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The Economics of Prophecy: Avoiding Disaster in Another World

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By Norafukurou and Rei Shichiwa. Released in Japan by Legend Novels (Kodansha). Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Hikoki.

So you want to read an isekai, but instead of being a horny Japanese teenager, you’re a late 30s-early 40s Japanese officer worker. You’re married, have a couple of kids. You really are not looking for a fantasy involving game systems, harem building, and fanservice. You don’t even need illustrations. You’re looking for something a bit more highbrow. Fortunately, Legend Novels, a fairly new Kodansha imprint, has you covered. The Economics of Prophecy is not kidding about its economics, and so will replace discussion of gaming stats with correlation coefficients. There is more than one girl interested in the hero, but they are more understated and political about it. As for the hero, well, yes, he’s a bit bland, but he’s bland in an ADULT way. All that said, this is still a young Japanese man transported to another world with monsters and magic, who goes to an elite private school along with his unlucky childhood friend and the gorgeous, naive princess. Not ALL the tropes are gone.

The actual “reincarnated and growing up in a new world” part of Ricardo’s life is glossed over in about two paragraphs – we jump right into him as a young businessman, trying to attend school and get his family honey-making business off the ground. Unfortunately, rival companies are bigger and richer than he is. All he has is his knowledge from Japan of economic theory and his secretary/childhood friend Mia. The fourth princess of the realm, Alfina, even does a taste test between the companies. Unfortunately, as Ricardo finds, once you start meeting this princess you can’t stop meeting her. And she’s actually an oracle with a different prediction than the usual “everything’s fine again this year” – there will be a disaster. What kind? She doesn’t know. Exactly where? She’s not quite sure. Can Ricardo help her figure out what and where is going to happen? And will it even matter given the complacency of this kingdom?

The plot and the main leads are the strongest part of this book. There is a lot of economic stuff, but it never quite gets to the point where you want to flip ahead. Ricardo is one of those “I am scheming and clever but also secretly really nice to people” sorts, a bit like the Genius Prince in Yen’s recent series – he works best when he’s being pressured. Alfina manages to be a very naive, innocent royal without becoming annoying, and she’s really sweet. On the flip side, Mia is vastly underused – we clearly see she has a thing for Ricardo, but given that she (like he) is also emotionally minimal this mostly comes out as disapproval when he’s around other women. I would have liked more of their childhood backstory. Alfina also has an aide that ends up getting relatively humiliated, but I’m not entirely sure that the crime merited the punishment – it wasn’t clear enough that Claudia had abandoned Alfina, so it seemed sort of mean instead.

This is still definitely strong enough that I’d recommend it, and I’ll be reading the second volume. It’s respectable, an isekai you could happily introduce to your parents.

The Irregular at Magic High School: Ancient City Insurrection Arc, Part I

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By Tsutomu Sato and Kana Ishida. Released in Japan as “Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei” by Dengeki Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Andrew Prowse.

Just because a large majority of the cast go “eurgh” whenever Miyuki is snuggling up to her brother does not mean that the writer is not leaning on the incest subtext as hard as he possibly can. Indeed, one can’t happen without the other. And since a lot of this book is Minami suffering through watching the siblings be “embarrassing”, or noticeably avoiding saying anything in order not to upset the powerful teenager with a hair-trigger killer ice move, there is an awful lot of my least favorite plot element in this series in this book. I made a promise to myself that I would hold out till the 16th book – this is, after all, one of Dengeki Bunko’s ‘flagship’ series, alongside titles such as Sword Art Online and A Certain Magical Index… which also have issues. We’ll see why I chose Book 16 in the summer. Till then, fortunately, there is more to this book than just snuggling against Tatsuya, though it suffers from being part one of two.

The Thesis Competition is coming around again, though this year Tatsuya is not involved – at least not directly. He’s going to be doing security, given what happened at the last event. Unfortunately, he’s also still dealing with fallout from the last couple of books – in particular, Gongjin Zhou’s whereabouts, which likely will impact a lot of things going forward. The ancient magicians are taking interest in him and his friends as well. Fortunately, trying to locate the base of these magicians allows him to travel to Nara and make a new friend. Possibly unfortunately, Minoru is, of course, probably going to be a major enemy down the road, particularly if they’re dealing with the parasites that have been cropping up for a while. Fortunately, he’s on their side for now, and is a nice, polite, pretty and very powerful young man. Possibly unfortunately, Minami falls for him – hard.

When you snip out discussion of magic and incest, what little is left in this series is action, and the action is very good. We even get the death of a character we’d seen before, which surprised me, and their death also impacts Mayumi, who is unable to get much information out of her “I am evil and sneering” dad. (Their relationship makes em think of Tokiomi and Rin.) Mayumi also gets to be in possible the funniest scene of the book, where she’s having lunch and discussing things with Mari and tries to deny that she’s in love with Tatsuya, a denial that is rather pathetic – she’s trying to say they’re like a big sister and little brother, but this is NOT the series to say that in. And it is nice – although, as Tatsuya and Miyuki acknowledge, rather odd – for Maya to actually ask Tatsuya to do a thing, rather than order him.

As I noted, this is Book 1 or 2, so I expect the second half will have a lot more action and payoff. Till then, this remains a good series provided you strip out the incest and magic talk – which, alas, leaves about 50 pages per book.

Our Last Crusade or the Rise of a New World, Vol. 2

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By Kei Sazane and Ao Nekonabe. Released in Japan as “Kimi to Boku no Saigo no Senjou, Aruiwa Sekai ga Hajimaru Seisen” by Fujimi Fantasia Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jan Cash.

The days when people were begging for a light novel – any light novel – to be released are long since past. We live in a glut of light novels, with new titles releasing several times a week, and it’s impossible to keep up with them all. This is difficult for someone like me, as I have a very high tolerance when it comes to entertainment. I have started to try to find reasons to drop series so that I don’t have to get even further behind in reading all the other series I read. And, honestly, Our Last Crusade seemed a perfect candidate for this after its second volume. Its plot was OK but not earth-shattering. The women in the book are… not great, particularly in this volume. There are some decent fights, but less of the self-analysis of the respective regimes we saw in the first book beyond “the empire tortures witches”. It seemed like a good place to leave off. Alas, then came the epilogue.

A vortex has appeared in the world, one that can give the right people amazing powers. Unfortunately, it’s desired by both sides. And so once again Iska and Alice are fighting against each other… or so it would seem. But unlike the last book, this time they keep missing each other, turning a Romeo and Juliet-style fated romance into drawing room farce. Most of the emphasis of the book is on Iska’s end, where his battalion has a very rude and uncaring leader and also a traitor, which is not good news for Captain Mismis, who is captured by said traitor. On Alice’s end, there’s a smug masked man and a powerful woman named “Kissing” with a blindfold and an attitude, but mostly there’s just Alice getting very, very annoyed that she isn’t making out with… erm, pardon me, fighting Iska to the death like she should be doing.

I’m gonna be honest here, Alice whining over wanting to fight Iska about every single page is going to get very boring very fast, and given that I suspect that once she gets over this it’s going to turn into “a young maiden in love” I’m not looking forward to future developments. Mismis, also, really really needs to develop beyond a captain who reads more like a mascot, and spending most of the second half of the book captured and in peril does not help. The book doesn’t really slide into being actively annoying or bad… it’s well-written, the pacing is good, and you can simply grump at Alice and Mismis as you go. But it lacks a hook that made me want to read past this volume. Or at least it did till the end. I will not reveal what the two hooks are, but I will say they’re perfectly delivered for maximum “dammit, now I have to get the next book in the series” effect. In particular, I’m cautiously optimistic one of the two issues I had with the book might change because of this? Maybe?

It could also be I’m just a soft touch who’s too easily pleased. But I am hoping that the third book in the series gets a bit more political and also does more with its female leads than having them be cliches.

The Wize Wize Beasts of the Wizarding Wizdoms

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“Whimsical tales of anthropomorphic beasts in love”—or so the dust jacket of The Wize Wize Beasts of the Wizarding Wizdoms promises. The eight stories in this collection do feature a race of half-animal, half-human creatures who behave like boys at a British boarding school, forming intense friendships that sometimes cross the line into romance. I’m a little reluctant to call these stories “whimsical,” however, as that word implies a certain degree of playfulness that was lacking in most of the stories, some of which were intensely sincere, and some of which raised legitimate questions about boundaries and consent.

Wize Wize Beasts unfolds at a special academy “dedicated to the study of wizardry,” where demi-humans of every imaginable type peacefully co-exist as they learn the arts of potion-making, spell-casting, and alchemy. Each story centers on a pair of opposites: prey and predator, teacher and student, mammal and reptile, smart and average. Most of their relationships fall under the general heading of “unrequited love,” in which one demi-human pines for his opposite, but can’t muster the courage to say how he feels.

In the most enjoyable chapters—”Marley & Collette,” “Cromwell & Benjamin”—Nagabe explores the healthier side of attraction, showing how strong feelings of admiration and concern can bring out the best in friends, allowing for moments of tenderness, warmth, and emotional honesty even when the friendship remains platonic. My favorite, “Mauchly & Charles,” read like an irresistible mash-up of Winnie the Pooh and The Girl from the Other Side, focusing on a bear (Mauchly) and the human he rescued (Charles) from a dark, rainy forest. After Charles returns to his own world, he and Mauchly hold an annual reunion, using this ritual as an opportunity to reflect on what’s changed in the ensuing year. The emotional vulnerability and candor of their interactions is genuinely astonishing—not because men don’t have close friendships, but because the kind of physical intimacy and gentleness that defines Mauchly and Charles’ friendship is seldom depicted in popular culture.

The weakest stories in the collection, by contrast, often conflate possessive or coercive behavior with romantic attraction, justifying one character’s actions by suggesting his feelings were so intense that they compelled him to transgress social norms. In “Doug & Huey,” for example, a crow (Doug) carries a torch for his handsome friend Huey, who—natch—is a peacock. Though Huey spends most of his time chasing girls, Doug’s devotion to him is unwavering—so much so, in fact, that Doug sabotages Huey’s efforts to land a girlfriend so that Huey will “never be closer to someone else.” Huey, for his part, is so deeply narcissistic that he doesn’t recognize Doug’s controlling behavior, creating a deeply toxic bond between them that is presented as a simple case of unrequited love.

The issue of consent lingers over other chapters in Wize Wize Beasts as well. “Alan & Eddington,” for example, depicts the friendship between a brilliant Siamese (Alan) and a hardworking rabbit (Eddie) who’s dazzled by his classmate’s effortless mastery of complex subjects. Afraid that Alan will reject his advances, Eddie concocts and serves him a love potion. While under the influence of Alan’s spell, Eddie compels Alan to kiss him and profess his love for him—a scene that’s meant to be a little naughty, I think, but instead registers as squicky. Alan confronts Eddie about the incident, but then invites Eddie to “start over” without a magical aide, undercutting the power of his previous speech about Alan’s “cowardly” behavior.

If I was sometimes ambivalent about the content, I found Nagabe’s crisp illustrations thoroughly enchanting. His anthropomorphic character designs capture the essential animal natures of each character while retaining just enough human features for Nagabe to plausibly swathe them in flowing capes and tweedy trousers. Nagabe’s command of light, shadow, and line is superb, creating a strong sense of place without excessive reliance on screentone or tracing; his characters inhabit a well-defined world that has been vividly and imaginatively rendered on the page.

In the afterword to Wize Wize Beasts, Nagabe cheerfully jokes about “winning” readers over to his particular fandom. “I’d be deeply honored if this work exposes more people to non-human characters,” he notes. “And if you start to think, ‘Wow, non-human characters are awesome,’ go on. Get in there up to your neck.” I can’t say that Wize Wize Beasts made me a convert, but I did admire Nagabe’s creativity, sincerity, and honesty, as well as his willingness to take narrative risks that might not pay off with all readers. Your mileage may vary.

THE WIZE WIZE BEASTS OF WIZARDING WIZDOMS • STORY AND ART BY NAGABE • TRANSLATED BY ADRIENNE BECK • SEVEN SEAS • RATED TEEN • 228 pp.

Manga the Week of 1/15/20

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SEAN: Remember when January was the smallest month of the year? No more!

ASH: Ha!

SEAN: Ghost Ship gives us a 14th volume of To-Love-Ru Darkness.

J-Novel Club has three debuts, the first of their massive wave of Anime NYC licenses. The Economics of Prophecy (Yogen no Keizaigaku) is from Legend Novels, a Kodansha fantasy imprint. Can an ignored oracle and a reincarnated economist save the kingdom?

Kobold King is also from Legend Novels. A famous warrior who has become so powerful that everyone is too afraid of him tries to show a tribe of kobolds that he’s really a sweetie at heart.

ASH: I was previously unaware of Legend Novels, but with these two titles make the imprint seems like it could be a source with some potential.

ANNA: Ok, light novels featuring economists does sound amusing, but I am not a light novel person.

SEAN: The Underdog of the Eight Greater Tribes (Hachi Dai Shuzoku no Saijaku Kettousha) is from HJ Bunko, and is a battle fantasy, though apparently not involving literal magical academies this time.

Also from J-Novel is the 9th volume of If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord, Infinite Stratos 11 and Seirei Gensouki 8.

In print, Kodansha has Hitorijime My Hero 6, If I Could Reach You 3, and Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches 21-22.

ASH: I’ve been meaning to give If I Could Reach You a try at some point.

SEAN: Digitally, the debut is GE: Good Ending, which has been rumored to get a license over here since it began, but never did. Now it’s over, and we have a digital license. It’s by the creator of Domestic Girlfriend, ran in Weekly Shonen Magazine, and is a potboiler, just like its successor.

We also have digital volumes for 1122: For a Happy Marriage (4), Ace of the Diamond (24), Domestic Girlfriend (23), Ex-Enthusiasts: Motokare Mania (2), Farewell My Dear Cramer (6), and Giant Killing (18).

MICHELLE: So much sports manga! *rubs hands together in anticipation*

SEAN: One Peace Books has a 6th volume of Hinamatsuri.

ASH: I’m a few volumes behind, but this series continues to amuse me.

SEAN: Seven Seas gives us an 8th Himouto Umaru-chan, the 5th Mushoku Tensei novel digitally, and a 2nd volume of Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!!.

Debuting from SuBLime is Liquor and Cigarettes, a title from Gentosha’s Lynx magazine. It’s by the author of Coyote. They smoke. They drink. They smoke and smoke and drink… OK, sorry.

Vertical has a 4th volume of the Knights of Sidonia Master Edition.

Viz has a debut title. You thrilled to Persona 3, you cried at Persona 4, now, at last, we see Persona 5! This runs in Shogakukan’s Ura Sunday, and (surprise!) adapts the game.

Viz also gives us Case Closed 73, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess 6, Radiant 9, and Splatoon 8.

ASH: I’ve been enjoying the Twilight Princess adaptation!

SEAN: Lastly, Yen Press has a 2nd Do You Love Your Mom (and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?) manga, and a 13th Yowamushi Pedal omnibus. I suspect Manga Bookshelf folks will have little trouble choosing between these two.

ASH: Yup. It’s definitely Yowamushi Pedal for me!

MICHELLE: See above re: anticipatory hands.

SEAN: Do you like any of these titles? Or do you not like manga at all, but read this column just for the hell of it?

KATE: I don’t like (much) manga, but I always enjoy this column. :D

Combatants Will Be Dispatched!, Vol. 2

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By Natsume Akimoto and Kakao Lanthanum. Released in Japan as “Sentouin, Hakenshimasu!” by Kadokawa Sneaker Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Noboru Akimoto.

Given that this is a series by the creator of KonoSuba, featuring characters who bear great similarities to those in KonoSuba, has a sequence where our “heroes” use The Destroyer from KonoSuba, and finally features a literal crossover with KonoSuba at the end, where a different evil operative goes to that world and is horrified by the overpowered nature of Aqua, Megumin and Darkness, it would not be unreasonable for a potential reader to ask me if Combatants Will Be Dispatched! is as good as KonoSuba. And the answer is… no, of course it’s not. Even if you weren’t aware that this was an earlier work that was dusted off and published by Kadokawa after KonoSuba became ludicrously successful, the fact is that KonoSuba’s characters are all likeable and you root for them, despite their many, many deep personality flaws. Even Kazuma. Whereas Agent Six, Alice and the others are just as flawed, but are really unpleasant people at heart. Rose comes closest, but it’s bad when the author has to say in the afterword “they’ll get more heroic soon, I hope.”

Alice is on the cover, and Akimoto states she’s the “featured girl” of the book, but honestly she doesn’t get much to do beyond what she did in Book One – snark at Six. Even her saving the day at the end of the book is only mentioned secondhand, because Six was knocked unconscious for all of it. To be fair, she is VERY good at snarking at Six – she’s still my favorite part of the book. With the Kingdom desperately short of water, the King missing, and the princess unwilling to say Six’s stupid password to a large crowd, he and his group are charged with negotiating water from a neighboring kingdom. Well, actually, he and the group are bodyguards for Snow, who is supposed to seduce the horny and easily led ruler of that kingdom. Unfortunately, due to a ridiculous chain of events, they end up starting a war. And also reviving an ancient superweapon. Fortunately, Six can still do what he does best – be petty and horrible till he wins the day.

I mentioned on Twitter that this feels like a KonoSuba with all the brakes removed, and I still stand by that. Snow is still a horrible combination of Darkness and Aqua with the flaws of both characters, and I longed for her to get run over by a bus. Rose comes off best of the crew, as I said before, but is driven by her appetite, which unfortunately leads to a lot of cannibalism jokes… not to mention sex = food jokes… when they have to cross a desert for several days with no food. Grimm is less fun here, with her one personality trait seeming to be “desperate”. There is a long-running argument over the course of the book between her and Alice over the nature of magic, which Alice, as an artificial human, rejects entirely. This could lead somewhere good, but it will have to be in future books, as nothing comes of it here.

Fortunately, this book does have one big thing still going for it: it’s funny. I laughed quite a bit. But with KonoSuba I laugh and also care, and I haven’t gotten to that point with this cast. They need a third dimension. Hopefully in future books.

Pick of the Week: Jump to the Beat

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SEAN: It’s Jump/Beat week, so we have an embarrassment of titles. I’ll pick the final Anonymous Noise, which is not quite as gripping now that it’s not showing its heroine screaming her song at the reader, but still a very good read.

MICHELLE: I’m definitely going to read the finale of Anonymous Noise, which won me over after the first few volumes but never quite captured my heart, but what I’m really jonesing for is a hit of some volleyball action in Haikyu!!.

KATE: Lest anyone accuse me of being predictable, I’m going to pick… actually, I’m going to stay on brand and choose volume 13 of The Promised Neverland. Why break my streak?!

ANNA: I’m never going to pass up a chance to highlight some josei, so my pick is An Incurable Case of Love Volume 2. The first volume featured a few twists on the workplace romance genre, so I’m curious to see what happens next.

ASH: This really is a good week for Viz releases! But to be contrary, and because I just finished reading and liked the first volume, I’m going to pick Animeta!.

MJ: It doesn’t seem like this should be a difficult week to come up with something, but I admit it’s been a struggle! But I have finally started getting into Snow White with the Red Hair, so I think I’ll toss my vote in for that. I need to read more manga in 2020!

The Alchemist Who Survived Now Dreams of a Quiet City Life, Vol. 2

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By Usata Nonohara and ox. Released in Japan as “Ikinokori Renkinjutsushi wa Machi de Shizuka ni Kurashitai” by Kadokawa Shoten. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Erin Husson.

The second volume of this series has many of the same strengths and weaknesses that the first has. The writing is good and makes you want to see what’s coming next. There is slightly less detail about the creation of potions, which pleased me. Those who are into deep worldbuilding will love it. But it seems tonally off in a way that means I can never quite love it. The author still wants to use slavery and critique it, but also shows us that all the slaves we meet are “bad guys being punished for robbery and murder” so that we’re still OK with it in this series. More to the point, there’s a disconnect between the world this book exists in and Mariela herself, and I don’t just mean that she’s displaced by 200 years from her old world, though that might explain it. It’s a slice of grim-n-gritty life, with Mariela being a bright ball of sunshine bringing joy into everyone’s life. The two don’t always mesh.

There’s a lot going on in this 2nd volume, even longer than the first – and the first was quite long. Mariela and Sieg are trying to run her shop, meet new people, and avoid having her outed as an alchemist, as she’d rather not be shut up in a building and worked to death. We see as the book moves along that her fears are not entirely unfounded. The Kingdom is still trying to beat the Labyrinth once and for all, helped out by Mariela’s Holy Water. And a noble family has a dark secret, one not entirely known to the nice girl who befriends Mariela and shows her the wonders of modern appliances, but her older brother certainly knows and is obsessed with it. What is concealed in a secret passageway in their mansion? And what kinds of things are being done to slaves to ensure the safety of the royal family?

If it sounds like this turned into a different story, you’re thinking along the lines I was. The last part of the book is quite dark and disturbing, with sacrifices, blood magic, and graphic descriptions of people’s heads cut open and brains showing. It contrasts with the childlike Mariela, who is shown to be even more childlike than she had been before in these scenes, as if the author wanted to emphasize the contrast but took it too far. Indeed, for most of the book the author can’t quite decide whether Mariela is meant to act like a 16-year-old or a 6-year-old, and it pinwheels between the two. This is especially discomfiting given that both Sieg and Lynx are shown to be falling for her. Innocent is fine, immature is less so.

Despite this, the book overall is very readable, and while it has many parts that annoy me I don’t actually feel the need to drop it yet. The flashback scenes showing Mariela’s first learning of alchemy and the relationship with her master are excellent. I just wish the author would stay in the fantasy-slice-of-life lane and stop making detours to the wrong side of the tracks.

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace

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As The Rise of Skywalker brings the Star Wars saga to its official close, now seems like the right time to revisit the very first chapter in the series, The Phantom Menace. Episode I debuted in 1999, making the leap from screen to print the following year with Kia Asamiya providing the illustrations. Readers familiar with Asamiya’s Silent Möbius will immediately understand why he was tapped for this project: he has a penchant for drawing detailed space ships and cityscapes, two important qualifications for translating George Lucas’ vision into a compelling comic.

Alas, Asamiya was also saddled with Lucas’ original script, leaving him little room to make the story more interesting on the page than it was on the screen. Asamiya faithfully preserves the film’s most frustrating elements—the tin-eared dialogue, the unfortunate minstrelsy of JarJar Binks—as well as its surfeit of plot points, secondary characters, and clumsy discussions of Federation trade policy. To his credit, Asamiya’s version is brisk and streamlined in contrast with Lucas’, marching from one scene to the next with a sense of urgency that’s often lacking from the film. Some of the film’s most tedious scenes—the blockade of Naboo, the first interactions between Padme and Anakin, the Imperial Senate’s deliberations—have been telescoped, giving Asamiya room for more detailed treatments of chases, light saber fights, and space battles.

The artwork, on the other hand, is a hit-or-miss affair. Asamiya’s skill at drawing aliens, robots, space craft, and futuristic cities is unquestionable; his evocation of Otoh Gunga and Coruscant do justice to the complexity and specificity of Lucas’ original designs, while Asamiya’s establishing shots of Naboo convincingly evoke the planet’s lush jungles and Greco-Roman palaces without the added benefit of color. His ability to compress lengthy action sequences is likewise impressive; in just a few artfully constructed pages, for example, he captures the excitement and danger of Anakin Skywalker’s pod race, using panels-within-panels to juxtapose the racers’ progress with the crowd’s ecstatic reaction to the event:

Asamiya’s human characters, by contrast, are as expressionless as their big-screen counterparts—a key failing, as the characters register as pawns, not people, dutifully shuttled from one scenario to the next with almost no sense of how the violence and chaos they’ve encountered has affected them. Only the two principle non-human characters—JarJar Binks and C3PO—are drawn in an animated fashion, providing the series’ few moments of genuine emotion and surprise.

And that, in a nutshell, is why Asamiya’s take on The Phantom Menace is so frustrating: it improves on certain aspects of the source material while emphasizing its fatal flaws, making for an efficient but affectless gloss on Lucas’ original story that reads a lot like Cliff Notes. Not recommended.

STAR WARS: EPISODE I – THE PHANTOM MENACE, VOLS. 1-2 • ART BY KIA ASAMIYA • MARVEL COMICS • NO RATING (SUITABLE FOR READERS 10 AND UP)

A Double Dungeon review

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Dungeon Builder: The Demon King’s Labyrinth Is a Modern City!. By Rui Tsukiyo and Hideaki Yoshikawa. Released in Japan as “Maou-sama no Machizukuri! ~Saikyou no Danjon wa Kindai Toshi~” by Overlap, serialization ongoing in the magazine Comic Gardo. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Elina Ishikawa-Curran. Adapted by Julia Kinsman.

My Room Is a Dungeon Rest Stop. By Tougoku Hudou and Takoya Kiyoshi. Released in Japan as “Boku no Heya ga Dungeon no Kyuukeijo ni Natteshimatta Ken” by Takeshobo, serialization ongoing on the online site Web Comic Gamma. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Wesley O’Donnell. Adapted by Kim Kindya.

After reading both of these titles I decided to review them together. Yes, they both have ‘dungeon’ in the title, but more than that, they’re both clearly catering to the exact same audience: light novel fans who enjoy fantasy manga, or in this case adaptation of light novels we don’t have licensed over here. They both have suitably generic male leads – one may be a demon lord and the other may be a schlub in a tracksuit, but at the end of the day they’re not why you’re reading this. And there’s also plenty of fanservice. Which is why folks are reading this.

Dungeon Builder might be an isekai – we do see the new Demon Lord has lost his memories but knows what guns are – but the isekai part is mostly irrelevant. Procel is new Demon Lord of Creation, and has to create minions and dungeons that feed on people’s despair and fear. As the flash forward at the start of the book tells you, however, he is too nice a guy, so decides to make his dungeon the happiest place on Earth. It’s not clear yet how he’ll do this – the first volume doesn’t get too far into the story. He’s joined by Marcho, his busty demon lord mentor (that’s her on the cover) and two cute minions, both of whom look underage (something cheerfully pointed out by Marcho, who nicknames him “Lolicel”. This has slightly less service than the other title, and might develop into something interesting, but also seems to run on cliche power – his rival Demon Lord of Wind is a classic tsundere with shaky self-esteem that shows as arrogance. There’s also a dwarf girl who ticks the “rei Ayanami Expy” box.

My Room Is a Dungeon Rest Stop is more of a reverse isekai. Our hero Touru (Why? What that romanization now for that specific name? Don’t get me wrong, I was an ‘ou’ fan for the longest tine, but really?… sorry, back to the review) gets an apartment that’s dirt cheap… because once he moves in, the front door turns out to lead to a dungeon! Luckily, he can go out the window to his modern-day life. Exploring the dungeon, he comes across a passed-out adventurer girl and takes her back to his apartment, where she discovers the wonders of modern lie and explains a bit to him about dungeon life. Like Dungeon Builder, this title has barely gotten started. It’s a lot heavier on the fanservice – there’s a long sequence regarding the girl wetting herself from fear and the consequences of this that I really did not need to read about – and Touru is slightly more generic than the already generic Procel. As with Dungeon Builder, it opens with a brief flashforward showing us other characters who have fallen into our lead’s orbit.

I’d argue that both titles deliver what the intended audience wants, and will irritate anyone who is not in that narrow audience bracket. I’d say Dungeon Builder, based on its first volume, has more promise than Dungeon Rest Stop. I may get a second volume of the former. Still, if you like fantasy dungeon series with cute girls, these two books exist for you.