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Having read Mushouku Tensei I have to admit.. sure, the main character can be KIND of a creeper sometimes.. there comes a point where he hits his stride and is actually a fairly likable guy. I wonder how much of his wandering paws can really be attributed to the fact that the Greyrat family is basically comprised almost entirely of replicas of Rance...
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Jan 30, 2015 02:40
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HiveCommander posted:I agree, Despite the creeper moments, holy poo poo I do not expect those Turning Point chapters to play out like they do. It's also cool that the author managed to mess around with time travel without completely screwing the story with plot holes. I once argued with someone that the proper way to use that plot hook was to tell the story from the final loop. And then assemble how the final loop was impacted by previous actions from INSIDE the final loop. On the topic of reincarnation stories, though, there's another one with a female protagonist the exact name of which I cannot recall. I'm fairly sure it hasn't been translated though. It plays off a bit of a different track than making the main character completely broken in that while the heroine is a potential magic user she's born blind. I think it was called something like Cloudy Eye? Gearhead fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Jan 30, 2015 |
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Jan 30, 2015 05:50
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Serious Frolicking posted:I've started reading Arifureta and it is just so wonderfully terrible that it might fill the mahouka-shaped hole in my heart. Even in the 'edgelord with rpg stats' genre, it is remarkably uninspired. I decided to look Arifureta over and I can't help but feel like his whole eating monsters gimmick got discarded entirely too soon in favor of the writer deliberately bolting stereotypes on him. His rapid collection of more women in a steady progression of different shades of freaky is kinda weak too. I think I would've been happier if he'd just stuck with a monster-eating man roaming around the countryside looking for new meals with his vampire queen sidekick.
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Jan 31, 2015 05:18
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HiveCommander posted:Good news! Change monster-eating man for lich lord and vampire queen for the MC's personal choice of inhuman sidekick and you've got Overlord! I'm going to have to check this out. Serious Frolicking posted:The best part is that his initial skill set was indeed weak and useless. He didn't find some clever way to make it work, but instead randomly found an unrelated method to become superhuman by accident. The author doesn't seem to understand that it takes more to make the protagonist likable than simply jamming a wide assortment of puerile concepts into one character. The protagonist isn't clever because the writer is too dim to understand what cleverness is. What's more, the actual story is intensely dull. Yeah, that's the impression I'm getting. I think it would've been much more interesting if it had taken a different tactic, such as, in the main character's extreme duress, lost at the bottom of the pit, he starts turning his power on HIMSELF using monsters as raw material. Of course, I'm not sure that a Japanese teen target audience would be down with that level of potential body horror. Maybe play off the idea that the main character has much more in common with monsters/demons/whatever than his own 'former allies.' On the OTHER hand.. this guy exists: 
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Jan 31, 2015 05:47
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Serious Frolicking posted:Oh right, I almost forgot about the funniest goddamn part of arifureta thus far- the drill instructor bit. The 17 year old boy who depends on a silly gun 90% of the time teaches a bunch of adults how to fight using 'logical movements'. All in all, after having slept on it. The thing that actively bugs me about Arifureta is that it reads like one of two things: The author is talking down to his readers. - or - The author has a really low reading level. EDIT: Reading through Overlord, I find myself enjoying the comic version of it more. There's something about the translation, or it may be a holdover from how the original story was laid out, but I have a hard time just sitting down and reading it. I keep having to go back over lines to make sure I read what I think I read. EDIT 2: I'm to understand, reading through comments, that the first volume of the story was translated roughly and is going to get another pass soon. Having looked over the comic for a better mental image of what is going on, I'll be giving the story a second try now. Gearhead fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jan 31, 2015 |
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Jan 31, 2015 14:44
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Paracelsus posted:Yeah, I found that, while I was kinda interested in where it was going story-wise, actually reading was a bit of a struggle to stay engaged. It picks up after the initial chapters, when The Overlord goes out and starts demonstrating what happens when a fully fledged Dark Lord pops up in a mid ranged zone and starts taking the hell over. The prose seems to flow better once he stops being introspective and starts recreating Thriller. EDIT: Caught up with where Overlord is translated to. I can see this becoming a train wreck, quickly, and not in the bad sense. Gearhead fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Feb 1, 2015 |
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Feb 1, 2015 00:21
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He referenced the male lead of Kaze no Stigma, who may honestly be a good example of a higher quality anti-hero. The death of the author makes a final call on that a bit hard though.
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Feb 1, 2015 16:19
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To be fair, his cruelty was deliberate and focused to kick her out of her comfort zone. Not JUST because he was an rear end in a top hat. That lady had issues. Not the least of which was that she never REALLY understood there was nothing 'special' about her powers. Gearhead fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Feb 1, 2015 |
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Feb 1, 2015 19:59
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I gotta agree on the tsundere front. It's a rampantly overused character concept at this point and needs to get retired for a good long while. Of course, since it's an easy stock concept to roll out, it will persist like a fungus. Arifureta seems to be built in cargo cult fashion. Without a real understanding of the underpinnings of what makes something work.
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Feb 2, 2015 04:21
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darkgray posted:Er. So I just noticed the latest translated Arifureta is "Volume 9 chapter 2", which confused me, because looking at the Japanese web novel page, the author just started publishing volume 7 chapters. On the translator's site, it seems they've arbitrarily decided to cut it up into volumes of 10 chapters each, so the original volume 1 ends in the middle of translated volume 3, kind of thing. Any idea why? I was talking with someone who does translation on the fly and was asking them about Arifureta. It seems the thing that is driving us ape about the way the story is framed is that it's not written in literary language at all, it's being written in CONVERSATIONAL Japanese. Teenaged male conversational Japanese. This is where all these drat sound effects are coming from in the text.
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Feb 2, 2015 23:54
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darkgray posted:If anything is conversational, it's Mushoku Tensei, which reads like someone's chat log, casually explaining how loving awesome his life is lately. Well, it is written in first person.
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Feb 3, 2015 00:36
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Robot Wendigo posted:I picked up Sword Art Online Volume One awhile ago, and have been reading that. I'm enjoying the slightly different focus the novel takes than the anime did, with little asides about day to day living in a virtual world. I know nothing about Spice and Wolf, but I think I'll be ordering that soon, judging from the reaction on the thread. The oddity of Sword Art is that it makes a better novel than it does an animated series, at least with how the people who did the animated version did it. A lot of Kirito's behavior makes more sense when you can hear his constant internal commentary.
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Feb 18, 2015 19:34
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There really is a ton more of the series than what has been animated. The Underworld arc, due to being fully 2/3 of the series written to date, will probably not be animated. Underworld Arc Spoilers: In which Kirito gets killed for a little while, experiences brain damage from oxygen loss, and gets stuck in a new form of simulation he'd been helping to test to put the information he's lost back in place. Things get ODDER from there.
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Feb 18, 2015 20:40
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I've generally been unhappy with a lot of the choices the animation team made over the course of both the first and second seasons. Several small touches here and there that not all things were right in the world after the fact got left out and some things were simply paved over. Though I wonder if the author will never go anywhere with the reveal that Kirito's neural chemistry is sufficiently jacked up that his sleep patterns do not trigger the Amusphere's logoff sequence, allowing him to actually sleep in simulation.
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Feb 19, 2015 09:56
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Hagop posted:The author drops a lot of hints that Kirito is one seriously messed up individual, but then invalidates them or just ignores them for the rest of the books. When the story was released chapter by chapter as a web novel this was probably intended to build tension.
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Feb 19, 2015 17:10
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Robot Wendigo posted:Definitely. He isn't the Galahad that he comes across as in the anime. He can be a bit of a jerk, which I find more believable. His antisocial tendencies play more of a role in his character here. The Kirito of the novels strikes me as being someone who is actually very, very tired and would really like to be left alone. Particularly after the first arc. He adapted. He survived. He escaped. He did so at a cost. He is old far, far before his time and requires Asuna and Yui as emotional crutches to continue to function.
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Feb 21, 2015 19:28
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D&D 3/3.5 had issues in which characters could exceed the speed of light with shockingly minimal set up time.
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Apr 12, 2015 23:00
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SerSpook posted:What's enjoyable is the fact that his grandfather, that taught him magic, went out of his way to get the best teachers in a variety of fields. But never actually taught him any of the common sense of the world. It's really more funny than serious and I am enjoying the 11 or so translated chapters. Wizards: Always think Wisdom is a dump stat.
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May 25, 2015 16:17
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Serious Frolicking posted:So I was clicking on random poo poo from aho updates, and I found this: https://lygartranslations.wordpress.com/novels/himekishi-ga-classmate/ More horrifying is that this is getting TRACTION and has a comic in Comic Valkyrie.
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Jun 9, 2015 14:41
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Wark Say posted:Isn't Horizon part of a shared continuity/'verse where eras come and go and people get killed in the most senseless/dumbest of ways? Or was I thinking of a different LN? It is part of a larger setting/trainwreck, yes. Horizon is the fourth in a set of SIX different larger arcs in a common universe created by the author.. which he is writing out of order.
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Jun 30, 2015 07:28
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Finished up the main story of Musoku Tensei.. got Raising Arizona flashbacks at the end.
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Aug 15, 2015 02:24
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FriggenJ posted:Most of those MMO stories are Chinese. Apparently(?) there's something to be said about being so filthy rich you can buy the world and own n00bs in vidya games. It's also present in some Korean stuff, which is also why so many Korean MMO companies had problems in the US at the start, thinking they could sell OP equipment in the cash shop as normal in the West. Took em a while to realize that it's all turned around from their perspective, people will pay TOP DOLLAR for a cute dress for their MMO anime girl but scoff at the idea of overpowered equipment for the most part.
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Aug 26, 2015 17:05
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Cynic Jester posted:It was going so well as a happy go lucky slime story and then it sort of went off the rails, shot off the cliff and slammed into the abyss in very short order. Agreed. It feels like the author wrote themselves into a corner at some point and decided the best solution was to blow a hole in the wall, or something. There could've been an interesting story about turning the standard formula of monsters=villains humans=heros on its head or something by having the humans all being jerks, but then we started getting into systematic sacrifice of souls, turning into superbeasts and sending an elite group of assassins back to their master as a single, shambling undead horror covered in faces. At this point, I pretty much lost all interest.  I think the core problem was that the writer had an interesting initial idea, but didn't stop at a natural point. Instead they just kept going, without a break, and everything kinda went weird.
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Aug 30, 2015 19:26
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Shukaro posted:In Mushoku Tensei the MC has 3 smokin' hot wives who he shags daily. To be fair, there was a fair amount of angst leading UP to this living arrangement, because the MC (while admitting to himself he was something of a perv) was trying very hard to NOT carry on his family tradition (multiple spouses, somewhat distantly removed incest, fathering (and mothering) children with the servants, etc). Which itself lines up with his homeland's gimmick of 'The nobility of Asura are people who openly display their dirty laundry.'
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Sep 4, 2015 15:58
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Serious Frolicking posted:Mushoku Tensei is very much not good, but anything is better than straight up slavery fetishism. Pretty much. The twist at the end was fairly funny, though. The MC's presence is a complete accident caused by a disruption to reality of a more traditional 'summoned to another world' protagonist who will appear many years in the future... whose story will probably not be told.
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Sep 4, 2015 19:49
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