this series that run longer than about a quarter of the book, so you don’t have to pay too much attention, and if a character returns, you’re helpfully reminded where they showed up before. On the downside, reading this may make you fall asleep.

Things that happen in this book: At Pecora’s birthday party, she changes Azusa into a fox girl, which ends up backfiring when Azusa starts beating up everyone in the demon kingdom in an effort to eat abura-age, which reminds you how Japanese this series is and also likely makes you turn to Google. Azusa and company then go to see one of the goddesses in this world speaking at what amounts to a business convention, and she is startled to find this is the goddess who first sent her to this world… who has since been demoted, as she refused to deal with anything but cute girls. There’s a battle to see who the next Dragon Lord is, which turns out to be a typical beauty contest. We get Around the World in 80 Days, Killing Slimes style, which is to say it’s pretty boring. And in the longest story in the book, the cast discover an ancient civilization, now inhabited by stuffy ghosts and a very unstuffy ruler who is annoyed no tsukkomis exist here.

This is fun and insubstantial as always. The ancient ghost queen is amusing as she talks in a broad accent, and also seems content to treat her temple like it’s a dungeon raid. Azusa is less grumpy than usual here, having fully accepted everyone’s eccentricities. That may, in fact, be the biggest negative in the book – everyone’s gotten too used to each other. No one fights anymore, no one gets upset. Conflicts are resolved almost immediately. It’s definitely a series that you should read after you’ve read a volume of something serious, bulky and filled with plot – it acts as a dessert or a palette cleanser. That said, this is absolutely the worst kind of series to marathon. If you read all seven books at once, you’ll give up. One book every few months is just the right pace.

High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World!, Vol. 1

Leave a reply

By Riku Misora and Sacraneco. Released in Japan as “Choujin Koukousei-tachi wa Isekai demo Yoyuu de Ikinuku you desu!” by GA Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Nathaniel Thrasher.

There are series where you want to concentrate hard on the worldbuilding, characterization, and moral quandaries. And then there are series that you want to read like popcorn, where you are not in the mood to think hard about anything. If you want one of the latter, then this new LN series is right up your alley. Thinking too hard about anything going on in this first volume, from its questionable “heroes” to its tendency, as with so many other light novels, to have its villains be the worst of the worst in so many ways, to its annoying White Man’s Burden viewpoint of isekai, you will probably end up finding this series quite annoying, especially as I don’t think it’s doing anything interesting with any of those issues. If you just sit back and enjoy the isekai candy and cool fights/schemes, then it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Check your brain at the door.

The gimmick here is that it’s an isekai times seven. Seven of Japan’s most powerful people, who are all teenagers and all friends, are swept away while on a plane trip to another world. We meet stereotypical samurai Aoi, morally terrifying doctor Keine, cowardly magician Prince, introverted inventor Ringo, arrogant businessman Masato, Prime Minister of Japan (in high school) Tsukasa, and “journalist” Shinobu, whose specialty is really being a ninja. Some of these are, obviously, more important than others in this first book, which focuses on Masato (in this volume) and Tsukasa (likely for all of them, he seems the “primary hero” sort). We also get Lyrule, who is the elf who is on the cover. She’s sweet, has a mysterious past, has a great figure, and she and Tsukasa bond almost immediately. In any case, this book focuses on them settling in with the village that rescued them and saving it from the local nobles, who are Very Bad Guys.

The author is also the writer of Chivalry of a Failed Knight, which is for magic academies what this is for overpowered isekai. Which is to say, the author wants to play in a fantasy world playground. There’s lots of ridiculous fun in this, from Ringo being able to build a nuclear power plant from scratch in about three months to Masato taking down the monopolistic trade company in the space of ONE DAY, to basically everything Shinobu says or does. (Who are secret ninja always named Shinobu?) We get a sense that each of the prodigies has their own tragic past – Tsukasa revealing his own father’s embezzlement leads to abandonment by his mother, and Masato’s father killed himself due to lack of money. I’m sure more will come in later volumes. And there’s also a lot of fun action sequences here as well, mostly due to Aoi, who is so terrifying bears run away from her, but also Tsukasa, who turns out to be well-protected against assassin’s bullets no matter what the world.

This series will, I anticipate, always be ethically suspect and have a tendency to fall apart if you look at it closely. But I had fun reading it, and will definitely get the 2nd book.

May These Leaden Battlegrounds Leave No Trace: Bullet Magic and Ghost Programs, Vol. 1

1 Reply

By Kei Uekawa and TEDDY. Released in Japan as “Uchinukareta Senjou wa, Soko de Kieteiro” by Fujimi Fantasia Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Roman Lampert.

It’s hard not to think about 86 when reading this new Yen On series, and I do wonder if war-torn teens fighting hopeless battles and getting blown to bits’ is a new light novel trend like villainess otomes. That said, if it’s trying to be another 86 it’s not too bad, getting a majority of the parts right. The main plot itself runs on a plot device I personally dislike, and there some tonal dissonance about a third of the way through, but when the book is being serious it’s very good at ramping up the tension and showing us a young, driven man who wants to end war and the white-haired, mysterious girl who is here to help him do so – and also tease and mock him, because it’s still a light novel. We even have an unlucky childhood friend of sorts. And while it doesn’t hit on ‘war is hell’ quite as much as 86, certainly war is not portrayed in a positive light here at all.

We open with Rain, a military academy soldier who manages to escape certain death by way of mysterious silver bullets he finds on the ground. Indeed, this war is run on ‘magic bullets’, each of which have a different function. The bullets Rain finds, when they kill a person, erases them and everything they achieved from existence. Later he discovers the owner, a young girl named Air, who arrives at the Military Academy where he normally is when war is not omnipresent and proceeds to explain that she is a ghost that is being forced to return whenever war is at its worst. She wants to use Rain to stop this endless cycle. Unfortunately, his partner and not-quite-girlfriend Athly is not happy with this, and what’s more, just eliminating the right people from history does not always solve the problem.

Let’s start with the issues I had. First of all, the ‘if you kill the man who invented cars there won’t be cars’ rule of time travel is very, very dumb. To be fair, near the end of the book we see that her analogy is not all it’s cracked up to be, but it’s still bad. Secondly, the section of academy life about 1/3 of the way through the book, which is meant to be a light-hearted bit of breathing space in an otherwise grim book, feels like it belongs in a different novel entirely. That said, setting up Athly as the cute normal girl with a crush on our hero does end up paying off later on down the line. As for Rain and Air, I am hoping, based on plot spoilers that I won’t get into, that they avoid their own romantic relationship. Honestly, romance seems secondary here to warfare, and that’s fine.

To sum up: this is a decent, solid debut for those who like grim war stories and fantasy/magic-based soldiering. I’ll be getting the next book.