- #1
Wanted to like it but...It's kind of awful. The actual writing isn't very good-looking the story is excessively verbose yet says so little. The lack of anything happening is frustrating, even for a slice of life. 99% of the story is background and, even the parts that aren't, seem to only be set up for the author to launch into another multiple page back story explaining something minor, that adds little to the story at hand. Of course, backgroundis necessary, but this author needs to know that all context and no action makes an encyclopedia, not a story. On the topic of "no action"- the characters' emotions are virtually non-existent and the author seems to be going through the motions of what a light novel does, without actually establishing a base for itself. It's just shallow, shallow, shallow. Overall, it's like suffering a slow death. I won't even get into the parts of the story that kinda creepy me out (like the loli obsession) as I've read plenty of other novels with similar themes that I still enjoyed. For this one, it's purely the execution that turned me off.And then let's move on to the translation. Not too many major issues, but the number of small errors adds up to an annoyance like a lot of water drops add up to make a river. Ex: the fact that the translator's verb tenses continuously switch around, odd word order, and just weird, cryptic sentences make the less than mediocre story painful to read. And then the "witty" chapter titles the translator comes up with just come off as trying too hard and start to get annoying considering every one ends in "..." He's better off just leaving the author's original boring titles. Now I know you're probably wondering why I bothered to review this story since I clearly hate everything about it, but I really don't hate it. I criticize it so harshly because it could have been a much better story considering the concept, but it seems like everyone involved insisted on making it as bad as possible. I'm simply disappointed in both the author's and translator's efforts, though I appreciate them nonetheless. Overall, I guess this is one of those stories where I recognize that it could be enjoyable or even good, but just happens to hit every single thing I dislike in light novel creation/translation.
