The Invincible Summoner Who Crawled Up from Level 1: Wrecking Reincarnators with My Hidden Dungeon Volume 1 - First off: skip the 0 chapter. Just do it, trust me. Second: soooooooooo many stupid plot holes. I get it, not everything can be Bookworm, but at least remember what you wrote just one or two pages back. Or keep an list with items a character possesses when writing so they don’t suddenly have items out of nowhere. Another example from very early on would be MC using his Eye of the God (or whatever) ability, which is basically appraisal, to look at the levels and stats of a group of soldiers. He mentions that many of them are only level 1 to 3 and that their stats are even weak for level 1. Then he does something that needs to stay secret and he he now has to brainwash them. After that, he laments that if only he knew how low-level they were he wouldn’t have to brainwash them. Like… I mean… didn’t he just appraise all of them in the very same chapter and even wonder why they are so low?! The very same chapter!! Next, the power levels are all over the place. As an example, there is a mage who is considered the greatest of the great, a genius, and who dreams of reaching untold heights of human possibilities by casting the highest spell in the Grade 2 tier. Right now he is able to cast the first Grade 2 spell and is considered among the greatest of humanity. A couple of pages later MC is going to pick up a slave girl (obviously) with cat ears (obviously) and she casually tells MC that in order to heal her he would need to go someplace to get Grade 3 magic cast on her. In her back story, her parents (living in some small village) are also casually casting middle Grade 2 spells. So what is it? What is the top of the line here for the people in that world? Power levels are fluctuating to whatever sounds cool at the moment with no other rhyme or reason, I guess. Then there are the antagonists who are just evil to be evil. Like killing a girl’s cat just to see her desperate or massacring another girl’s village and torturing her just to make her hate him. That type of 1-dimensional villain whose only characteristic is that they’re Evil with a capital E. Mike Myers would be too embarrassed to play them as a caricature.
There is also this:
“I do everything according to your wishes, Master Shinobu. You may use me, Gabriel, both day and night. Battles, cooking, cleaning, even accompanying you in the evenings. I will not refuse a single thing.” I had to ask. “Accompanying me in the evenings?” “Yes, sir, as you heard. When a female summon’s loyalty stat reaches 80, their mind and body become their master’s possessions in their entirety.” Whoa. Does that mean I can do it with this gorgeous woman? I pressed further. “So you mean I can do ‘things’ with you?” “If you so wish.”
Yep, it’s Shield Hero all over again. I wish this sickening type of wish fulfillment would just die out already. I stopped counting how often I wanted to drop it and in the end, I only read it as far as I did because I was morbidly curious about how terribly bad it could become. - 0/10
Finding Avalon: The Quest of a Chaosbringer Volume 1 - The info dump is off-putting. It’s a good thing to have a lot of world-building, but it has to be presented in a good way as well. The first 6-7 chapters are basically just an unmitigated info dump of the world-building without being related to the current events in the story at all. It’s boring to read to get a history of the Isekai world and the skill system upfront. Towards the later third, it gets better as the background is out of the way and story picks up. It becomes entertaining even though some of that awkward info delivery lingers throughout. But I enjoy those “leveling up in the dungeon” type of stories where there is a clear progression (think the first volumes of I’m a Spider, so what? as an example). If the author manages to give the antagonists some more dimension (there are several and they are typical “evil just to be evil” types I wrote about above in the Invincible Summoner impressions) it could be a good series. I’ll give it another volume at least. -5/10
Finding Avalon: The Quest of a Chaosbringer Volume 2 + 3 - Definitively better than the first volume. There is still the problem with the one-dimensional villains but I found vol. 2 and 3 enjoyable enough now that the story has started. - 6/10
Infinite Dendrogram: Volume 1 - I don’t know why I had this series pegged as a SciFi show (well, it technically is one, but only in the frame) but I was positively surprised that it’s a fantasy setting. I liked the first volume so far and already started the second volume. The nice thing about starting a series so late is that I have a lot of content to catch up to, so I guess that this will dominate next week’s impressions if I don’t grow tired of the series. Anyway, I like the solution to the game-based immortality of the players, by making the NPCs mortal and driving it home that losing them is a fail condition. That way you can still have high stakes without some convoluted plot around “if you die in the game you die in reality”. It’s an elegant solution that works for me. I don’t think this is necessarily the first time I’ve seen it but going by how old the series it it might just as well have been when it was first released. - 7/10
I’ve been killing slimes for 300 years - Vol 04 to Vol 06
The last few weeks I continued slowly with Slime 300. The writing is pretty uniform, no real changing in quality. It is defiantly slice of life - “this week we did …”. If you want something relaxing with fluff it’s worth reading.
