Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, Vol. 1

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By Ao Jyumonji and Eiri Shirai. Released in Japan by Overlap, Inc. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Sean McCann.

These days, if you have a genre that’s popular enough you’re going to get deconstructions of it. And the Japanese genre of ‘people sent to another world where they fight in RPG-like circumstances’ is hugely popular in Japan. We’ve seen the odd attempt at doing something different with this genre before (Re: Zero comes to mind), but Grimgar in particular seems to follow another very popular way of thinking: the “grim and gritty” school. I don’t know if the name was deliberately chosen to mirror the mood of the book (likely it’s coincidence), but this first volume is a lengthy look at a group of people who are forced to fight monsters together and find, that with a lot of training and sacrifice… they can still be pretty terrible at it.

We meet a group of 12 people who find themselves in a castle in fantasy world X. They appear to be modern Japanese people, but have lost their memories, knowing only their names and the basic “I have plot amnesia” things. They’re taken to a man (who is unfortunately written in “scary gay man” mode) who tells them to survive, they need to become volunteer soliders. For the moment, they’re trainees. One group immediately forms of what seems to be the top people in the group. This is not their story, though we see them later on and find they are indeed the top people in the group. Our group consists of our narrator, who is “generic protagonist” with an occasional line in snark and a tendency to have no self esteem; a cheerful happy girl who has a complex about her small breasts; a painfully shy girl (with large breasts); the leader, a smiling sensible type who screams “I won’t last the book” and indeed does not; a big awkward guy; and Ranta.

I signal Ranta out by name for a reason. Grimgar is a well-written book, with good fight scenes and a dark but compelling plotline. Its weakness is the characters, who are a bit more generic types than I’d really wanted. Ranta is a type as well, the irritating hot-headed loudmouth. The difficulty is that this is turned up to 11 – he’s easily the most irritating part of the entire book, and it’s more grating because you know he’s written this way on purpose. He makes the whole party dislike him, and it takes the arrival of another stock type, the cold beauty with a tragic past (she replaces the doomed guy I mentioned above), to make everyone accept him because well, they’re a team and teams have to get along no matter what.

The awkwardness of this cast is, of course, the selling point. You won’t find a Kirito here; this team is mocked for going out to smash up low-ranked goblins all day every day, and they’re not terribly good at doing that either. None of them arrive with any game-breaking powers. They do gain some powers by joining guilds (again, this is very RPG), but leveling up is tough and slow. It’s a “what would this sort of story be like in reality?” type of tale, and as such it does its job quite well. Of course, this makes it a bit of a slog at times as well. I am hoping that fortunes turn upward for this group in future books, but won’t get my hopes up – that would defeat the purpose a bit.

Spice & Wolf, Vol. 1

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By Isuna Hasekura and Jyuu Ayakura. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Paul Starr.

All right, so I’m just a little bit late to the party here. In fact, the party has long since had everyone leave and shut the lights off, and Carol Burnett is walking around me mopping up. But when this series began here in North America, it was in the pre-Yen On days, and I wasn’t as into light novels as I am now, so I never got around to it. Then when I did show interest (particularly after seeing the author at New York Comic Con) it was more a case of “I don’t have the room for 17 volumes on my shelf”. But glory be, the whole series is due to be released digitally over the next few months, and there’s a new book coming out in May as well, so I thought “Why not?” And it’s a good thing I did, as this proved to be a very good first volume.

I knew a bit about the series before I began to read it through internet osmosis – I seem to recall the general talk about it was “come for the nekkid loli wolf girl, stay for the economic theory’. Thankfully, at least in the first volume, the nekkid loli is kept to a minimum, as after her introduction Holo finds clothes and for the most part stays in them. She is indeed a wolf girl, or to be more accurate wolf goddess of the harvest, and her ears and tail and the hiding thereof take up a bit more of the narrative’s time. The majority of the book, though, is about two things: 1) the travails of Holo and Lawrence, the merchant who picked her up at the start, trying to stop a vast economic conspiracy and also make a bit of cash doing so, and b) the banter back and forth between them as they do this. And honestly, economics is fine, but I’d say the dialogue and banter is the real win here.

The series takes place is sort of “generic middle ages X”, but thankfully is more of a genuine fantasy novel rather than all of the RPG-styled worlds we’ve seen in more recent books. I mentioned Lawrence earlier, and he’s our narrator and viewpoint character. He is seemingly rather pleasant and mild-mannered, but there is a deep awkwardness to him as well, with the odd hint of a tragic past. It’s rather cruel that the one man he looks forward to meeting at the start of the book turns out to be one of the main villains towards the end. You get the sense that Lawrence and Holo are made for each other, and there certainly seems to be a bit of ‘will they or won’t they?’ through the book. Despite being called a loli, Holo acts and speaks like you’d expect someone hundreds of years old to, and honestly looks to be about 15-16 on the cover, which for anime and manga is pretty much ‘go for it’ age.

Basically, “come for the economics, stay for the playful sarcastic banter” is my tag for this series. I look forward to catching up.

The Seven Princes of the Thousand-Year Labyrinth, Vol. 1

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By Atori Haruno and Aikawa Yu. Released in Japan as “Sennen Meikyuu no Nana Ouji” by Ichijinsha, serialized in the magazine Comic Zero-sum. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Beni Axia Conrad, Adapted by Ysabet MacFarlane.

As I continue to read more and more manga, I find myself becoming familiar with not only the differences between genres, but also the difference between specific Japanese publishers and how they work in those genres. A Jump manga and a Sunday manga are too very different beasts, and both are also different from Magazine. If I’m reading a shoujo manga from Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume, I expect two to three times as much dialogue as I would if the manga was in Shueisha’s Betsuma. And sometimes you can be reading a manga and without even knowing who the publisher is, you can correctly identify it based merely on the style. Such is the case with this new Seven Seas title, which may be one of the most Comic Zero-Sum things I’ve ever seen.

This is not a bad thing, to be fair. Seven Princes knows what it wants to be, and does its job very well. It wants to be Zero-Sum doing a survival game manga. Being Zero-Sum, instead of teenagers locked in a school, we get beautiful and slightly eccentric young men locked on a fantasy world castle/dungeon combo. Our hero is the only one who isn’t famous, or so it seems at first. Ewan wakes up one day to find himself trapped in a deep pit. Luckily, he’s rescued by another man who was trapped in a different part of what turns out to be a prison. Evading deathtraps and meeting up with others, they gradually realize that they are participating in a legendary ritual to determine who will be the new Emperor. Unfortunately, that ritual seems to involve a lot of deadly puzzle games – one participant is already dead when we meet him, and two more seemingly die by the end of this first book.

I say seemingly as I have experience in this genre, both good and bad, and know that fake deaths and “they never saw the body” are common occurrences. One of the fun things about this title is that it knows its cliches, and feels free to blithely abuse them when it suits. One character is introduced to us as the one female participant, something that is so unlikely in this world of “it’s not quite BL but close enough” that several of the characters immediately think “there’s something odd about her”. And sure enough! Likewise, Ewan may say that he’s just a typical young student, and not a famous thief/detective/singer/etc. like all the others, but he not only has the shiny “we can get through this if we all work together!” attitude that most survival game leads need, but he can also apparently read ancient lost scripts with ease.

I do wish there was a bit more humor – the few attempts at it mostly revolve around the thief and detective hating each other in amusing comedy ways, but for the most part this is meant to be serious business. Old-school manga fans may recognize the artist from such works as Butterfly (never completed here as the publisher stopped doing manga) and Dark Edge (different publisher, ditto). This is only four volumes, so hopefully will have a bit more luck. Recommended to those who like dark fantasy, survival games, or hot guys getting close to each other.