Review for Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Vol.1
I am really excited about new Light Novels, and this one really seemed fun, however it made me remember why I don’t really like reading Light Novels.
The English is often weird, at times the sentences just seemed off. Add to that the fact that they add the sound effects. For instance if someone is grunting or sighing or being startled this would be posted like: Urghhh or Haahh or Ahhhhhh. This kind of thing is nice in a manga, but it looks really off in a novel. Add to that the over-use of quotes. Things like: “Even vicious monsters were not safe from her “charm”.” or “Guild staff and the “fierce members” of Ganesha Familia had been guarding the west gate.”
For me (and what I learned in school a long time ago), this makes me feel like her charm is not real and the fierce members are not so fierce. I am not sure what kind of symbol they are replacing in the translation, I am guessing something like brackets, since these are often used in Japanese novels/manga. However, replacing them with quotes… might not have been the best way.
So it took me 3 days to get through this book thanks to all this.
The story was good and I really enjoyed it, though I wish there were less endless descriptions of how things worked. It is nice that you are trying to explain stuff to us, but it just kept coming and coming and I just wanted the story to get somewhere, to see if our main guy could find his harem or find his strength.
The characters are fun and I really liked them. We got various characters, some good and some bad. Our main character is interesting. Instead of fame or gold, he goes to a dungeon to find his harem. To save girls from bad monsters. Of course, he fails a lot (as expected) and he has to set his standards to something else. He is now trying his best for just one girl.
In the mean time though, he has no clue that around 4 or so girls are all drooling over him and want to get in his pants. 😉 Also as expected, we know how blind male characters in anime/manga/light novels are.
Ah, another thing that I didn’t like was the fact that the POVs changed, sometimes in the middle of a chapter and it took me quite a bit of time to recalibrate and find out who is chatting. I thought the book was only about our main guy, but we also have various other characters. I am really happy to learn about those characters and find out what they think of the main guy, but on the other hand… it is so confusing.
All in all, I will be checking out the second volume when it comes out. Even with all its faults this was a fun manga to read and I laughed out loud a few times. I can’t wait to see what will happen to our main character.