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Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement, Vol. 3

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By FUNA and Touzai. Released in Japan as “Rōgo ni Sonaete Isekai de 8-Man-Mai no Kinka o Tamemasu” by K Lanove Books. Released in North America by Kodansha Books. Translated by Luke Hutton.

(A reminder that the English Vol. 3 is the equivalent of the Japanese Vol. 4.)

I feel a certain regret in my past choices. When I started to review I Shall Survive Using Potions!, I had only read the first volume of 80K Gold, and given Kaoru’s, um, tendency towards war crimes, I described 80K Gold as “beginning” FUNA, Make My Abilities Average as “intermediate”, and Potions as “hard”. The thing is, though, all of these series are essentially exactly the same. You could take Mile, Kaoru and Mitsuha and swap them into each other’s books and not much would have to change, except the Potions cast would wonder where their grumpy cuss went. They are all basically “a girl who looks younger than she really is wreaks havoc on a fantasy landscape, collecting other young girls along the way”. And boy, is much havoc wreaked in this volume. Mitsuha is going on a world tour, and she’s brought a camper van and her own barrel of war crimes.

Having vanquished the invading country with their newfangled ships and weapons, Mitsuha and company now have to tell the neighboring countries about the same danger. While also trying to get them to form an alliance, and possibly sell them some cool guns. A diplomatic team is put together… with Mitsuha as a supernumerary, not part of the actual team, so she can do whatever the hell she wants. She takes Sabina and Colette with her, and, after introducing the two of them to Japan and the wonders of Japanese food (and, after overeating, the wonders of Japanese toilets), she buys an RV that she names the Good Ship Lollipop and sets off in style and comfort… while occasionally waiting for the diplomatic party to catch up to her.

There are always a few light novel series that make me uncomfortable with where they sit on the political spectrum, and this is one of them. The author and the main character love their guns, and we get more discussion of them, along with which ones are best to use in which situation. The diplomatic mission amounts to blackmail most of the time, as basically the other countries have to give in or they won’t get any of Mitsuha’s armaments… and, after observing the effect of one rifle on their standard suit of armor, they HAVE to give in. It can feel a bit mean. She also wins over a new princess and solves the succession crisis for her (good) but also gets her addicted to gambling (bad). This series never gets too serious, unlike Potions, but there is some melancholy as Mitsuha realizes that her unaging self means that in a couple of years she will have to give up her Japanese life for good to avoid unwanted questions. It depresses her.

That said, it doesn’t depress her enough that she’s not rolling through a fantasy world in a camper van with her two child soldiers… erm, assistants at her side. As always, if you like FUNA, you’ll like this. If you don’t, you’ll hate this.

The Troubles of Miss Nicola the Exorcist, Vol. 2

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By Ito Iino and Kinokohime. Released in Japan as “Haraiya Reijō Nicola no Komarigoto” by DRE Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Heart. Translated by Joshua Douglass-Molloy.

DRE Novels is a relatively recent imprint, and they don’t have any series longer than three volumes. So it’s no surprise that when they get a series that does really well – such as winning the Gold Medal in their light novel awards, as the first volume of this did – they’re going to tell them “hey, write more” even when the series wrapped up perfectly fine in the first book. It’s not all that hard. Nicola is, after all, a grumpy cuss, and the lack of life experience other than “exorcist” in her previous life and noble politeness in this one have left her ill-equipped for feelings of love. So she spends a bit of this book asking the other members of the cast what they think love is. That said, that’s not enough to sustain a second book. What is enough, though, is doubling down on the ‘exorcist’ part of the series and turning a lot of this into straight-up horror.

We pick up right where we left off at the end of the last book. Olivia is dead, Nicola and Sieghart like each other but she’s too embarrassed to own up to it on her end, and supernatural things still love Sieghart to death – and in some cases are trying to make that literal. Olivia’s death, unfortunately, means that Alois needs a new fiancee, and Nicola is one of only three candidates – and the top one, at that. The group decide to go on a trip to meet the other two fiancee candidates – Charlotte, daughter of a marquess and a maid who grew up starving on the streets till they were taken in and made an heir; and Elfriede, another marquess’ daughter who has been so sickly no one has seen her in years. There are a few surprises, as you might guess. Charlotte’s identity is a major shock. And what’s really happened to Elfriede is beyond the pale.

This isn’t quite as good as the first book, which makes sense given that it’s a sequel the author had to be talked into writing. Emma, Charlotte’s older sister, is far too underdeveloped a character given her role in the book’s plot, and there is a “I don’t want this to be TOO depressing” bit near the end that takes suspension of disbelief and tosses it out the window. The book excels, as you might expect, with Nicola, who remains very grumpy throughout, even as she tries to figure out what these feelings she has for Sieghart are and why everyone else already knows that she has them. There’s also the horror, especially in the back half. This book comes with a big old “child death” warning, and we see the brutality of some of these deaths. But it’s not done to shock but to horrify, and is handled very well. If the series ends here, I would not mind the author writing more horror.

Will the series end here? Well, Nicola has actually put a name to her love, but they’re still not actually married, so who knows? Till then, this doesn’t have as many dead children as Roll Over and Die, but it makes the deaths count more. (Also, why do I keep bringing up Roll Over and Die in my reviews lately?)

Marriage, Divorce and Beyond: The White Mage and Black Knight’s Romance Reignited, Vol. 1

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By Takasugi Naturu and kieshi akaz. Released in Japan as “Saishō Hosa to Kurokishi no Keiyaku Kekkon to Rikon to Sonogo: Henkyō no Chi de Futari wa Fūfu o Yarinaosu” by DRE Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Heart. Translated by Olivia Plowman.

Generally speaking, when I am supremely irritated with a book, it tends to be for a few basic reasons. “Your attempts at comedy aren’t funny” is a good one. Also “your attempts to be horny are merely deeply misogynistic”. And occasionally “your violence is so ridiculous it’s stopped being horrifying”. It’s very rare, however, that we get “your desire to show how bad things are for the heroine are so amazingly over the top that it verges on torture porn”. This book is theoretically a romance, and you do sort of get that in the last third or so. And yes, I understand that the author has an agenda, and that agenda is “hey, husbands and wives need to actually talk to each other”. But oh my god, getting through the middle third of this book was like punching myself in the face over and over again. Sheer misery. I read books to enjoy them, remember?

The book opens with the lovely wedding of Lina, a Black Knight whose job it is to fight against dragons due to the old magic she has, and Joshua, a white mage who can use his compatible magic to protect her before she goes out to fight dragons. We then cut to four years later, when she’s just received grievous wounds from a dragon because her white magic protection was inadequate – and her injuries are so bad she’s been fired. The rest of the front half of the book traces he steps before and between those points, as we see Lina struggle with a nobility that despises commoners and a tendency to suffer nobly, and her husband Joshua contends with work never allowing him time with his wife and a tendency to not be overly expressive. The result is disaster.

We’ve had evil nobility in many light novels before, but they’ve tended to be cartoon evil nobles. The prejudice and disdain in this book is played 100% for drama (there may not be a funny line in the entire book) and you just want Lina to go apeshit and start stabbing everyone. Then there’s the end of the book. Not to spoil TOO much, but essentially everything that’s been happening to Lina and Joshua since their marriage has been engineered. We find this out right near the end. The evil mastermind was… a guy we met towards the start of the book, who gave friendly advice, and who I had completely forgotten about. He references his past history with Joshua at the academy, which sure would have been nice to see in flashbacks, but no. Oh yes, and on realizing that the man who he’d asked to reform the nobility and stop the hatred of commoners is in fact an evil noble, the prince’s first reaction is “welp, I tried, guess I’d better stop reform” and he has to be talked back into it.

Lastly, it’s never a good sign when you realize that all the heart-wrenching scenes you’ve written aren’t enough, and you have the heroine dream of scenes that are exaggerated parodies of these scenes, just to make her more miserable. Fortunately, this wraps up nicely and neatly in one book, so I can cheerfully ignore the “1” on the cover and go on to read more happy, upbeat things, like Roll Over and Die.