in the land of leadale

By Ceez and Tenmaso. Released in Japan as “Leadale no Daichi nite” by Famitsu Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jessica Lange.

The Leadale series does something that I very much appreciate… well, to an extent. It knows that readers may not always remember what’s come before, so has a handy summary of the series before each volume. That said… perhaps the summary can be shortened a bit in the future? By the time I read through what had previously happened in the first 7 books, I was already nearly 30 pages into THIS book. It needn’t pad out the word count so much. As for the book itself, it continues to have fun with its main joke, which is that Cayna sees the other powerful players in her old group as eccentric lunatics, and they see her as the exact same if not worse. But really, Leadale is the ultimate book for folks who just want to read the worldbuiding. So much of this series is about game mechanics, both past and present, and how to abuse flavor text or what happens when your last boss monsters get unsealed. The gaming really is the plot.

Cayna is invited to help guard the princess as she and her fellows go out on an educational camping trip (a plotline also done, almost note for note, in Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear). Unfortunately, she also has a job she has to do for Opus, checking out the stability of a barrier holding back the last boss monsters mentioned above. The second mission quickly outstrips the first, and the school trip has to be rapidly cancelled. (The entire purpose of the trip seems to have been to introduce Exis’ little sister, who was also a player and thus is also in Leadale. That said, they need all the players and strong NPCs they can get, as the barrier is finally breaking, and bad things will overrun the kingdom if they don’t stop them. What’s more, if Cayna dies, the whole “game” part of this world goes away forever.

The connection between this world and Cayna has been its strongest mystery, still being revealed to us, and the most interesting part here is the fact that the players that have ended up inside Leadale is a figure much larger than the players who were actually active when the game shut down. Cayna has no idea why this is, and apparently Opus doesn’t either. As for the rest of the book, well, if you like Cayna being Cayna, it’s fun. She overreacts, she terrifies people, she will brings out a terrifying monster to act as a blanket so she can be warm when she sleeps. And, since the book is from her point of view, we as the reader don’t regard it as oddly as everyone else who deals with her. It doesn’t help that she’s now getting fangirls, thanks to players being too glib when creating their “children”…

The book ends with a cliffhanger, as our players are still in the midst of a big battle against a monster horde. Sadly, this is the final volume out in Japan as well, so we’ll be waiting a while before we continue. Probably long enough that I’ll need the 30-age summary for Book 9.

By Ceez and Tenmaso. Released in Japan as “Leadale no Daichi nite” by Famitsu Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jessica Lange.

One of the main reasons to read the Leadale series is to see the dissonance between Cayna as a centuries-old high elf who has great-grandchildren and can casually wipe out a continent with Cayna, who is a teenager who spent almost her entire life in a hospital bed and is still learning how to act like a normal person while also having the aforementioned massive power. That dissonance is felt keenly in this volume. At least twice in the book, Cayna overreacts to a situation so much that she causes terror in those around her. She claims that Opus is the dangerous loose cannon, but he (and the reader) know the actual truth. Watching the anime recently helped remind me of this, as there were a lot of viewers who could not get past Cayna’s “comedic violence” towards people, and the violence is no longer quite as comedic. She needs to get a handle on herself, especially now that she knows the true nature of where she is.

Cayna and Opus spend a lot of the start of the book looking around for the magic projector that will allow them to livestream the upcoming fighting tournament, which results in a sort of mini-tour of all the previous towers and shows off the eccentricities of the people who own them. This includes moving the giant turtle so it looks slightly less like it’s about to destroy the nearby city… as well as running into another relative, an elf queen who is rather enthusiastic about meeting Cayna. Unfortunately, now that Opus and Cayna are walking around together, her kids are starting to notice that Opus sounds exactly like who she said their dad was, which requires some last-second lying to avoid the topic. And then we get the tourney itself, which Cayna sits out but even so manages to accidentally ruin.

The world in general seems to treat Cayna as a natural disaster, and honestly the world isn’t wrong. She doesn’t react to things the way anyone would expect, mostly as she’s a teenager who never had a normal life being forced to deal with things that worry, upset, or embarrass her. She also looks like a cute l’il elf girl, so can occasionally be underestimated, though any of the players actually in this world who are able to see (or more accurately not see) her stats will be running away fast. She’s smart enough to know not to enter the tourney, but she then goes and gives Shining Saber one of her ludicrous monster swords, which results in the entire arena getting destroyed as he fights his opponent so hard that no one can continue. The reason I harp on this is because, unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of development with Cayna maturing. The series realizes that her overreactions are funny. So I will attempt to not take it too seriously. There are many funny bits here, which helps.

Leadale is never going to be great, but it’s always entertaining, and it’s a good read if you like fun fantasy with OP girls.

By Ceez and Tenmaso. Released in Japan as “Leadale no Daichi nite” by Famitsu Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jessica Lange.

Last time I wondered whether Opus’ introduction would lead to him explaining the plot a bit more, or just to him being a dick. As it turns out, it’s both. Indeed, the explanations come fast and furious, which is a bit of a surprise. We’ve occasionally thought back to Keina lying in her hospital bed, and how Leadale was created essentially for her. But this volume shows that goes MUCH deeper than we’d expected , and that Cayna is tied to Leadale in a far more significant way than I think she’d really like to be. I don’t want to get too much into spoilers, but suffice to say that Opus’ real-life identity was the least surprising part of it. That said, the real world is not an option for Cayna anymore, so best make the most of it and do what she does best – be a terrifyingly powerful mage who you never, ever want to see get angry. Sadlty, in this volume, Opus is at her side most of the time, so no luck there.

After recovering from her MP-draining rage attack on Opus from the last volume, Opus actually deigns to answers a lot of her questions about the true nature of this world. From there, she goes back to the village she’s now calling home, trailed by Opus and his Maid/Bodyguard/Tsukkomi Siren, who has definite opinions on what servants should be like but also is well aware of how much of an asshole her boss is. She then returns to the capital, where her granddaughter asks her to deal with a loose end… the player/bandit leader she put a punishment collar on several books ago, who has basically learned his lesson. As for Opus, he’s just starting to walk around and get back into the swing of things, but he certainly enjoys putting the fear of God into anyone he interacts with. This won’t change.

There’s a prologue where we see Keina at the hospital, interacting with her family and the programmer who’s there to tell her about Leadale, and it helps to hammer home how mentally exhausted she was in there, and also how truly immature she still is. I’d mentioned the reaction against her violence last time, and I think that’s because we’re told (as everyone else thinks) to see her as a 200-year-old all-powerful grandma rather than a teenage girl who get really, really excited simply by the fact that she can run around. As for her and Opus, leaving aside the various reveals, I am pleased to see that they have exactly zero romantic chemistry together… though admittedly that’s not what the rest of the cast thinks. It’s OK, sometimes you can just have a relationship be two antagonistic friends who have the power to destroy a continent. Cayna yells, Opus smugs, punches ensue, rinse and repeat. It’s fun.

Leadale is not for everyone, and if you didn’t like the anime I don’t think this adds enough value to recommend, but for those already invested, there’s a lot of payoff here you weren’t expecting.

By Ceez and Tenmaso. Released in Japan as “Leadale no Daichi nite” by Famitsu Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jessica Lange.

We’ve introduced most of the main cast at this point, but there’s one other major player (and indeed Major Player) whose absence from this has felt like a plot point: Opus, Cayna’s rival and partner in crime. She knows he’s there, as the presence of L’il Fairy has demonstrated, but he has not really shown up in front of her and we haven’t gotten a good sense of his character. Well, despite the fact that he only appears in the last few pages of this volume, we have a much better idea now. He’s a troll. A massive troll. And while Cayna, who is also incredibly eccentric in her own right, proved to be OK with that when she was helping him do the trolling, being on the receiving end of it for once pushes her to a righteous fury we haven’t really seen from her that much. For all that Cayna tends to use fists to solve arguments, she’s a relatively mellow person. Well, OK, she’s not. But her own “persona” pretends she is.

Cayna is still going around being a force of nature, but she can’t be everywhere, particularly if something needs to be solved the hard way rather than the Cayna way. So Exis and Quolkeh team up with another ex-player to take on a massive Guardian Tower that is a mobile turtle… heading for the royal palace. (This is solved by a typical Japanese quiz game.) As for Cayna, she suddenly finds that L’il Fairy needs a name, So she goes with Kuu, because it sounds like Kee, because Cayna is still pretty childish most of the time. She then goes on to do what she does best: There Is No Kill Like Overkill, as she takes on a huge pile of monsters led by a goblin master who is somewhat stunned to see how easily she carves them up. She then takes Cloffe and Clofia (remember them? The anime cut them?) on a dungeon crawl to find Opus. A very annoying dungeon crawl.

Since our last review the anime ran, and it seems to be a case where fans of the light novels enjoyed it (despite the cuts) but those who had not read the books were deeply turned off by Cayna’s temper and the series’ lack of a plot. To be honest, they’re good points. The author really enjoys showing Cayna lose it and hit people with her fists or big-ass weapons, usually whether they deserve it or not. Fortunately, in this case, Opus definitely does deserve it. As for the lack of anything happening… that’s true as well. This is at heart a slow life series, it’s just Cayna doesn’t run a drugstore or a library, she goes around trying to discover the secrets of this post-game world. It’s a hard vibe to get into, and I don’t think the anime got far along enough to show it off.

Still, this volume is pleasant enough, and thankfully had less of the body horror of Book 4. Now that Opus is here, will he help shed some light on things? Or will he just be a dick? We’ll find out soon.

By Ceez and Tenmaso. Released in Japan as “Leadale no Daichi nite” by Famitsu Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jessica Lange.

Last time I called In the Land of Leadale “a slow life series with a potentially dark, chewy center”, and that definitely applies to this book, though keep in mind the darkness at the center may in fact keep you up at night. For the most part this continues to advance the series’ vague plotline. Cayna is getting better at social interaction (having a child to care for helps), and while she still does ludicrous things, they’ve become more of a spice than the entire book itself. There’s also lots of cuteness and slow life stuff. Unfortunately, there’s also a group of goons who are hired to kidnap the children Cayna is caring for, and they fill the “evil light novel guy” gamut from cheerful sociopath to literal pedophile. Seeing them get their asses handed to them by our favorite catgirl maid is a big highlight of the book. We then get to see their actual fate, which, not gonna lie, was straight up terrifying. I was not expecting pure horror in this series.

Cayna, settling in in the village with her adopted daughter and her butler/maid familiars, realizes that she has not interacted with Mai-Mai as much as her other two children, and also wants to introduce Luca to her. So it’s back to Felskeilo we go, with not only Luca and Roxine but also Lytt, just to make sure Luca has an appropriate companion. Once there, it’s time for the annual festival!… which may not happen, as there’s a mysterious unidentified swimming object in the massive river that goes through the city. Those familiar with previous volumes of Leadale will not be too surprised at what it actually is, but that does not make dealing with it any easier. Add to this that Cayna’s… unusual horseless carriage has drawn the wrong kind of attention, and it’s a wonder that Cayna has any time left over to be ludicrously powerful! But that’s OK. She makes time.

So yeah, I will not get too much into the fate of the horrible mooks, as I’d like to leave it for the reader. It’s scary, though, even if they deserve it. The most interesting part of the book might come near the end, where Cayna starts theorizing about why all of a sudden they’re seeing the reactivation of so many quests. It’s actually quite a clever idea, and manages to hit on another of the things I like about this book – we’re not sure if this is a “trapped in a game” world or not, and the narrative itself is deliberately obfuscating things. The other fun thing about this book is its sweet moments. Cayna’s casual overpoweredness can also lead to relaxed, fun situations, such as the giant fishing party at the end, and the bond she’s developed with not only Luca but also Roxine is great. (Also loved Roxine’s dere moments in this.)

This is the last volume to come out before the anime, and given the state of recent LN adaptations, that’s cause for worry. Still, if you still enjoy slow life OP women and don’t mind a literal demon coming along and turning evil men into things, this is a great series to read.

By Ceez and Tenmaso. Released in Japan as “Leadale no Daichi nite” by Famitsu Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jessica Lange.

As we get more and more into this series, I am starting to wonder if it may be more connected to Keina’s life than I had thought. I had assumed that the general horribleness of her life before getting trapped in this “game world” was basically for drama purposes, and indeed we get a flashback to the car accident that saw her permanently on life support and killed her parents here, as well as showing why she’s so much more ludicrously ovepowered than everyone else – she literally had nothing else to do but lie in the hospital and game. That said, the narrative also notes that she’d been ill her entire life, and also offhandledly says her family were somehow involved with Leadale’s production. And we also heard form some other players who got trapped in the game that its shutdown was a huge surprise, and no one could work out why. Things that make you go “Hmmm”. That said, most of this book is not concerned with that at all.

That’s not to say that the book is not concerned with the interweaving of “game world” and this world with real, actual people, as it very much is. Cayna starts to find that old “game events” are seeming to reactivate years later… only now killing all the NPCs is far less easy to shrug off. With the help of two other players, she helps to clear out one of them, but the villages that were wiped out remain very much wiped out, and Cayna ends up adopting the one survivor, a little girl. There’s clearly ominous stuff happening. That said, the other half of the book is pretty much just Cayna being Cayna. She’s creating beer and whiskey, she’s battling dark elves with ease, and she’s basically about 200 levels above everyone else. That said, social interaction is still an issue, especially now that she has to be a mom. Keina did not emotionally mature much in hospital… and it shows in Cayna.

Given we’re seeing a few more gamers who have ended up in this world (and woe betide them if they try to explain “well, see, 200 years ago” to the authorities) we get an answer to a question that was bound to crop up eventually: what about players who gamed as the other gender? Turns out the game did not let you do that… but that did not stop one player, who used an illegal mod to play as a woman. Now she’s in the game, and is having troubles. Fortunately, this book is almost entirely service-free, so the troubles are more “I talk like a brash guy in this body”, something Cayna finds amusing. We also get two more servants that Cayna calls upon (and then keeps around, since it’s unclear what happens to them when unsummoned). They’re a cat butler and cat maid, and they both hate each other a whole lot. Comedy ensues. Sometimes it’s even funny. Mostly, though, the laughs come from Cayna and her ludicrous power.

So yes, this remains a slow life series with a potentially dark, chewy center. I’m enjoying it quite a bit.

By Ceez and Tenmaso. Released in Japan by Famitsu Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jessica Lange.

Last time I jokingly said that the series was “Overlord meets Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear”, and I was not expecting that to be doubly true in the second volume, which features Cayna serving as a guard/guide to students going out in the woods for the first time (Kuma Bear), but also searching for other “players” and starting to discover that she is not the only one who ended up in this supposed game world far into its future (Overlord). Surrounding this are scenes of Cayna getting pissed off when getting called “grandmother”, Cayna having absolutely no knowledge of current currency at all, and Cayna one-shotting various terrifying monsters that would normally take 15 high-level people to take out. In other words, it’s a slow life series without the actual slow life. It FEELS like a slow life series in both the meandering pacing and Cayna’s somewhat blase personality, but there’s far, far too much going on here, and too many mysteries still to be solved. It is a lot of fun, though, and very quotable.

We pick up where we left off, with Cayna arriving at the capital of Helshper to deliver a message for Mai-Mai. The message turns out to have been a ruse, as it was going to the leader of the largest merchant house in the world… who is also Mai-Mai’s son, and thus Cayna’s grandson. Oh yes, and her granddaughter is a member of the city knight brigade. Cayna doesn’t like surprises like this (she’s also not fond of being called grandma given she still feels like a 17-year-old), but hey. The city is having a bit of a bandit problem, and as Cayna helps with it, she finds out that yes, there ARE other players trapped in this “post-game” world, though whether they think it’s a game or real depends on the mindset. Elsewhere, she gains a small fairy helper, continues to go to the other top player bases, and, to the disappointment of her children, decides to settle and build a house somewhere AWAY from the big city.

So yes, Cayna is not alone in being in Leadale as a gamer, though she does seem to be late – the other players have been there for years, and it’s suggested this might have something to do with the fact that she died in the real world before the game shut down. That said, she’s still far and away the most overpowered person in the entire world, and we see examples of that throughout this book – anyone who dislikes overpowered characters… well, should stop reading Japanese novels, really. Cayna’s delivery continues to be a treat, be it when she’s angry, happy, or otherwise, and I like how her priorities are simply nothing like what anyone else expects them to be. She finds out that another of the top players she knew had an NPC daughter who wants to meet her , and her reaction is “sounds like a pain, so no”. Keina spent half her life in bed on life support. As Cayna, she has absolutely no fucks to give.

So yes, another enjoyable volume in the series, and I definitely recommend it more to those on the Kuma Bear end of the spectrum rather than the Overlord end, though there is a suggestion of malevolent things going on in the epilogue. Cayna’s a treat.

By Ceez and Tenmaso. Released in Japan by Famitsu Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jessica Lange.

I have to admit “it’s sort of like Overlord meets Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear” is not a sentence I thought I’d be typing, and yet here we are. In the Land of Leadale manages to use a bit of the premise and a few of the logistics of Overlord, but is decidedly non-evil in tone, and in the end is far more concerned about its heroine walking leisurely around this world and being superpowered. Indeed, its “isekai” premise doesn’t come up as often as I’d expect – it’s there mostly for Cayna to make comparisons about how things were in the game compared to her life in the land she now finds herself in, and to occasionally go overboard with stats (as this genre is wont to do), but Cayna is for the most part quite happy to be in Leadale, especially as she is now, and her goal, after realizing how different things are now from the game proper, is simply to go around and talk to people. And occasionally show that she is superhuman compared to everyone else. Much like Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear.

We only get a few bits and pieces of the life Keina Kagami had in Japan before this. She apparently has lost her parents, and is in a hospital bed, where she has been for several years (she mentions not getting to the end of elementary school). Fortunately, she has the VR game Leadale to entertain her, and she has grown to be one of the thirteen strongest players. Then one day a power outage takes out her life support briefly, and she dies… only to be reborn in Leadale as Cayna, her high-elf character. She is rather puzzled as to how she’s in a world based on her game, especially as this world seems to be two hundred years AFTER the game’s own timeline. Now she has to go around, investigate, track down the NPCs she made… erm, pardon me, her three children, and see if she can figure out what happened. Then, when she does get an explanation, she moves on and decides to simply live here as a superpowered ancient high elf woman (who still looks like a teenager, of course.)

The character voice of Cayna is tremendous, and kudos to Jessica Lange, the translator. Admittedly you might call it a flaw – Cayna sounds nothing like a bedridden, near-death Japanese teen might sound, but sounds exactly like you’d expect a flighty and practical high elf to sound. She’s mostly unflappable, though there are things that can set her off, such as when she unintentionally shows off her kick attack by shouting the attack name like a 13-year-old. She starts off in a backwater village and rapidly starts helping to cleanse its forest of monsters, upgrading its wells, and adding a public bath. By the end of the book she’s gone to the capital to meet her kids (two other high elves and an adopted dwarf), each of whom are still alive by dint of being from long-lived races. Unfortunately, what she finds is that the game ended, and that the 12 other top players all gathered for a final farewell, lamenting they weren’t thirteen. (This is why I mentioned Overlord.)

So what happens next? Well, she can always be an adventurer – she helps to catch an errant Prince who is constantly running away from home, and the end of the book has her guarding a merchant party from bandits (and suggesting that there may be other people here she knew from the game). Mostly, though, you want to read Vol. 2 and more because it’s fun to listen to Cayna’s narrative voice and see her going around being ludicrous. An excellent addition to the “slow life” genre.