slice of life Archives - Animefangirl!

Cheating My Way through a Different World with My Tablet to Live a Comfortable Life manga review (complete at 24 chapters)

It’s always a pity when a quality manga, or at least one with a very promising premise, gets cancelled after a few chapters while utter dreck runs indefinitely. Cheating My Way through a Different World with My Tablet to Live a Comfortable Life wasn’t anything ground-breaking or unprecedented, but it was relaxing and inoffensive with a hero you wanted to root for, so I was sad that it got cancelled after only 24 chapters.

Summary: Kento Yamazaki, an ordinary boy who isn’t particularly special, realizes after a while that he is reincarnated into a different world holding a tablet?! He acquires housework skills as he makes delicious food and cleans up in a short time by using apps on his tablet. He finds himself in the adventurer’s party, called “Daybreak”, in which unique characters, such as a beautiful elf and a cute boy with glasses, who does not talk much, get together. Time to start his carefree life in a different world, tablet in hand!

So that’s the story in a nutshell. The adventurer’s party actually comes later in the story, after Kento has spent time working for another party which ends up kicking up out for costing it later. In typical “kicked out by the hero’s party” manga style, the reader expects them to regret it later. However he later meets members of that party and it turns out they split up over the issue and that many of the members had no problem with him and even liked him, so that was a bit of a surprise.

Apart from that slight twist, Cheating My Way follows the typical “wimpy Japanese isekai protagonist” trope almost exactly. Kento starts out at the lowest rank in the guild, takes on odd jobs to make ends meet, makes powerful friends who train him little by little and eventually gets strong enough to beat monsters with a little help from others.

The titular tablet is helpful but not as overpowered and almighty as in In Another World with My Smartphone. It contains functions like a camera, which helps him with identifying things, and a shop where he can buy items from Earth. Oddly enough, anything from Earth is much more efficient and powerful than what is already available in the world.

Kento uses this to provide cleaning and mending services, become a great cook by using ingredients and spices from Japan, and even become an apothecary by substituting Earth ingredients for local ones. This later allows him to save the life of Aggis’ wife, Aggis being the guy who helped him out when he suddenly arrived in another world with only the tablet and the clothes on his back. And so on, and so forth.

There isn’t much more to Cheating My Way through a Different World with My Tablet to Live a Comfortable Life than that. It’s the story of a guy slowly gaining confidence and finding his way in the world. Honestly I enjoyed reading it, and Kento and all his companions were really nice. He also somehow becames a tamer and gets some cute pets. His progress wasn’t too fast, but it wasn’t slow either, so he was on his way to being really strong eventually but not so soon that it’s not believeable. Best of all there was no harem, or even romance! Just pure(ish) cozy cooking, crafting, taming and leveling up.

Unfortunately I think that lack of speed was what sealed its fate. It just wasn’t exciting enough. It doesn’t do anything that other isekai manga haven’t done before (the tablet is just another cheat item or skill). There was also no deeper story behind his migration to the other world, his purpose there, no greater worldview, no crisis, no other. Additionally, like it or not, romantic options in an isekai manga draws readers in, so I’m sure lacking those made the series less compelling to many. And so one thing led to another and Cheating My Way through a Different World with My Tablet to Live a Comfortable Life got cancelled after a mere 24 chapters.

Still it was 24 chapters of cozy fun, it gives enough of a taste of the series so you can imagine what happens next or read the novel if it exists. If you try it and like it, also try The Great Cleric by Broccoli Lion. It has a lot of similarities in art style, with a similarly wimpy hero who is protected and trained by more powerful characters, but it is much better because it has a much stronger world view. Give it a try.

Back to the Small Fishing Village In 1982 Chinese webnovel review – Great until it wasn’t

When you’re reading your slice of life web novel and having a great time and then suddenly the author takes a really bad decision that pisses you off and you drop it but now you’re sad. If you want to experience that, read Back to the Small Fishing Village In 1982.

Summary: Ye Yaodong is a fisherman who falls into the sea in his 50s and wakes up again in his 20s in his fishing village in China in 1982, just like the title said. Having squandered his life and burned all his bridges last time, he decides to live this life a little more sensibly.

And that’s really it. Ye Yaodong isn’t one of those people who go back in time with a system or superpowers or even esoteric knowledge. His memory isn’t even that good, with only major events like his wife’s miscarriage standing out to him. And as an ordinary villager in rural China, he can’t even read until he takes night classes, though he proves to be quick study.

The only thing special about him is his high degree of luck when it comes to fishing. That, and an ability to shmooze. He also knows enough about future events to recognize a pyramid scheme at a time when few have heard of it, and to know that certain things like oyster pearls will go up tremendously in future. This helps him stay out of trouble by working diligently and avoiding standing out too much, while preparing for a prosperous future by making and saving money when he can.

I read up to chapter 77 from a blog that cleaned up the machine translation, but unfortunately the rewrites stopped just when Yaodong had bought a fishing boat and was preparing to become independent from his family. After that I read the brain-melting but still understandable raw machine translation. If you read it, you can look forward to choice lines like, “What kind of mouse meeting last time, didn’t they just not listen to A Dong? You see, they didn’t believe it and didn’t lose. We are too greedy, and the ghosts are obsessed.” It… kind of makes sense in context, but phew!

Not only did the half-garbled nonsense make me appreciate the first blogger, but it also made me think that edited machine translations (a.k.a. post-edited machine translations) are the wave of the future, at least for web novels. But that’s a discussion for another day.

Thanks to the machine translation, me and my surviving brain cells were able to read up to chapter 466 of Back To the Small Fishing Village In 1982 before giving up due to a very disgusting action on the part of Ye Yaodong. Before that, there’s a lot that happens, but for the most part this is a slice of life about a fisherman in a fishing village, so he goes fishing, catches fish, comes back and sells it, rinse and repeat. Whole arcs can revolve around catching spawning squid (sustainability? what’s that?) or picking up scallops on the beach after a typhoon. Here are major events I recall:

In his last life, his wife Lin Xiuqing miscarried a daughter, but this time they are able to hide the baby until it is almost due (barring one person who finds out and tries to blackmail them). Lin Xiuqing goes into labor just when inspectors come round to check, but the villagers are able to delay them until the baby is born. The truly horrifying implication is that she would have been forced to abort the almost full-term baby if she hadn’t given birth right then, which is too cruel to think about but was a reality in China’s draconian one-child policy days.
Ye Yaodong quickly upgrades from his small wooden boat to a mid-sized iron boat. He hires his father as his deckhand and sells (IIRC) the wooden boat to his friends. His two brothers take over the dad’s old boat, and everyone is happy.

Ye Yaodong makes a lot of money through different bursts of luck, such as finding pearls in oysters, picking up and selling a beached oarfish, taking rich men fishing, and finding a reef with plenty of abalone for the picking. He buys a diving suit so he can pick up expensive seafood like sea cucumbers from shallow waters, and comes to a profit-sharing agreement with his friends to let them borrow it.
He also has occasional run-ins with unfriendly people at sea, such as a guy who later incites someone to rob him, and a gang of pirates from Luzhou island. So far he has successfully fended them off every time.
There is a long drawn-out and boring sub-arc where his friend Ah Guang tries to woo his sister Ye Huimei and eventually succeeds. Every reader breathes a sigh of relief once they are finally married and out of the picture.
He successfully mends and improves his relationships with all those who knew him as a ne’er-do-well in his previous life, such as his long-suffering wife, his children, and his in-laws.
For example he goes foraging in the mountains and rivers with his in-laws and helps them make a lot of money, he helps his mother get a job as a village cadre, and he builds an extra room in his new house for his doting grandmother – which indirectly saves his life because she’s around to give him advice during a typhoon.
He saves a whale and gets his picture taken with it.
He picks up a box of treasure while diving and hides it in his garden for the future. He also picks up a tripod that he places in the local Mazu temple, then the government comes sniffing around after it. Long story short, he comes up with an idea to rebuild the temple using donations, and he also makes valuable connections in the army and the government.
He finds out that stores are being sold in a new market that he knows will be prosperous in the future, so he borrows money from his friends and buys two stores without consulting his wife. He later persuades his brothers and some acquaintances to do the same.

This is where the trouble came. He bought it without discussing it with his wife, who keeps the money in the house. When he went to get the money from her to repay his friends, she was understandably upset. So… how does Ye Yaodong persuade her? He doesn’t. He rapes her instead. Uh… yeah. When that fails to persuade her, he tries plan B: rape her again. Which works this time. The writer tries to play it off as nothing, but the magic was gone after that.

I kept reading a little longer and other things happened like Ye Yaodong making tons of money through a squid fishing trip, and picking up boxes dropped by smugglers in the process, or ordering an actual fishing ship at the shipyard (his wife doesn’t bother to oppose him any more, I wonder why) which will be ready in two years.

However, once I lost the will to support Ye Yaodong, I didn’t want to slog through the bad machine translation for his sake any more. I give kudos to the author for making a series about fishing in a Chinese village really interesting and compelling even when he’s just picking up fish on the beach, but maybe try not making him a rapist next time, yeah? I’m done here.

I read Ascendance of a Bookworm manga up to chapter 31

I’m still reading many different isekai manga. It sucks that so many of them are in very early stages, sometimes only 3 or 4 chapters are out. Usually there’s a light novel or web novel behind them, but I can’t be bothered to track those down for most series. Ascendance of a Bookworm / Honzuki no gekokujou is one of the few exceptions where I read the scanlation up to chapter 12 and then read the raws all the way up to chapter 31, the latest available right now.

Summary: Urano, a bookworm who had finally found a job as a librarian at a university, was sadly killed shortly after graduating from college. She was reborn as Main, the daughter of a soldier in a world where the literacy rate is low and books were scarce. No matter how much she wanted to read, there were no books around. What is a bookworm to do without any books? Make them, of course. Her goal is to become a librarian! So that she may once again live surrounded by books, she must start by making them herself. [from novelupdates]

What’s so good about Ascendance of a Bookworm

Although it’s an isekai fantasy series like a hundred others currently running, it’s low fantasy with a bigger focus on slice of life and everyday survival. Main lives a life far removed from castles, demons, goddesses, stat level ups, just a little kid trying to get by in the world.
It has one of the few protagonists who is not hopelessly overpowered right from the start. In fact Main is totally weak and prone to illness.
Main is not super-intelligent either, just blessed with a lot of book knowledge. In particular she doesn’t know much about business and would be swindled regularly if it wasn’t for adults looking out for her.
No harem, no huge crowd of adoring fans lapping up his every move. A few people know just how amazing she is, but the majority of people including her own family see her as an ordinary, rather weird girl. She does have the obligatory good-but-not-too-competent isekai companion though.
You read a lot of manga where the heroine/hero can make a lot of stuff just because they saw it on TV once, but Main doesn’t have it that easy.
The art is excellent and the little children are drawn suitably adorable. The food looks great too. I know there’s a web novel, but the manga is so cute and clear and easy to follow that I have zero desire to try the WN.
The pace is relatively slow and there’s no real story so there’s plenty of time for world-building. You get to know a lot about how the city is run, how society is organized, how people relate to each other, etc. It’s very down to earth and interesting if you like to get immersed in fantasy worlds.
I learned a lot about making paper from scratch by reading it. That should come in handy if I ever go to another world, right?

What’s not so good about Ascendance of a Bookworm

It’s ridiculous how few people are suspicions of Main’s true identity once she starts making paper. It’s an extremely convoluted process requiring very specialized tools and materials and yet she knows all of them and all the right proportions? At only 6-7 years old? No one gets suspicious and starts fishing around when a kid that young starts going in and out of various workshops under Benno’s guidance, ordering this strange item and that? The world is a little too idealistic. The adults are a little too conveniently dense.
The world-building gets a bit too much sometimes. Half of the chapters are devoted to long treatises on how the city works, politics work, business work, etc. It’s interesting at first but later on it gets in the way of plot progression.
There’s a long slowdown between Main being diagnosed with consumption and any further advancement being made in her treatment. Then another long break before a more permanent solution (joining the church) comes along. Some of that time is taken up by the paper-making process, but there’s still a lot of dead time spent on stuff. I know it’s a slice of life kind of show but it gets a bit tiring anyway.

TL;DR

Ascendance of the Bookworm is good and I want more!

Death March to a Parallel World Rhapsody anime review

Just when I was starting to get back in the saddle of anime-watching, I had the misfortune to come across trash like Death March to a Parallel World Rhapsody. I watched the whole thing expecting it to get interesting at some point, or at least to take full advantage of its schlockiness like In Another World with my Smartphone did. But no, it was just a mediocre waste of time that has severely dented my desire to read or watch any more isekai series.

Summary, for what its worth

Ichiro Suzuki is a programmer who was tasked with fixing several bugs in two MMORPGs his company is preparing . While taking a nap, he somehow wakes up in another world as Satoo Pendragon. Suddenly, a group of high-level lizardmen attack him, and in order to survive, Satoo desperately uses a special mass attack. As a result, his level jumps to 310 and he becomes extremely wealthy.

Satoo decides to hide his level, and plans to live peacefully and meet new people. However, developments in the game’s story may cause a nuisance to Satoo’s plans. [adapted from Wikipedia]

Why I call it trash

On the face of it, Death March to a Parallel World Rhapsody doesn’t do anything too different from the masses of isekai manga I’ve been reading recently. Satoo suddenly becomes overpowered, he goes around saving girls left and right, all the girls fall madly in love with him and he solves every problem the show can throw at him without suffering too much.

Problem 1 – Unnecessary sexual content. I’m not interested in a show where the hero has sex with prostitutes just to convince viewers that he’s a man. Or just to set itself apart from other shows. Death March is really just a slice of life show so maybe they included such scenes to show that they’re not so wholesome after all. Like how teenybopper stars go after risque roles to distance themselves from their former images. Whatever I don’t care.

Problem 2 – The bigger problem. Satoo is level 310. He should act like he’s level 310! But he doesn’t. He always looks like he’s struggling against even the weakest of enemies when he should be clearing them out with a single yawn. Part of that is understandable, like when he’s trying to level up his party members so they can defend themselves. Or when he’s trying to stay under the radar in the city. But even in far off places with no other witnesses he’s still struggling against weakling homunculi or a level 75 wizard. I hate to bring this up again but… HE’S LEVEL 310. So the show should give us the catharsis that comes from the hero being hundreds of levels above everyone else.

He’s so terrible at playing the game it’s hard to believe he’s really a programmer. He doesn’t learn skills when he should, he doesn’t explore the limits of his abilities, he doesn’t try to learn useful resistances in advance, nothing. Like there’s a part where he’s hit by Dark Magic. He gets a Dark Magic resistance skill. Instead of maxing it out, he just kind of leaves it there. In fact he just kind of leaves a lot of stuff in his menu to look at “Later” when the viewer is screaming “No! Look at it now!” It’s just a very annoying show all around.

Problem 3 – Boring characters and world. Death March is so short we didn’t get to see much of the world. The little we see is just one generic fantasy city, nothing interesting or exciting about it at all. The food doesn’t even look good despite their best efforts. The harem characters are so many that they all blur into one. Couple of lolis, couple of older girls, either way Satoo ignores them in favor of prostititues – plus he’s level 310 and doesn’t really need hangers on. I don’t even know what they’re doing in this how. What were their names again?

TL;DR

Death March to a Parallel World Rhapsody is an isekai show with very little isekai-ness, just one tiny city. It’s a harem show with no appealing girls. It’s a game-world show with a hero who evidently doesn’t care much for video games. Long story short, it has very little to offer fans of any of these genres. There are so many other isekai shows out there that you don’t need to waste time with this one. Avoid.

Dropped: Giant Killing, Joukamachi no Dandelion, Non non Biyori

Regular readers of the AnimeFangirl blog should be used to the system where I try one episode of a series and then drop it like a hot potato. Being an avid anime watcher for almost 20 years ensures you develop a nose for shows that won’t work out and can quit without wasting too much time. As a bonus this also frees you up to cope with your ever-growing backlog -_-;; The latest shows on the chopping block:

Giant Killing: I like sports shows/manga about the sport at the professional level, but something about this lazy rogue ‘unconventional’ coach rubbed me the wrong way. The art and the voices were low-tier as well, but I am vaguely interested in this rags-to-riches story so I might read the manga sometime. Things take so long to develop in the anime and so much time is spent just talking and arguing that I’m bailing out now.

Non non Biyori: Cute show. Lovely environments. Really makes you want to up and move to a village in the Japanese countryside, it’s so beautiful. So much so in fact that it actually feels like pro-countryside propaganda, to be honest. But the bigger problem is that there are tons of “cute girls doing cute stuff” slice of life shows out there and Non non Biyori doesn’t have anything special going for it besides the gorgeous scenery gimmick. It’s also really, really slow even by slice of life show standards. It was a nice watch, but one episode is enough.

Joukamachi no Dandelion: Too many characters. Too much going on. Too many ‘wacky’ incidents. The main character is annoying. The premise is all kinds of messed up and yet not very interesting at the same time. The royal family lives in a normal neighborhood? There’s nothing normal about their lives with all those cameras and magical powers and flying! So why not just let them live in a palace already? And the whole ‘game to decide the next king’ gimmick is stupid. In fact it’s just a dumb show all around. I don’t think I even finished the first episode. Next!