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Kagerou Daze VIII: Summer Time Reload

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By Jin (Shinzen no Teki-P) and Sidu. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Kevin Gifford.

(This review gets even more spoilery than I normally do, FYI.)

I will admit, those who are only familiar with Kagerou Daze via the light novels themselves, rather than the franchise in general, may be a little dissatisfied with the ending. It’s not really that the villains win or even that most of the cast die, it’s that it all ends with a big old reset button. We tried a cool plan, it didn’t work, and so we’re going back to try something else – which, it turns out, they’ve been doing for a long, long time. Kagerou Daze is not a visual novel, but like Higurashi and Little Busters, it revolves around repeating a sequence of time to try and fix things. In the case of the light novel, things don’t get fixed. Oh, there are some survivors – the “side story” in this book deals with Seto and Marie after everything else has already happened, and Hibiya is still around as well – but no one really wins. Not even the villains.

That said, the novels are not all there is to Kagerou Daze. The books are based on a series of songs, and the final song in the “main” series, Summer Time Reload, is also the title of this book. It implies the majority of the cast survive, though they may forget about all this. There’s also the manga, which is just about to wrap up in Japan, and clearly tells a different version of events from the books and the songs. And there’s also the anime, Mekakucity Actors, which may annoy fans for various reasons, but also arguably provides the most closure. All the spinoffs are different kinds of flavoring to the main plot. Here, with prose, we get a lot of monologues showing off the emotional state of the cast – in fact, I would argue that Jin is better at this than he is at actual plotting.

There’s also an awful lot of shipping in this last volume, which surprised me. Kagerou Daze has a large shipping fandom – it’s got about 2.5K fics on Fanfiction.net – both het and otherwise. You don’t see much of the otherwise here, but other shippers should be pleased. Haruka clearly ships Shintaro and Ayano, and is visibly upset when their reunion in the Daze is less about “Sorry I forgot to say I love you before you killed yourself” and more “how do we stop the villains”. Hiyori, who I suspect the majority of readers may have forgotten about, pops in at the end too, and she’s just as tsundere as ever, though she does manage to spit out words very few tsunderes ever have. And the entire book is about Seto and Marry’s relationship, and how they’re family but also clearly want to have more, at least on his side. Sadly, his desire to protect is sort of destroying anything else they might have.

Jin’s afterword is very self-deprecatory, and I get that. These aren’t the best written books, especially in translation – there were several times when I could have used a “this character is now our narrator” slug at the top of the section. And Seto really did get the least focus of any character, coming off as a bit wet in the process. That said, in terms of emotion and character, Kagerou Daze was a fast favorite for me. The books make me want to listen to the songs, read the manga, and watch the anime all in a marathon. Which is all you can ask from a franchise spinoff.

Danganronpa 2: Ultimate Luck and Hope and Despair, Vol. 1

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By Spike Chunsoft and Kyousuke Suga. Released in Japan by Mag Garden, serialized in the magazine Beat’s. Released in North America by Dark Horse. Translated by Jackie McClure.

I tried to play the first DR game, but never got far due to frustration over a “gatcha” system giving you random pointless things. In other words, a typical game experience. I do know enough about the franchise, though, to know that the second in the series was more popular than the first, at least over here. As such, licensing the manga seems like a lock. That said, I think that once again this is a manga to read if you’ve already played the games – there’s very little help given to the newbie reader, and the character introductions come fast and furious. Given the large cast, and the complete lack of holdovers from the last game/manga (mostly), it’d normally be hard to get a handle on who we should be following. The player character is clearly Hajime Hinata, a weird fusion of Naegi and Kirigiri from the first series, but being a player character he’s pretty blank and dull. So the manga focuses instead on Nagito Komaeda, who… isn’t.

Danganronpa 2 takes place on an uncharted desert island, where the cast wake up after being in school previkously. They’re supposedly led by a rabbit bascot named Usami, but Monokuma quickly takes over by force and decides to restart the usual killing games. Quite how Monokuma’s mastermind is alive after the last game is not clear, but oh well. Everyone tries to make the best of it with a party, but midway through the power cuts out, and when the lights come back on, oh look, somebody’s stabbed. It’s Byakuya Togami who… seems different from the last time we saw him, and also a lot heavier. OK, frankly, the discerning reader knows it’s NOT Byakuya Togami, but as to why someone is impersonating him… we don’t really find that out either. There are very few answers in this book, but a lot of setup, and a lot of Komaeda. The conceit of this manga is that it’s from Komaeda’s “POV”.

Komaeda is a piece of work, and reminds me quite a bit off Izaya Orihara from the DRRR!! series. He says that he’s trying to prove that hope exists in a world of despair, but seems to want to accomplish this by getting everyone around him to despair and see if someone manages to beat him. He has a lot of “laughing crazy” faces too, as well as a heap of bromantic tension with Hajime. As for the rest of the class, so far there aren’t many standouts. One tanned athletic girl gives me memories of Aoi Asahina. There’s a nurse whose personality and looks are reminiscent of Hinata from Naruto, though Hinata never quite fell and exposed herself quite the way Mikan does constantly. (This seems to be a fanservicey running gag, and it’s awful, frankly. DR is still written for teenage boys in Japan, no matter how much ho yay may be in it.) And there’s a gamer girl who may be the Kirigiri to Hajime’s Naegi. But yeah, mostly still a faceless mass.

I believe this series is only three volumes in Japan, so I’m not expecting much in terms of coherence. That said, if you like Komaeda, it’s an easy purchase. He is all over this manga, and he is dramatic as fuck. Which is all the player wants, really.

Der Werwolf: the Annals of Veight, Vol. 2

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By Hyougetsu and Nishi(E)da. Released in Japan by Earth Star Entertainment. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Ningen.

I’m always pleased when a second book in the series proves to be even better than the first, and that’s definitely the case with Der Werwolf. I enjoyed the first book quite a bit, but the second volume steps up its game, showing off Veight’s political and diplomatic skills in the first half, then pulling the rug out from under the reader with a plot twist I wasn’t expecting for a few more books yet. Perhaps best of all, there’s virtually none of the typical isekai cliches in this book – probably as the “I’m from Japan” part is still mostly irrelevant. There’s no gamer terminology, dungeon levels, and the romance is kept very much on the back burner – i.e. there isn’t any yet, though there’s clearly a few women who like Veight. Instead, we are simply reading a fantasy book. It reminds me a lot of The Faraway Paladin, and fans of one should enjoy the other.

At the start of this book, Veight is interested in expanding his allies on the Southern half of the continent, so reaches out to a pseudo-Arabian city along the coast. As with the first book, we occasionally get the viewpoints of other characters (though I wish they were marked off in the text a bit better – it can be tough to tell when we’ve left Veight’s viewpoint and when we return), and that helps here to show off the rock and the hard place that the other city is caught between, and also how Veight thinking that he’s being calm and reasonable is seen by other people as Veight being threatening and terrifying. In fact, there’s a running gag here, even more than the first book, of Veight saying he’s “just a vice-commander” and denying that he’s anything special, despite constant evidence to the contrary. It would be annoying if he were doing it deliberately, but he means it, so it’s just funny.

The second part of the book is much darker. We’d been introduced to the concept of a Hero arriving and challenging the Demon Lord at the start, but this proved to be a false lead (though it did get us another cute girl character, the stressed-out mage who can do illusion magic). Then a real hero does show up, and things go badly very quickly. It’s great to see how the concept of a hero here, in a book essentially narrated by “bad guys”, is that of a fiercely destructive force that none can stand against except the Demon Lord himself. Even more intriguing, there’s clear backstory between the hero and the Demon Lord, apparently involving a woman… but we never really get to find out what it is, except it’s made the hero hell bent on revenge. Actually, I’ll be honest here, I was expecting things to get even MORE dark, but thankfully things got a little better at the end, and Veight gets to go on being the most humble yet awesome vice-commander ever.

This is a pretty long-running series in Japan, so we have a ways to go. This pleases me, as reading these volumes is a treat. I highly recommend Der Werwolf to anyone who enjoys good light novel fantasy without the “light novel” cliches.