Tsukikage

When this book's main character wakes up, he discovers that he's now what's known as a flesh-man, a low-level undead being. Horos Kamen, the necromancer who brought him back to life, names him "End" and appears to have complete control over him. End's only consolation is he's able to do whatever he pleases as long as it doesn't contradict the necromancer's orders. He's also incredibly lucky that Horos doesn't seem to realize that he's self-aware.

When he was alive, End's existence was agony. He'd had an incurable illness that sapped his strength and left him in constant pain. If it weren't for his lack of freedom, he'd consider being a flesh-man to be a blessing. He feels no pain, never gets tired, and is much stronger than he ever was in life. Now that he has a better existence to look forward to, he'll do whatever it takes to gain his freedom. He'll have to kill Horos. But is it even possible to kill someone whose every order you must obey? Then there are the additional complications presented by Horos' human slave, Lou, End's lack of knowledge about the undead and their limitations, and the Ender knights, sworn enemies of necromancers and the undead.

I bought this because I'd previously read the first couple volumes of Tsukikage's Defeating the Demon Lord's a Cinch (If You've Got a Ringer). That series had some serious issues (pacing problems, a premise the relegated the most competent character to the background, some problematic behavior on the main character's part), but also some things I really liked (a main character with a strong and interesting personality and weirdly relatable problems). I ultimately decided to stop reading it, but Tsukikage had enough potential as an author that I decided it was worth trying The King of the Dead at the Dark Palace.

Like Defeating the Demon Lord's Ares, End wasn't really a good person. His only goal was freedom, and he was willing to do whatever it took to obtain it. After a certain point in the story, "whatever it took" involved using Lou, Horos' human slave. Lou had been the necromancer's slave for long enough that she'd lost all hope - the only reason she feared death at all was because she knew Horos could continue to enslave her even after she'd died. The thing that irked me most about End's interactions with Lou was the way he viewed her - he saw himself as better than her because he still fought for his freedom and existence, whereas she'd given up.

I don't know that it's quite accurate to say that End lacked agency, but there were certainly an awful lot of instances where he succeeded not because he'd accomplished anything, but rather because he persevered long enough for the story's next convenient development to save him. For now, there's no real explanation for how he managed to do some of the things readers were told should have been impossible, although I have a feeling it has something to do with the reason why the author has thus far avoided revealing End's true name.

There weren't really any characters I could root for. End, like I said, was kind of horrible. Lou was pitiful. Even the Ender knights weren't that great. The author made it clear that they'd kill regular humans without flinching if they thought it was the best way to rid the area of the undead. The only one who seemed marginally like a decent person was Senli, who literally everyone agreed was soft-hearted to a fault. There was a bit from her POV that either confirmed her naivete or indicated that End is an unreliable narrator - I'm hoping for more the latter, but who knows?

Although this wasn't a "reborn in an RPG-like world" story, it felt like it at times. The way the undead evolved felt very much like the way RPG characters could level up. It unfortunately left this series feeling stale.

Will I continue reading this? Right now, the odds aren't good. I liked the lack of weird boob jokes, it might be interesting to see how Senli and End handle each other, and the bonus story with Lou had some potential, but for the most part this was not a fun book. It might improve in volume 2, but for now I have lots of other light novel series I could be reading instead.

Extras:

A folded sheet with two illustrations, one of all the prominent characters and one of a scene in which Horos Kamen orders End to kill a bear. Also, two bonus short stories ("The Merry and Mournful Days of the Undead," which read like something Tsukikage had been asked to cut out of the novel, and "The Melancholy of Lou Doles," which gives a hint of things to come) and a short afterword by the author.

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

Nao (who's most often referred to as Toudou, so maybe I should switch to that) and her party have ventured into Yutith's Tomb, a place novice priests often go to level up. It should be easy for a Holy Warrior like Toudou, except for one thing: she's deathly afraid of most of the undead.

Ares, who still thinks Toudou is a womanizing guy, continues to try to assist her without her being aware of it. That means helping Toudou with her fear of the undead, leveling her up, and somehow adding a priest to Toudou's party, since she kicked Ares out. Unfortunately, Toudou, Limis, and Aria have crossed paths with one of the last people Ares ever wanted them to meet: the crusader Gregorio Legins, also known as the Mad Eater. So now he has to keep them safe from Gregorio as well...

It's been over a year since I read the first volume, so when I started this I struggled to remember who Limis and Aria were and why the party was even in Yutith's Tomb in the first place. Toudou, Limis, and Aria aren't the most vivid characters, and they were particularly bland in this volume.

I continue to think that Tsukikage is a decent writer who painted themselves into a corner with their choice of premise and POV. Toudou is technically the person the story revolves around, the hero brought over from another world who is supposedly the only one who can defeat the Demon Lord. However, Ares, who is technically a side character in the overall "defeat the Demon Lord" quest, is the one with actual skills and experience. So readers are stuck watching Ares try to prod Toudou along the necessary path, even though Toudou is ill-suited for the role and appears to be at least 20 years away from ever being able to defeat the Demon Lord. I'm still convinced that, when they do finally encounter the Demon Lord, Ares will essentially be the one to kill him, even if he has to do it by throwing Toudou at him, sword first.

In the first volume, Ares was an angry professional forced to do his job as best he could with both hands tied behind his back. He was ruthless, ridiculously skilled and competent, and not particularly priestly. Toudou and her party were massively incompetent, and Toudou made things worse by shoving away the help that Ares offered. Ares essentially tortured a monster in an effort to help Toudou, which was off-putting, but somehow not as bad as Toudou freaking out and severely wounding an entire tavern full of people and never thinking about that incident again.

In this volume, it seemed like everyone had mellowed out a bit, which unfortunately made Toudou and her party painfully bland. I was a bit disappointed that Ares wasn't the giant ball of anger and frustration that I recalled him being in the first volume, but I will admit that his behavior was generally less problematic. He was surprisingly patient and kind towards Spica, the little orphan girl he and Amelia hoped they could add to Toudou's party.

Gregorio was a fun character, one of those types who's so warped by his backstory that he almost qualifies as a villain. The best parts of this volume were when he and Ares interacted - Gregorio deeply respected Ares, while Ares loathed Gregorio and just wanted him to leave.

The volume's pacing was, to put it mildly, pretty terrible. This was essentially just 300 pages of Ares attempting to help Toudou conquer her fear of the undead while trying to get Gregorio to stay out of the way. Still, my appreciation for Ares kind of makes me want to continue this series. But is it on hiatus? It's been two years since Yen Press published volume 4, and I think the Japanese editions might have stopped at that point as well. Tsukikage has another series, The King of Death at the Dark Palace, that Yen Press will begin releasing in April, so maybe I'll just give that a try instead, and leave Defeating the Demon Lord behind for now.

Extras:

A three-page story in which Ares discovers one of Amelia's "activity report journals" and learns her true feelings (maybe?) about him and the other characters in the series. Also, a brief afterword by the author, black and white illustrations throughout, a couple full-color illustrations on a folded sheet, and character profiles for Gregorio and Spica. Spica's "Will" information made me smile: "Doing her best." I do hope the choices she made at the end of this volume don't end up getting her killed.

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

Note: Don't read the character data section at the end of the book until you've finished the novel. There are at least a couple major spoilers.

Naotsugu Toudou is a hero summoned from another world (more than likely ours) to defeat the Demon Lord Kranos. Only the hero has the necessary divine protection required to defeat the Demon Lord, but others may accompany and aid him. All heroes start off at the lowest level and have to work their way up from there. Theoretically, the hero's party members should all be high level, but this party is...different.

Limis Al Friedia is a Level 10 elemental mage who can only use fire magic, even though all elemental mages are supposed to be able to use two different elements. Aria Rizas is a Level 20 swordmaster who recently switched to a completely different school of swordsmanship. Also, even though higher level techniques require at least a little magic, Aria has absolutely no magical ability. (It isn't until nearly the end of the book that readers are finally told that the maximum level for humans is probably 100. I don't consider this to be a spoiler, so I'm mentioning it here for context.)

Ares Crown, the priest assigned to be the group's healer, is the only one with any battle experience. In fact, his level is so high that he worries the rest of the group might use him as a crutch, so he lies and says his level is only 3, the last digit of his true level. He somehow has to get everyone in the party leveled up as soon as possible and keep Nao alive long enough to defeat the Demon Lord, no easy task considering that Nao soon becomes convinced that Ares' assistance is unnecessary.

In terms of flow and general readability this was one of the better light novels I've tried. I never got bored or bogged down by the writing. The battle scenes were relatively easy to follow, and I blew through the whole book much faster than I expected I would. I enjoyed Ares' crankiness, and his "keep moving forward and make the best of the crappy hand you've been dealt" attitude really worked for me.

That said, this book missed the mark in a lot of important ways. For starters, the cover art/title led me to believe that this was going to be a bit lighter and more ridiculous than it actually was. I figured that Ares would be the put-upon healer constantly saving his party members from certain death while the idiots kept obliviously charging forward. There was a little of that, but the brutality and bloodshed kept it from being the light read I expected.

At one point, Ares stumbled upon the aftermath of a fight in a tavern. An aggressive mercenary had freaked Nao out, and, as a result, Nao accidentally maimed nearly everyone in the building. Nao then ran off, basically leaving everyone to die, and only Limis knew that Ares then healed everyone and hushed the whole thing up. This incident was never mentioned again and seemed to make zero impact on Nao. In fact, a short while later, Nao came across a seriously injured monster (secretly injured by Ares, who was hoping Nao would kill it and thereby manage to level up a bit more) and, horrified, said that whoever had hurt it so badly and left it like that must be a monster. There were multiple times in the book where Ares wondered whether Nao was unstable, and I have to say that I wondered that myself. This particular volume provided no answers.

Ares was not a nice guy, and he definitely wasn't a devout priest, but he was absolutely a professional. He did his job, no matter how much the people around him pissed him off. The book included several brutal multi-page scenes in which he beat up and/or maimed monsters and demons, including a monster that looked like a little girl, in an effort to aid Nao or obtain more information (the violence is of the bone-crunching variety, but there is thankfully not much in the way of "gory squishy bits" descriptions). As ruthless as he was, I still preferred him to Nao. It really bothered me that Nao seemed unaffected by the fight at the tavern, and Ares' experience and practicality worked better for me than Nao's boneheadedness.

There were some POV issues. The bulk of the book was first person present tense POV from Ares' perspective, and the author was clearly most comfortable with this. Unfortunately, this resulted in a story that was mostly Ares running around and reacting to things. After a certain point, he was cut off from Nao's party and reduced to guessing where they might go next and what they might do. He was also in the dark as far as the Church went - Cardinal Creio kept saying that the Church had its reasons for assigning Ares to this job, and Ares just had to keep doing his best despite everything. His POV also put limitations on the things readers got to learn about the other characters. Ares wasn't the sort of person who made friends, and he really didn't care about anyone around him, beyond what their level of usefulness might be in battle. I had a better idea of most of the female characters' breast sizes than their personalities.

And speaking of breasts... I think the only female character whose breasts weren't described was maybe the one female mercenary. For a guy who seemed to care more about work than about romance or sex, Ares sure noticed breasts a lot. The breast thing irked me but was mostly ignorable, until the end, when it was revealed that leveling up could affect at least one character's breast size. Yes, the author wrote magically growing breasts into this world. ::sigh::

The overall world was painfully generic, the breast thing was annoying, and there was more bone-crunching violence than I expected. Still, there were some intriguing aspects that might prompt me to at least read the next volume. There are indications that Nao might morph into a more interesting and difficult-to-handle villain than the Demon Lord. There were brief mentions of Ares' workaholic tendencies being his biggest weakness - he isn't good at or used to delegating work, and he uses holy energy on himself to keep himself going past the normal limits of human endurance. This particular volume didn't really demonstrate the drawbacks of his way of operating, and I'm hoping that future volumes do a better job of digging into this some more. Volume 4's cover art features most of the female cast in bikinis, though, so that isn't very encouraging.

Extras:

- Character data for most of the book's prominent characters. The only information not included that I would have liked to see was character ages. There was a bit on page 30 that seemed to indicate that Ares was only 18 years old, and that can't possibly be right.

- An afterword written by the author.

- Several black-and-white illustrations throughout.

- A couple color illustrations on a folded sheet at the beginning of the book. The illustrator seems to have forgotten that Amelia's hair is supposed to be blue.

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