Forum - View topicREVIEW: Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Novel 6
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killjoy_the
 Posts: 2459 |
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I haven't watched the anime yet, but am up to date on the English release of the novels.
Definitely the best novel so far. Lilly's run through with Soma and how she battles the wine addiction/high were amazingly well-done, something I really didn't expect from this series. All-in-all, Lilly was definitely the best player in this novel, for me. Not that she had light competition, though: while I thought Mikoto and Lyu just kind of hopped on the harem for no particular good reason, they were still really good at what they do, and their battles exciting. Welf was great all throughout as he's always been, and hell, I even liked the way Hestia dealt with everything. In the 5th novel I remember feeling like Bell just kind of kept pulling shit out of his ass for convenience's sake, and I'm glad this novel had none of that. This novel also had way fewer 'romantic comedy' bits, or at least it seemed like. They were tiring and cliché from the start, so having them off for a while was greatly appreciated. |
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2185 |
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Oh wow, my request actually went through. Thanks!
That would be the Hera Familia that used to be prominent before falling. And I quite enjoyed this volume. While the first moment at the ball was funny and sweet, the tense chase scene in the middle and the final battle were definitely the most engaging parts. I'm curious as to when spoiler[the disconnect between Bell's and Hestia's love will be addressed.] |
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Melicans
Posts: 620 Location: Canada |
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I particularly enjoyed two very different parts; the first was during the chase scene when spoiler[Hestia essentially confessed to Bell]; they didn't have much direct interaction afterwards so it will be interesting to see how their dynamic is going forwards. Hopefully the reaction of the Loki familia to Bell showing up at their door will be something that continues going forwards too.
The second part was Cassandra and Daphne. In Greek mythology Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam (of Troy fame) so her observation of spoiler[Lilly being the Trojan Horse] felt particularly apt. It was neat tying her with Apollo too, as Apollo supposedly gave her the power of prophecy (one of the aspects he was god of) to try and seduce her; but when she rejected him, he cursed her so that her prophecies would never be believed. I certainly hope that gets explored in detail later too if she becomes a main character; either way, I doubt we have seen the last of Apollo. It was at the least refreshing to see more than just the gods being referenced in the series. |
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JacobC
ANN Contributor
 Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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Fix'd, thanks for the heads up. |
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Razor/Edge
Posts: 607 |
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Wow, didn't realize the anime blazed through the first 5 volumes of this series. I haven't seen the anime yet, but it sounds like the pacing of the anime must be incredibly quick to go through so much material in 13 episodes. Must anime at least have 3 or 4 episodes per volume.
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Vannil
 Posts: 240 |
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It's actually paced quite well compared to most other animes adapted from light novels. The anime does leave out some parts from the novels, most of which are pretty minor or help build the world a little more. It is worth a viewing if you have time to spare. It also should win an award for most misleading title. |
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CrimsonDX
Posts: 171 |
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I really enjoyed this volume. Out of all the LNs I am currently reading, this series is definitely my favorite.
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Kalessin
 Posts: 931 |
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I very much enjoyed this book. I don't know whether the fifth book or this one is better, but they're both fantastic, and I love the fact that we're getting these books in English and not just being stuck with whatever happens to get adapted into an anime. I eagerly await the release of the seventh book in December.
The anime blasts through the material way too quickly, but it works surprisingly well considering how much it rushes through things. I fully expect that folks who just watched the anime won't understand certain things that are explained in the books, and I've heard that the anime didn't do all that well in Japan, but I don't know. I enjoyed the anime, but given its pacing, I think that it's clearly inferior to the books, whereas some other anime adaptations cover things well enough that you don't miss much more than some minor details and an occasional explanation that the books had, making it far more debatable as to whether it's worth reading the books after seeing the anime. So, someone who watched the anime for this series and then reads the books is a lot less likely to feel that they're rehashing things than would often be the case (e.g. the fourth book is almost completely skipped, and every book has stuff stripped out). I suspect that part of the problem was that they probably would have had to have stretched the first 3 books too much to make one series out of them, and the fourth book would have made a terrible ending point, so they added the fifth one in and squeezed everything in order to fit it. It actually probably would have worked much better had they adapted the first 6 books and made a 2 cours series out of it, but unfortunately, that's not what they did. Still, the anime is decent if worse than it should have been, and we get the full, proper stories with the books from Yen Press.
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Merxamers
 Posts: 720 |
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I agree that volume 6 is the best so far. I loved the running chase, the ballroom scene, the siege game, and especially Lilly's rescue from her familia, and how she does a lot to help herself out of that situation. Great volume, great series; it's a relief when i can say "that was a great, fun book" without having to add "for a light novel"
Btw, during my recent re-read of this series i had a theory you all might like;spoiler[ i think Syr might be Freya in disguise]. It just makes too much sense; it explains why spoiler[Freya was at that festival in vol 1 when Syr was supposed to be there, the unexplained relationship between the Benevolent Mistress's owner and Freya, how Syr came across that magic book to give to Bell, etc]. I actually hope this one is true, as it would give some needed layers to spoiler[Syr/Freya's] character. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18182 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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^
You'll get no agreement from me on the anime being inferior to the books in this case. Yes, a few details are left out here and there, but I thought the anime actually improved on the novels (especially early on). As for the fourth book, you're being a bit disingenuous. It had two short stories in it that were not part of the main storyline and could not have easily been fit in to what the anime was doing without coming off as filler. Beside, at least one of those is likely to get adapted into the upcoming OVA. |
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myskaros
 Posts: 598 Location: J-Novel Club |
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Very big "this." All LN-truthers go on about how "volume 4 was skipped/not done justice in the anime," but volume 4 was literally half a book with 2 side stories tacked on. Yes, they didn't animate the Denatus, but in the wake of 6 volumes of story, the contents of the Denatus were extraneous, non-essential to the main story. We got the results, Bell's nickname and Aiz's Level 6, and the only point of interest lost was how Freya sided with Hestia. It is brought up again in volume 6, but otherwise it's completely ignored for the rest of volumes 4 and 5. As someone who only reads the English LNs, I can't say how important that reveal is, but if the anime gets a full continuation, they really only need a short 20 second flashback to the Denatus showing her do it and everyone's caught up. |
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killjoy_the
Posts: 2459 |
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That's a nice theory. It certainly sounds better than all of the "just because" we've been getting with Syr all along. I don't think it'd really work out with all the minutes, though. |
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CLTM
Posts: 2 |
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Hi, light novel translator here (not for this series!) with some commentary. What you're describing is indeed a stylistic trademark of light novel writing in Japanese. In typical English writing, we use frequent dialogue tags (he said, she said, etc) in a conversation scene to set apart the speaker, and when there is action in that sequence, it's often rolled into the same paragraph. But LN writing tends to exclusively feature dialogue on its own line, with no tags. I've seen tags as we are familiar with them much more often in literary JP writing, so this is a light-novel-specific thing. Don't ask me why this writing style evolved the way it did, but it's quite prevalent. (For one thing, it's much more possible to have an entire conversation without speakers noted because there are many more identifying features baked into the Japanese language such as gender/status that can make the speaker evident without needing to mention the name.) Instead, when the writer wants to insert a break in the dialogue, switch to an action, or provide a visual cue, they will place a paragraph (a brief sentence) of prose in between that line and the next line of dialogue, each with their own line break. This is also generally configured in a way to serve as connective tissue between the two statements, sometimes in ways that we would never write naturally in English. So for example, we might write this:
But a light novelist in Japanese would write it something more like this:
Sometimes this will actually be a forward-moving detail that moves the scene along, but it's just as likely that this text beat will be a fluff/stereotypical character action, or, as noted in the review, a statement of the context of the line that was just uttered. Depending on the writer/translator/reader, this fleshing out of context might be funny or insightful, or it might just be redundant. (In my personal experience, it seems to be about fifty-fifty.) While translators have a fair amount of leeway in terms of massaging or adapting text to make it as smooth, elegant and enjoyable as possible in English, this is one of the features of LN writing that is least likely to be altered. For one thing, it's often "creative" material that allows the author to throw a subtle observational angle onto the event. Not only would removing it diminish the amount of the original work present, it would also leave conversation scenes much flatter and more abrupt without the pacing of the prose there. And most translators are not going to make the extreme step of replacing that text with their own writing, because it's not coming from the author and is also going to add a lot of work over the long run. So the best option is usually to judiciously try to downplay the redundancies and let the more creative/worthwhile aspect of the description be accentuated (if possible) in the translation process. Hope that was edifying! |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18182 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Very much so! Thanks for posting it; it confirms some of my long-standing suspicions about light novel style. If you're still paying attention to the thread, have you been in the business long enough to approximate when this trend started? I've looked back at some older Vampire Hunter D novels (which are commonly considered the forebears of current light novels) and they don't do this. Nor do the Strawberry Panic or The Twelve Kingdom novels (although the latter in particular probably doesn't qualify as a light novel series). The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya does do it a fair amount, though not exclusively so and in a much smoother fashion. |
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1817 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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I realize this is probably an automatic thing with the CMS, but it's a little weird seeing the anime adaptation's credits listed in a review of one of the novels.
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