So I've read all of the seven volumes of How Not to Summon a Demon Lord that J-Novel Club has put out in English, and tbh I vastly prefer LN Diablo over the anime version, mostly because he's somehow more of an awkward dork and not a lecher. Other than that, it's pretty well written, the translation has a breezy feel to it that made me actually want to read seven volumes in like four days, and it's something I don't regret dropping $50 on (ofc I'd probably have spent that on Alcohol, Gacha or more books I'll never read, so there's that at least.) It was also my first time reading an actual prose work in Apple Books (I've used it for Manga because simple comic and calibre both suck at displaying any sort of comic,) and it's honestly nicer looking than Kindle or Calibre when it's not awkward and too minimalistic.
I should probably get caught up on Outbreak Company at some point as well, but I've got finals to study for and like a bunch of research books to read, so that's getting held off.
Itai no wa Iya nanode Bougyo-Ryoku ni Kyokufuri Shitai to Omoimasu's latest plot point is much more realistic than I ever expected from a Light Novel/manga about wish fulfillment in VR video games. A month after the heroine shows off her secret OP build at a big in-game event, the devs nerf her build in the next patch. Several nerfs specifically target key skills used by the OP heroine. This is the first time I've seen a MMO manga acknowledge that patches and re-balancing exist.
Just found something titled 'I swear I won't bother you again. Not a reincarnation but a villainness Peggy Sue. From bad ending at that, considering the story after she murder her target of jealousy. Anyway, I am not sure yet about its whole quality atm(edit: Its quite decent). But I think so far it did better than Duke's Daughter in portraying the MC as more a humane/sympathetic figure, as it does without making her a complete innocent.
@all fictions Thought to post this on your profile re: our earlier conversation, but then I thought I may as well share it with others too.
EDIT:
Also, LOL. The MC's wish to became Nun. There's happen to be a villaness reincarnation story that features the MC becoming a nun after the downfall event (which is was the reincarnator wanted). ISIWBYA's MC is also a duke's daughter.
I'm on volume 5 of 'I said, make my abilities average!'. Kinda a light volume, made up of a couple smaller bits.
Meeting the Wonder Trio again was cool, but on the whole it was too light, aside from the group clash everything was well within their realm. They have goals but they're too distant- I think the Vow need either a threat or a more immediate medium-term goal to set their sights on.
On mobile at the moment so I can't go into full details, but I finished volume 2 of Strongest Gamer some days ago.
Where the previous volume was a hardcore (in terms of grinding) survival sim, this volume is a Dungeon Keeper game on a time limit. It's a lot more relaxed in comparison to the previous volume, in that the protagonist isn't exactly living on a knife edge of survival anymore. We meet another fellow dungeon master (via teleconference), and we see that the dungeons around the world all have different purposes and ways to get dungeon points.
Which ties into the primary plotline of this volume, where the dungeon has to be inspected and validated for points, despite the old dungeon master being arrested for embezzlement prior to the series, and thus no work had been done at all. Corporate bureaucracy means that fact had not propagated to the rest of the company paperwork, and so the protagonist has to make a full working dungeon, complete with anti-adventurer measures, in a few months.
There's also a sideplot where the protagonist picks up a Noble Lady Knight archetype, as in hiring her to work as the final boss of the planned dungeon.
Overall I liked this volume a lot better than the previous one, possibly because the translation quality from Sol Press is much better. There's some fun banter between the characters, and the protagonist's inner thoughts have more dry wit than before. The lower stakes are also welcome, since it's nice to see everyone working together happily, rather than have an outside existential threat they have to fear.
Overall it's a good book, and if Sol Press ever updates the first volume to improve their proofreading, I would recommend this series.
A MILF and her son. Aside from the problematic implications of the MILF being quite obsessed for the well-being of the son, the series is an absolute blast.
I'm on volume 5 of 'I said, make my abilities average!'. Kinda a light volume, made up of a couple smaller bits.
Meeting the Wonder Trio again was cool, but on the whole it was too light, aside from the group clash everything was well within their realm. They have goals but they're too distant- I think the Vow need either a threat or a more immediate medium-term goal to set their sights on.
Yeah. It was a good update, but I felt the meeting was a bit of a letdown. Especially since the author had been teasing us with it for 3 books.... *lol*
Finished reading Redefining The Meta At VRMMO Academy, again translated by Sol Press. Translation quality this time is about the level of "decent fan": it has proper grammar and word flow in English, but it has a noticeable number of meme-ish pop culture references that feel kind of jarring, since the characters kind of go out of their way to phrase it like that, but nobody comments or notices. So it feels like the translator just wants to feel clever for themselves.
The "VRMMO Academy" in the title is a new high school which uses brand-new cutting-edge VRMMO tech, of the "full immersion as your mind is transported from your body" type. The idea is that the students can learn the usual subjects, and the scores they get for their tests can be used as stat/skill points, with the standard MMO adventuring being the primary extracurricular activity.
The protagonist is the "Emperor of Underpowered", in that he has a reputation and particular obsession for taking allegedly underpowered classes in games, and trying to make them overpowered. He is quick to qualify this with the caveat that he is not always successful, but he prefers to enjoy the game by doing this, whether or not he succeeds, so it's fine for him. So as usual here, he takes the absolute bottom-tier class, and then tries to find a way to make it not only work, but also the niche where it can excel beyond all others.
An interesting difference from a lot of similar plotlines in other stories is that the protagonist's concept of victory is not always actually winning against the enemy critters. Instead, he considers it a full victory if he learns something about his class (or other classes), even if he gets a full party wipe in the process. So he's willing to go test out unconventional techniques and see if they work or not.
Which is kind of where the term "redefining the meta" becomes a bit broad. The protagonist isn't actually "redefining" the meta, but just adding a few very specialized situations where the bottom-tier classes can become overpowered due to skill synergies. The vast majority of his techniques are ultra-high-risk, with potentially corresponding ultra-high-rewards. And to use his primary one-shot killer move on anything resembling a regular basis, he has to essentially grind for a month for raw materials on enemies too low to give any other progression XP. So that actually neatly answers the question of "why doesn't anyone else copy this game-breaking strategy": it requires such a specialized set of circumstances, and a correspondingly mind-numbing grind of preparation, that most players probably won't bother, going with tried-and-true meta tiers instead.
Basically, the protagonist is doing the classic Pun-Pun The Kobold builds.
On a curious note, the author states that they're an online gaming junkie as well, but I strongly suspect that very little of the protagonist's plans are original to the author's imagination. Mainly because the moment I look through the skill descriptions provided, I can already see how the skills can be used in a potentially overpowered way. The only question would be what the raw numbers would be, and what their effects are in context, but that's basically just author fiat on how effective they are. However, I also think someone who isn't as familiar with MMO theorycrafting might not pick it up as quickly.
The protagonist's basic one-shot attack is essentially an attack that increases in power the lower his HP is, coupled with a never-miss support ability.
His class also has a special ability that swaps his HP and MP values. A few paragraphs are spent in describing how "everyone else" thinks this is useless, since who would ever want to do that anyway, especially given the relatively easy MP restoration methods available.
So it's presented as a genius move when the protagonist first empties out his MP, then swaps it to make his HP a single point. Which essentially maxes out his one-shot attack.
Except I know this was already considered an old and well-known tactic fifteen years ago, when City of Heroes added passives for each archetype, and Blasters got the first version of Defiance. Which did increase the Blaster's attack power the lower their HP, and so what happened was that Blaster players liked to fly way up into the air, drop down for massive fall damage (that cannot kill them, but will leave them at 1 HP at minimum), and then use a nuke ability to one-shot bosses. So I already recognized the HP/MP Swap of this story as a HP manipulation ability, rather than a MP restoration one.
Overall it's probably a fair time-waster for people who aren't already tired of Genius VRMMO Player stories. There's indications of a greater plot, but they're barely covered in this first volume, which is just introducing our protagonist, his adventuring group classmates (three girls), and his nature of being obsessive about unusual skill synergies. The protagonist's companions seem a bit too willing to give up their own character progression for the protagonist's sake (even though only one of them has any potential romantic interest), but you could kind of squint and assume that they're conveniently less of a "gamer mentality" than the protagonist (for some strange reason, considering this is a school explicitly for gamers), and want to observe how far he can go.
Next I will not be talking about any sort of new manga unless 'new' is something from this millenium , but I saw new update for Break Blade recently. Man this manga still ongoing. I recall loving it back when was it still recently out. What year again that was? *check internet* huh it first published at 2007. It's been more than a decade since. Eventually kinda abandon it due its slow pace of updates, and I think because of plot kinda bored me in the middle?
Anyway, with new update I ended up reading it again from the beginning. Yep, still love this manga (well the parts I have been rereading so far at least). It has nice charater design andr interaction. There's something of this manga, a certain interesting atmosphere about it that charms. An atmosphere that I recall got intesified in the six-films anime adaptation (also addition of cool soundtracks). I'm going to watch them again too, once I'm done with rereading the manga. And then the TV series, since I never got around to watch that.
*(re)watch a bit of the anime* oh yes, the films were good stuffs indeed.
Also rereading made me notices details that I didn't before (or remember details I forgot). Like, Zess being married and having a daughter. Totally didn't remember that! Also, Cleo just being 12 years old!!?? (I thought that was a joke at first). The fuck Athens?
EDIT: Still catching up. Wow, that's great developments. Wonder which part back then that caused me to got bored? I guess its more because of the wait between updates. Marathoned like twist, the story is quite engaging with development one after another.
A MILF and her son. Aside from the problematic implications of the MILF being quite obsessed for the well-being of the son, the series is an absolute blast.
I read a bit and I can't say I connected with either son or mom, though the premise is interesting. I would've liked it if the Mom was really just a very good gamer rather than starting out with some OP weapons.
*edit for further elaboration* The son complains a ton about a not so bad mom, and the mom is a cutesy 'young looking/acting' mom who's highly focused on her son, way too idealized and straightforward in short. I don't really get a sense of how their relationship got how it is and both came across as flat, at least as far as I got.
Hey, here's something I kinda want to talk about - Tokyopop. Back during the manga boom I bought a lot of their stuff, especially their OEL content, before I found out the crappiness of their deals with the creators. At one point they also stopped publishing manga in bookstore, leaving some titles and creators in a lurch.
A year or two back they decided to return.
And... I look at their current output and it looks like the lower tier of the manga boom era when everything and anything was getting licensed with lower quality art than anything on the selves around them, and only one license I recognized (Yuri Bear Storm- which looks pretty pale next to the anime). Nothing to speak of on the OEL front either.
Frankly I'm surprised they're keeping at it, even with their cost cutting it's hard to see how they're supposed to stay in the market.
Hey, here's something I kinda want to talk about - Tokyopop. Back during the manga boom I bought a lot of their stuff, especially their OEL content, before I found out the crappiness of their deals with the creators. At one point they also stopped publishing manga in bookstore, leaving some titles and creators in a lurch.
A year or two back they decided to return.
And... I look at their current output and it looks like the lower tier of the manga boom era when everything and anything was getting licensed with lower quality art than anything on the selves around them, and only one license I recognized (Yuri Bear Storm- which looks pretty pale next to the anime). Nothing to speak of on the OEL front either.
Frankly I'm surprised they're keeping at it, even with their cost cutting it's hard to see how they're supposed to stay in the market.
The wait for Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation season 2 is killing me. And english dub... whennnn
(Okay, technically that's an adaptation of a Chinese novel, but I have nowhere to complain about it)
Oh, and Villainous Daughter (Akuyaku Reijou Nanode Rasubosu wo Katte Mimashita) is a pretty good manga so far, so I'm keeping an eye on that.
EDIT:
Quick reactions to a couple of light novels I picked up and finished recently:
Reincarnated As A Sword: The first volume covers up to the first Goblin Dungeon subjugation, and the immediate aftermath thereof. I think I agree with most other reviews which say that the story only picks up when Fran is introduced, which happens after a third of the book, so for the beginning it's just the sword protagonist flying around and killing monsters. He's charming enough with his narration, though, so it's not as bad as I feared. Still, his interplay with Fran is much better, and I'm looking forward to the next volume.
Saving 80,000 Gold In Another World For My Retirement: Like all FUNA stories, the narrative kind of warps to the main character, with everyone else acting like supporting cast to their zany antics, rather than characters in their own right. Mitsuha is a lot more energetic than Kaoru or even Mile, although most of it manifests in the form of multi-page internal rambling monologues, which I found myself skimming through after a while. Also the light novel does explain something that the manga version doesn't, which is that Mitsuha's more competent on-the-spot preparations (eg preparing to fight off wolves) are almost entirely done on "reflex", in that her body is moving to equip herself before she knows it, and she only remembers the justifications later. Which is kind of weird, and feels like an excuse for someone as impulsive as Mitsuha to be able to have Batman levels of preparation.
considering the story after she murder her target of jealousy. Anyway, 
