The basic premise of the series: right after the release of a new expansion pack, all players currently logged on to the MMORPG game Elder Tales woke up to find themselves living in the bodies of their avatars, trapped in what appeared to be a blend of the Elder Tales world and the real world.

This first volume introduces Shiroe, an Enchanter who's an incredibly gifted strategist, Naotsugu, a Guardian with a bad habit of talking about panties, and Akatsuki, an Assassin who's really into roleplaying her character, right down to referring to Shiroe as her liege. The three of them figure out how to use their magical and fighting abilities, learn the rules of this new world, encounter player killers, and go on a quest to rescue a young girl named Serara from a town that has turned hellish ever since the Catastrophe that resulted in everybody getting trapped in the game.

I really wanted to like this book. I loved the anime so much that I ordered the first few volumes of the light novel series before I'd even finished it. Based on my feelings about this first volume, that was probably a mistake.

I still love the premise, and that Touno opted to focus on the nitty gritty details of rebuilding a functional society rather than on battles and action, although the series certainly still has some of that. And this book provided some interesting details that either weren't included in the anime or that I'd missed. For instance, I loved the class and subclass table. And the detail about abusive players using the game's "friend" function to aid their harassment of other players made me wince because it was such a perfect example of the ways people will take something that was intended to be a helpful feature and figure out how to use it to hurt others.

Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to love this, it was bogged down by its massive amount of detail and bad writing/translation. The writing problems ranged from unnecessarily obvious statements to just plain awkward phrasing. A couple examples:

"Online games are played over the Internet." (15)

They are indeed. I suspect that this painfully obvious statement was the result of some of the translation issues discussed in Clyde Mandelin's "Redundant Translations in Games & Anime."

Later on, Shiroe was referred to as the "Tea Party strategy counselor" (25). The Debauchery Tea Party used to be a well-known party filled with high-level players who took on difficult enemies. It would have been better, and less awkward-sounding, to refer to Shiroe as their strategist, rather than strategy counselor.

I could come up with other examples, but what it basically came down to was that I much preferred the anime's English subtitling to the book's English translation. Still, I soldiered on, hoping for some good additional content that didn't get included in the anime.

From what I could tell, the anime was actually a pretty faithful adaptation of the book. It inherited the book's pacing problems and initial lack of a decent story, but managed to improve upon the book by cutting down on its panty jokes and level of Elder Tales world details. Yes, the book somehow had even more panty jokes than the anime. And boob jokes, once Marielle was introduced.

I'll continue on, since I already own the next few books, but I doubt I'll end up reading the full series, especially since it looks like nearly all of the currently available light novel content has made it into the anime.

Extras:

A couple color illustrations on a large folded sheet, several black-and-white illustrations throughout, character profile information (Shiroe, Naotsugu, Akatsuki, Marielle, Serara), tables listing many of the various Elder Tales main classes and subclasses, and a short afterword written by the author.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

OMG, I'm finished. I loved the first season of the anime, despite its pacing issues. Unfortunately, it turns out that whoever adapted the anime actually made quite a few improvements, because the original book's pacing was excruciating. Also, I can't believe I'm saying this, but the anime actually had less fanservice than the book.

In the afterword:

"This book is an edited and revised version of an online serial I started writing in April 2010. When the story was turned into a book, I changed the setting a bit and revised the text to improve the quality of the writing and its readability."

Uh, not enough, but I suspect that truly fixing the story would have involved scrapping at least the first couple books' worth of material and complete rewriting everything.

I'm going to attempt to finish this before Booklikesopoly tomorrow, and/or write some reviews because my backlog is awful.

It's been ages since I last touched this book. If I hadn't seen the anime, I'm not sure I'd remember what's going on in the current scene.

Oof. The anime and book have the same pacing problems, but they're much more noticeable in the book, at least for me. Nothing much has happened, and there's nothing you could really call a plot. Also, in both the anime and the book it bugs me that no one thinks much about their life before everything changed. Akatsuki and Shiroe were college students with terrible social skills, and Naotsugu had a job somewhere. That's it, that's all I know about their lives outside the game.

While I love the anime, one of the things it requires me to put up with is occasional boob and panty related jokes. There's Naotsugu and his attempts at off-color remarks (which are always interrupted by a quick whack from Akatsuki). And there's Marielle and her efforts to squish Naotsugu into her enormous boobs (while he won't shut up about panties, he is instantly shut down by actual boobs, so I suppose it works as a preemptive strike).

Amazingly, the book manages to have more boob-related dialogue and jokes than the anime. Yeesh.

Edit: I just did a search of the author's name to see if he'd worked on anything else (he has, Maoyu, another work with a focus on fantasy economics) and discovered that he was found guilty of tax evasion in 2016. Oops.