Category Archives: reviews

Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?!, Vol. 14

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By FUNA and Itsuki Akata. Released in Japan as “Watashi, Nouryoku wa Heikinchi de tte Itta yo ne!” by SQEX Novels. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Diana Taylor. Adapted by Maggie Cooper.

It’s been a while since we last had the adventures of Mile and company in front of us. Most of the reason for this is that the series got a new publisher in Japan, Square Enix, which necessitated renegotiating the license for the series, which takes time. But now, a mere 16 months after the last book, we have a new volume of the series. Perhaps sensing that this was a chance to show off why the series was picked up by a larger publisher, the author has decided to get slightly more serious than usual this time around. Oh, not to worry, there’s still plenty of “Mile does OP stuff” and fourth wall breaking, it’s just that the volume as a whole seems to want to go back to the main plot of the series, the one it usually ignores for books on end. It’s going to get harder to ignore from now on, though, as there are portals opening from another world.

That said, we have another plot to get through first. The Crimson Vow are hired as escorts/bodyguards… supposedly… to take Clairia and her fellow elves back to their village. The reason turns out to be trickier than that, as they wanted the Vow to distract from what turns out to be a “get married already” meeting set up by the village. This involves a lot of inbred misogyny, and the Vow quickly take matters into their own hands. The Guild then hires them to investigate a nearby kingdom, where things are just going… slightly worse than usual. For no stated reason. Mile is the perfect person to figure out what’s really going on… robots are making portals to their world from another world and sending in stronger, smarter monsters to take out the adventurers!

The elf stuff was not as good as the rest of the book, mostly depending on “ha ha, it’s funny because elf men are lolicons” and a heaping helping of “women should stay in the village and breed more elves”. The latter, to be fair, the narrative rips apart with its bare hands, and indeed one of the main themes of the entire series has been “you don’t have to get married immediately”. The second part is more setup for the next few books, made more amusing by Mile literally sacrificing some of her nanos to a portal to another world just to get information, and their irritated response. We also see that the Crimson Vow are a mature, powerful, respected team… but only in their own lands, and when they go elsewhere, or when their intelligence is disseminated by the Crown, it still has an air of “these are stupid kids, why should we care?” to it. Mike needs to become more famous, and not just as an author.

This is a good, not great book, with the series’ usual flaws. But it also has the series’ usual strengths as well, and fans should be pleased.

Sugar Apple Fairy Tale: The Silver Sugar Master and the Obsidian Fairy

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By Miri Mikawa and Aki. Released in Japan by Kadokawa Beans Bunko Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Nicole Wilder.

Frequently in romance novels, in both English and Japanese, I find myself waiting for the bomb to go off. It’s always really easy to spot the bomb. It’s the guy who we first meet. He’s not on the cover art. He’s usually a Swell Guy ™. He loves the heroine. He says so. A lot. Ignoring whatever she might have to say about it. Sometimes everyone else around her also assumes that they’re fated to be together. And, credit to our Sugar Apple heroine, she is deeply aware of this and runs away at the earliest opportunity. Alas, the bomb follows her. That’s when I started to get annoyed. I was on edge, waiting for the Asshole Bomb to go off, and when it finally did, I breathed a sigh of relief. Now, it does mean the identity of the villain in this first book is immediately obvious from about page 3, but that’s fine. This first book is not about Asshole Dude, it’s about a teenager who just lost her mother weeks before trying to cope with overwhelming grief.

Our story takes place in the Kingdom of Highland, where they have candy crafters, the highest ranked of which are Silver Sugar Masters, whose candy is basically endorsed by the Crown. Our heroine, Anne, has bee traveling the country with her mother Emma, learning at her elbow and growing up. Then Emma gets sick and dies. Anne resolves to travel to the main city of the Kingdom so that she can pass the test to become a Silver Sugar Master. She needs to do this by the next holy day, so that her mother’s spirit can rest in peace. Of course, she can’t make it in time till she takes a nasty and brutal shortcut… for which she will need a bodyguard. Fortunately, this Kingdom also has fairies! To be their slaves.

So yeah, I liked this book, but it has a very high bar to clear. There’s slavery here, and our heroine immediately buys a slave, because she needs a bodyguard to get there in time and does not have the ability to stick to her principles. She talks about slavery being wrong, and frees him at the end of this book, but… yeah. Fairies are still slaves, that’s not going away. As for the rest of the book, the romance was OK, but I think my favorite part was exploring Anne’s attempts to be plucky and have gumption in the wake of her mother’s death, which the book needs to remind us a few times was only about three weeks before the start. She’s an excellent candy crafter, but she’s not making her OWN candies, she’s making the candies her mother made. She needs to accept her grief, then she can flower as a true artist. That’s the good part of the book.

I also enjoy Culinary Chronicles of the Court Flower, by the same author. This series came out before that one, and is 17 volumes, so we have a ways to go. If you like romantic fantasies, and can get past “slaves are bad, but here I am buying a slave”, this is a solid start.

When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace, Vol. 4

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By Kota Nozomi and 029. Released in Japan as “Inou Battle wa Nichijoukei no Nakade” by GA Bunko. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Tristan K. Hill.

As always, this series tends to run on character-based comedy that is 50% decent, 30% good with a side of heartwarming, and 20% godawful. Usually the godawful part involves Andou doing something mind-numbingly stupid, but aside from one poorly-delivered euphemism that causes dangerous searches on the internet, he’s mostly fine now. It’s Sagami that gets the bulk of being awful. That said, it’s good in this case, because it’s showing off that he really IS the villain of this piece. For the most part the overarching plot of this series has been very hit and miss, and we haven’t seen that gang that attacked Hatoko since her book. But Sagami’s preening, salacious inability to see anything except as a fictional construct does make him a good antagonist. And of course this IS a fictional construct that is also a romantic harem comedy, so he gets the added aggravation of being correct. I think most readers were thinking the same thing Sagami was: in a harem of four girls, Sayumi is a distant fourth place.

Each volume has focused on one of the girls in the Literary Club, and as the cover suggests, this is Sayumi’s book. The actual present-day dilemma is fairly easy to resolve, but it also ties back to the past, so we see flashbacks, from Sayumi’s POV, of how she first met Andou and immediately did not get on with him. Unsurprising, this is Andou. In the present, the girls all present Andou with a game that they’ve been coding and ask him to play test it, which gives us a string of great humiliating gags as well as a wonderful sweet heartwarming bit at the end. As for the conflict, Andou discovers that Sayumi was going to run for Student Council President in high school, but never did… and he thinks that he’s the reason for this.

Sayumi is the most mature of the cast, meaning that thankfully we get less of the antics that we got last volume (though they’re still there, sadly, but at least Andou is NOT involved in the stupidity this time). It makes sense that her arc is resolved by simply telling Andou he’s gotten things wrong and that she doesn’t regret what happened. Of course, that’s not really what this book is doing. This is the fourth volume, so we’ve run out of heroines. It’s setting up the next arc, and doing so pretty well. All four girls are explicitly in love with Andou by the end of the book. Chifuyu doesn’t really know what it means, Hatoko knows what it means and who the “best girl” is and is ready to go to war, and Sayumi is getting advice from the devil himself. That just leaves Tomoyo, and if Sagami was here he’d no doubt say that she’s “best girl” at this point, or at least the most likely winner, if she can stop tsunning it up.

As always, I don’t recommend this book to anyone but those who are buried so far into otaku culture that they don’t really notice the bad things. If you’re that sort of person, this is a solid volume.