Aug 29, 2022
tl;dr: A LN series that wastes all of its foundational concepts but has good comedy, fluff, and art so is pretty decent anyway.
Reading the description, it may feel like there are a lot of interesting elements to this light novel series, but in terms of execution very little of them have enough substance to matter at all. There is the Romeo and Juliet aspect, with there being a romance between Mikado, heir to the family that controls the light side of Japan, and Kisa, heir to the family that controls the dark side of Japan. This is very underdeveloped however, with it only being mentioned
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in passing for most of the series and just kind of thrown in there more explicitly in the last volume without doing much with it. There is also the love game aspect, wherein each is trying to get the other to admit they love them, which is somewhat like Kaguya-sama, but unlike Kaguya-sama isn’t written intelligently at all, instead being incredibly random and nonsensical. At times the love game will try to have characters be strategic about things, but in general everyone is really dumb and everything just works out through coincidence basically, so it doesn’t feel like there’s much value there. As it goes on the love game aspect becomes less strategic in favor of more just straight up action, but that relies on characters just suddenly having random skills and abilities and other characters just doing exactly what the author needs them to no matter how forced it is, so there isn’t much value there either. Ultimately how things ended regarding both of those elements was pretty dumb, pulling out a random plot element without any prior foreshadowing to just force tie up the plot up. Still, while the ending is completely predictable and not particularly interesting, it’s a satisfying enough ending I suppose.
The main couple isn’t all that strong either. Mikado is the standard dense overtly good protagonist. Him being dense I suppose is standard enough and usually not too much of an issue, but the series tries too hard to make him seem smart despite also having him be completely dense, which is possible but the writing here wasn’t strong enough to pull it off. Kisa as far as I can tell is supposed to be a cartoonishly evil genius character with tsundere elements. The issue with her is that it feels like her appeal is supposed to be gap moe stemming from the contrast between smart villain side and in love to the point of being stupid side, but the key to gap moe is the gap and this doesn’t establish that gap well at all. She’s pretty much always shown in her in love to the point of being stupid side and doesn’t seem like much of a villain at all for most of the series. The last two books have her seeming more like an actual villain, but it felt like too little too late. Thus, she just seems like an incredibly love-struck girl, which is cute to a degree, but lacking in substance, and doesn’t really stand out compared to the side heroines. There’s also no real character development in either of them, and though they do behave somewhat differently in later volumes compared to earlier ones, since there’s no clear character arc this just feels like inconsistent characterization. The romance between the two isn’t all that strong either. They don’t have very good chemistry which results in why they’re in love in the first place being a major question throughout most of the series. The last volume explains why by fleshing out their background somewhat, but once again, too little too late.
So what does the series actually have? Romantic fluff and comedy. Mikado and Kisa aren’t particularly well written characters and the plot surrounding them is nonsense, but it’s still pretty amusing most of the time. The side heroines are also really simplistic characters, but they definitely spice things up and make things more interesting. Rinka is the overtly obsessed lover type despite being a Yamato Nadeshiko so just reading about her craziness was pretty fun. Mizuki is an agent of chaos that does her best to screw with everyone and has fun doing it so that too is a lot of fun to read about. And while I wouldn’t put Kokage in the same league as the former two, her randomly being a weirdo and throwing in stuff about aliens and such also kept things interesting. The plot is still all sorts of nonsense, but it feels like it definitely crosses into so bad its good territory if you’re just turning off your brain and going with the flow. Throw in that Kisa, Rinka, and Mizuki all get a lot of romantic fluff and a good variety of it too and it begins to feel like this novel series actually has a solid amount of substance considering it’s relatively short length. And add the cherry on top that is incredibly good art work that shows off all the heroines really well and this turns out to be a passably good series.
I should also note that the fan translation has issues. There are a lot of sentences that straight up don’t make sense. Most of these sentences feel like they’re stemming from issues in misinterpreting the subject/object or unnatural word choice which are common mistakes for machine translations so there’s a chance MTL may be involved. But at the same time, there are also a steady stream of just straight up typos and misspellings which are not common in MTL, so I suppose the more likely source of the lack of quality of the translation is that the translator wasn’t paying much attention to the context of the story while they were translating and the editor wasn’t paying much attention to anything at all.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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