The Villain Only Wants To Live a Buddhist Life Chapter 1100 Discussion

I have been reading this through MTL for months and only now realized that it was being translated.

First a warning: This is a slow story. It's not a question of if that is a flaw or not, it's just the type of story that this is. If that isn't for you, then you might not like this story. It actually works very well with the setting of Harry Potter, because that is what those books were like: you see the lives of those students throughout the years, with some action in the middle. In the name of the novel, the Buddhist part I am pretty sure refers to "a life free of sin", which is related to the system he gets, and how he is fighting against it.

In the original description, it mentions that it parodies Harry Potter, Yu-gi-oh!, Digimon, and Pokemon. It sounds like it should be a totally chaotic mess, but somehow the author has actually made it work really well, to the point where the battle system feels very complete.

The character is transmigrated into a Galgame, that he actually hasn't played himself because he didn't like that it parodied those series. So he doesn't know much of the plot. The setting is a School for Magic like in Harry Potter with 4 houses, but with only 6 years instead of 7. Unlike Harry Potter, Magic is not a secret in this world: The whole world is a fantasy setting that has just gotten past a war with a Demon King in MC's parents generation. The resurrection of the Demon King is a plot point later on. The way that they use magic is to create Magic Cards that summon monsters like in Yu-gi-oh!. And the "cards" are taken from Yu-gi-oh! Cards, Digimon, Pokemon, and some that are just made up.

It is better than it sounds. The battles are not turn based like the actual Yu-gi-oh! Card game, they are just summoning actual monsters that they use to fight. While they do have "duels", both sides just start summoning cards as they want, and every 30 seconds, both sides draw 2 cards. There is tribute summoning to summon higher level cards by sacrificing lesser cards too. Outside of the duels, they can use the cards however they want, and they were created for fighting an actual war against demons.

The cards that everyone uses are not bought or obtained from anywhere. They have to actually make them themselves. Rather, a big part of the school is teaching students to make the cards and use them using a combination of potions, alchemy, and magic spells. There is still some random elements though, so even with the same process, everyone ends up with different monsters based partly on their own personal attributes.

The main character Darke gets a lot of cards that are taken from Digimon and Pokemon. The "cards" are basically actual lifeforms, so all of them are characters as well, though more like pets. Darke does "evolve" them in battle Digimon-style, where Digimon can evolve into a variety of forms, but only for a period of time before they revert to base form. That is used for the Pokemon as well.

Spoiler

It is actually convenient, because the first Pokemon he gets is an Eevee. Depending on the method, he can get a variety of evolutions.

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Thus far, he hasn't really lost except in training against people like his teachers, and he is better than most of his classmates, but it isn't overpowering either. There are times when he has really close battles, if only because of bad luck with draws. He is compared to older students, but there are still plenty of people that are stronger than him, and many different things for him to work on to get stronger.

For the "Villain" part, Darke is resisting it pretty well so far. The following is all chapter 1 stuff, so I don't think it really counts as a spoiler, but I'll put it in one just in case people care. The second one is actual spoiler.

Spoiler

He is supposed to be a Demon God, who is like a hidden boss that comes after the Demon King that is though to be the final boss for most of the game. He technically has a system that shows his points in the 7 Deadly Sins: Wrath, Pride, Lust, Greed, Gluttony, Sloth, and Envy. He is asked to raise them to awaken his Demon God bloodline, but all the system does is report the numbers and changes based on his behavior. There is no punishment for not raising them, and as long as he doesn't go above 120, there will be no permanent change, and they can be reduced by behaving against the sins. That is basically the meaning of the title. Darke starts by trying to live a life without any of the sins.

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Spoiler

If that was it, then there almost wouldn't be a point in having the sins as part of the novel, but very quickly, Darke realizes that the excess sin points can be drained from his soul as a type of special energy that he can use to create special power-up cards and monsters. It becomes a balancing act. On one hand he can't let them rise too high or he'll become a Demon God, on the other he can only use them to make cards if they are over a certain level. By the end of his first year, there is little fear that he will fall to the sins, though he still has to be careful because there is a limit on how much he can drain to use per month, or he might damage his soul.

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As for the "hero" of the game, he is a work in progress. By which I mean he actually does act like an 11-year-old at the beginning. However, through constantly getting involved in incidents (the "plot points") and comparing himself to others like Darke, he pulls himself together and starts to grow. In terms of character alone, he is probably the one who grew the most.

Spoiler

White is son of a Hero that died in the war against demons, so everyone expects a lot out of him. At first he doesn't really live up to that and just messes around with his friend Robert (Ron parody). He does snap out of it when he realizes that not only Darke, who he is often compared to, but a lot of his classmates are leaving him in the dust. He start to dedicate himself to getting stronger, though it takes a while to make up for his lost time. His goal is to eventually defeat Darke, but as a rival, not an enemy. As the "protagonist" of the story, he does end up getting involved in a lot of trouble. Darke is actually more of a bystander to most of these, though he does get involved to patch things up occasionally.

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The "Galgame" element hasn't really been important yet, considering that as of chapter 728, they are only almost done with the first semester of the 2nd year of school. Meaning that all the main characters are only 12 years old. Maybe it will come up more later. The most you see out of it is that a lot of important characters end up being female, including some teachers and the headmistress. There is at least a few characters with a crush on Darke, but like I said, they are 12. Even the characters themselves are aware of that and don't intend to start anything romantic.

About the pacing of the novel: the time in the novel goes fairly slowly. First year took up until around chapter 450. At 800, they are just into January of Year 2. The main character is growing 1 card at a time, but he does have the intelligence of a grown adult compared to a bunch of kids, so he is noticeably faster than his classmates. In the first year, it isn't that obvious yet, but the gap slowly expands. He is currently on the level of the average Year 5 student. Looking at how things are going, I am wondering if the plot will actually cover all 6 years. It could just be over 3~ish years, or it could start involving more events outside the school. Later years might have a lot of time-gaps from travel and etc.

The only sort of problem I would have is the translation speed is a lot slower than the release speed, so I'm not sure if it will ever catch up. There are new chapters every 1-2 days, so I will likely be continuing with the MTL for a while, and only occasionally coming back to the translation to see what progress there is.

For people who want to read ahead, I read the MTL version on lnmtl. It is convenient for this type of novel because there is a viewer generated glossary that people can contribute to, so all the Pokemon, Digimon, and Yu-gi-oh names get properly translated, unlike just plain google translate.

Edit: Ch 1100

The series was running into the usual problem with these long running series and was getting kind of stale. They are still in the second year. The amount of cards he is making is increasing in pace, so there are a lot of new ones that don't get clear character development like the early ones did. They are at least getting into more big-picture, world setting stuff, and you can sort of see where things are headed. I'll probably wait until there are a few hundred more chapters before coming back to it.