Category Archives: reviews

The Do-Over Damsel Conquers the Dragon Emperor, Vol. 7

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By Sasara Nagase and Mitsuya Fuji. Released in Japan as “Yarinaoshi Reijō wa Ryūtei Heika o Kōryaku-chū” by Kadokawa Beans Bunko. Released in North America by Cross Infinite World. Translated by piyo.

It’s sometimes very hard to separate this series, where a young woman decides to get engaged to the man who may one day try to destroy the world in order to change her own fate, and at every single turn of the page worry that she’s going to fail and the book will end with most of the cast dead and a BAD END screen, and not compare it to I’m the Villainess, So I’m Taming the Final Boss, by the same author, which has the exact same plot. And both series also have an antagonist, someone who sets herself diametrically opposite our protagonist and does everything they can do fix things. It’s just been harder to spot it in Do-Over Damsel, as Faris just hasn’t shown us much. Fortunately, in this book we get to see her dealing with a very, very useless goddess (no, not that one), and also bond with Jill over a mutual enemy. It’s sweet. Also, it makes her evil at the end hit even harder.

Jill is headed off to the Lehrsatz Duchy for a meeting with Faris, the queen of Kratos. Hadis is staying behind, with one of the candidates to be his wife handling things on his end, and being better at it than Jill, much to her chagrin. Unfortunately, when they’re flying to the duchy, Jill decides to investigate a mysterious village that may be home to the Order of the Ark, a group of religious terrorists who wants the Gods dead. As it turns out, she then manages to get accidentally abducted by those same terrorists – accidentally as the ones they really want to abduct are Raw, presumably so they can control dragons… and Faris, who they have already abducted and who is near unconscious due to the anti-magic barriers surrounding her. Can Jill break them out and manage to get to the conference? And what will Hadis do when he hears about this?

This was supposed to be the short story volume. CIW says that it is still coming, but they did this volume first. I’m assuming that, unlike, say, Re: Zero or Index, this is not causing us to miss all sorts of nuance in this current volume. Not that nuance is something Jill is good at. Her strength is indeed her strength, as well as her temper, as she realizes the best solution is to simply punch everything until it stops. Again. Her weakness is that this isn’t good enough this time, and Faris, who seems to only have the strength to break her ditzy goddess spear, is much better at crafty plans that you cannot punch your way out of. Hence the cliffhanger. There’s also the usual “Jill gets jealous and mad, Hadis panics and feeds her to make up for it” wackiness – these two know each other really well by now. That was fun.

Will we get Vol. 8 next? Or short stories? And yes, I did deliberately leave out all the reveals near the end. A great series, assuming you can get past the premise, which is still hard to get past.

I Want to Be a Saint, But I Can Only Use Attack Magic!, Vol. 1

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By Fuyu Aoki and Bodax. Released in Japan as “Seijo-sama ni Naritai no ni Kougeki Mahou shika Tsukaenain desu kedo!?” by GC Novels. Released in North America by Cross Infinite World. Translated by Kashi Kamitoma.

As I was about three minutes into the book, I joked that it should be called “Bocchi the Mage!”. Little did I know. There is a scene, with art to match, where Yuffie, the heroine of this novel, wears a party outfit to what turns out to be a standard noble’s ballroom party. It consists of big sunglasses, one a heart and one a star, and a T-Shirt saying Let’s Party. When you combine this with her hideous social anxiety and desire to abase herself, it’s really hard NOT to think of Bocchi. Or Monica, because she also gets invited to the student council, which feels very much like the one from Silent Witch. Unlike Monica, she’s only here to go to school and make a friend or two, if that’s possible for someone like her. Unfortunately for her, she lives in a world where magic is gender-binaried… and she’s just broken that binary.

Yuffie is a girl who lives in the middle of nowhere with her family, who aren’t abusive per se, but seem to be of the “why can’t you be like the normal children?” sort. She’s got crippling social anxiety, and her attempts to make friends have been laughably bad. When they team up for school activities, she’s always with the teacher. But she has a secret. When she was seven, she saw a saint using magic, and realized that’s what she wanted to be when she grew up. So she practiced magic. Every day. For seven years. By teaching herself. She manages to learn some healing magic… slow healing magic, but it’s there… and shows her parents, who say she should go to the magic academy! She’s delighted. Or horrified. One of those. See, she has a secret. She has immensely powerful attack spells like fireballs and lightning blasts. But… only men can use that sort of magic. It’s in their religion. Not good.

If seeing girls having a panic attack and debasing themselves constantly is not your thing… well, don’t skip the book, but you’ll need patience. Yuffie does get better by the end of the book, but it’s a long, painful road. She accidentally makes friends with most of the current student council. She’s trying to hide her attack magic, so the rest of the students and her teachers hate her. Oh yes, and it turns out that the demons are trying to attack humanity, starting with this school, and the only thing powerful enough to wipe them out is Yuffie. She self-taught herself magic so well she’s the most powerful attack magician in the country, and that means that it’s not – for once – just her paranoid fantasies,. she really COULD be imprisoned and experimented on. Fortunately, this school seems to mostly have good, if eccentric nobles. One seems to be a predatory lesbian, but it’s more of an “I’m taking her home with me!” cute fetish than anything sordid. Heck, even the bullying ojou-sama is almost immediately tamed by Yuffie’s apologies and delicious burdock roots.

This is not a must-read, but if you can get past Yuffie’s complete mess of a self-image, it’s a decent power fantasy, though it’s not so much a trans allegory as just another “what if I were OP as hell?” fantasy.

Heroine? Saint? No, I’m an All-Works Maid (And Proud of It)!, Vol. 3

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By Atekichi and Yukiko. Released in Japan as “Heroine? Seijo? Iie, All Works Maid desu (ko)!” by TO Books. Released in North America by Airship. Translated by Matthew Jackson. Adapted by Michelle McGuinness.

This was the best volume in the series to date, mostly as a) it managed to actually get through to its heroine/saint/maid and make her realize that her “aw shucks, this is just normal maid magic” thing is absolute hogwash, and b) it actually started pushing back on her omnipotence and perfection, showing her screwing up several times over the course of the book, and also having another crisis of faith, this one even stronger than the one she had in the second book. Melody loves maids, and loves to be a maid, but at heart this is a heroine reincarnated in a fantasy world book, and nine times out of ten when that happens the main character is a workaholic. Melody does not know what to do with time off. She literally has no outfits other than maid uniforms. And, despite riding her way through an obvious event flag, she remains completely uninterested in romance. She is not here to be a romance heroine, thank you very much.

It’s summer break, and time for Luciana and her entourage of servants to go back to the main estate and tour their lands. Though this journey is thrown off slightly by the arrival of Maxwell, who is here to invite Luciana to the Summer Ball, something that absolutely flummoxes her, and she asks for time to think it over. After this, they head off on the long journey there, and watch Melody literally build a two-story mansion from scratch… and also store it in a snowglobe for later use. You know, just Melody things. Unfortunately, as they’re almost there, an earthquake rocks the land, and her family estate is totally destroyed! Even worse, the three villages that make up what remains of their domain are suffering from a blight AND a poor harvest. Will this finally be a problem even Melody can’t solve?

This has a classic otome game dilemma at its heart, which is that the game’s plotline wants to happen even though Melody has completely broken it. It keeps trying to ruin and kill Luciana, to the point where the poor girl is literally dreaming of the game creators discussing her death, though she has no idea who they are. We meet another love interest here, and he’s a smiling villain if ever there was one, and he also falls hard for Melody (who is uninterested, but less uninterested than she is with everyone else.) Most of all, Melody spends an exhausting night curing all the blight and poor crops… only to have it come back almost immediately. Some dark force wants this family and region destroyed, and I suspect we’ll get more of hat as the series goes on.

So while there is still a lot of ludicrous maid stuff, Melody *and* the series itself are getting more serious. Which is good, as it’s a long-runner, and you can’t get by on oblivious OP maid forever.