- #1
Up to c105 review, 2024 0329:After reading all the currently available chapters from the new translator, I have to say that the story and world becomes much more interesting but reading another 12 chapters on Syosetu, I have to say there's no reason to read anything besides Syosetu's version via Google Chrome's translator. The pronouns and varying translations of names might honestly be more consistent just through the Chrome translation. Also, the NCS translator even translates utterances the same as the Chrome translation (e.g., "ie" as "home"). It's kinda' fun to read these sort of translations if you like puzzles and having to question every sentence if "my" was supposed to be "your" and "she" was supposed to be "I", but not sure why you'd wait when there's 1000+ chapters on Syosetu with the same sort of puzzles to read via machine translation.Also, the translation site is just a blogspot site and doesn't appear to have intrusive ads on the page anywhere but will occasionally forward you to malware or take a minute to load. Very sus.Anyway, the story gets a lot better as demons start interfering in the city and the MC's relationships grow. There's an underlying absurdity in that he's 10/11 as people are getting engaged to him and he's entrusted with a ton of things, but it's kinda' nice to imagine there are adults who'd trust an overly competent child. Although it's a game-world isekai, the world/novel itself is much more western-fantasy in style than a lot of isekai I read. It seems like the shaping mechanics of the fantasy and the politics/world have a fairly high internal consistency that isn't as superficial as many popcorn isekai works end up. The magics, spells, monsters, etc all end up being very interesting to read about and I'm hopeful the author will be able to continue at that level.There is a harem, though the first two seemed fairly reasonable in terms of the world setup and the politics/background story. I thought it was going to feature a coed adventuring party after that, but everyone in the party are female, though not all of them are harem members as of c105. Presumably because they're all children except for Grace, they only cuddle and do not go farther than that. If you can tolerate harems, this might be worth reading (again, on Syosetu). Oh! Also, there are basically no scene transitions. The story immediately jumps to include people the characters were thinking about talking to and changes location as needed. Basically, anytime a character is thinking about someone and the next line is a quote, then that's the character they were thinking about who is talking. It's a little jarring to get used to.Up to c20 review:I'm interested to see where it goes but both the translator from 8 years ago and the current translator don't seem like they're great. The old translator seemed to make fairly large mistakes in plot and explanation so I gave up on that one and have been reading the new translator.This one seems to capture the main ideas of the story but there are frequent mistakes with pronouns, possessives, and switching names around that contain v/b or r/l. E.g., Verine, Berine, Veline, Beline. Also you'll sometimes have names that are also nouns being treated like the noun instead of a person's name. Basically feels like reading a machine translation that doesn't have an editor/style guide.On the other hand, if you can read past all that, then they don't seem to make content mistakes which the old one seemed to.As far as the story goes, it seems to mainly be a dungeon dive story and I'm interested to see where it goes, but the MC has a STRONG tendency to overthink politics and connections and we get fairly long "exposition" dumps that are just him thinking 10 years down the line. Like, it may be a good idea but it seems like overkill at this point or maybe it's included to make the reader believe he's a great political mind or something.I don't usually review stories this early and I don't have too much else to say other than to be aware of the translation issues while you're reading.