There are many different kinds of jobs for adventurers but they all have one thing in common: it’s dangerous to go alone. And this is what is giving Nick, Tiana, Zen, and Karan so much trouble; each of them is still recovering from recent events that shook their faith in humanity and are only begrudgingly teaming up since adventuring work is about all that any of them are qualified for right now. It’d be easy to feel sympathetic for them, if their backgrounds weren’t so incredibly trite and if Shinta Fuji knew how to actually make readers buy into the characters instead of relying on the audience feeling pity for them instead.
Nick adventured in another party for years before being kicked out for the confusing combination of reasons “you’re always telling us to be more careful with money, so clearly you were the one who stole from the party account” and “you’re too good for this party anyway and me kicking you out should motivate you to find a better party.” Unlike Red in Banished from the Hero’s Party, who did try to move on and become an adventurer elsewhere, Nick briefly mopes and then immediately gets sucked into the world of idol fandom as a NEET and I found myself asking once again why so many creators insist on sticking modern-day idols into medieval fantasy settings instead of having people go nuts over say a conductor or opera singer (intense fan antics aren’t a modern thing!). Nick’s backstory, and really all of the character’s backstories, felt phoned in; these events didn’t seem to have meaning and repercussions, they just happened because the author needed them to.
Tiana’s tale of woe reads like a villainess story, where she’s unfairly accused by her fiancé of being mean to a new girl he meets at a fancy school for nobles and she ends up being ousted not only out of the relationship but out of society as well. The thing about villainess stories is that it’s surprisingly difficult to make the denouement feel like an actual event characters precipitated and not something that the author had to make happen (you really need some time to dig into the backstory to establish what the other characters had to gain from such lengths or you need to make the event be so inconsequential that you can breeze by it) which is exactly what it feels like in Tiana’s situation. I did like the detail that the new girl’s family had enough money and political clout to threaten everyone who might question the story into silence, that’s an angle that I surprisingly haven’t seen as often in villainess tales, but that was after the fact and then Tiana is also on her way to engaging in a very expensive hobby.
Of the main characters, Karan’s backstory is the most sympathetic and also the one that I thought worked the best, possibly because it was the simplest. Much like Shiori in Housekeeping Mage, Karan was a new adventurer who joined a party and after she was comfortable with them she was then deliberately left for dead in a dungeon so they could take everything and run. Unlike Shiori’s story, where her party started out on decent terms before taking a bad turn, Karan’s party members were planning to use her from the beginning (going so far as to not show her the ropes with some of the usual skills involved in dungeon crawling) and so unsurprisingly she spends quite a lot of this volume quiet and still a bit traumatized. Unfortunately, that means that we don’t actually get to see much of her personality so she’s probably the least developed of these paper doll characters, although her money sink hobby (fine dining, developed after following another adventurer around as she was trying to figure out what to do next) was also the only one that made sense to me, the other three always felt a bit at odds with the characters’ personalities, with Zen’s feeling the most incongruous.
Zen’s tragic backstory is a false rape accusation by a young girl who was his charge in a religious organization and who was mad that he wouldn’t sleep with her. False rape accusations are such a small percentage of all reporting on rapes that I’m always a bit leery of a story that chooses to use that trope and the fact that Zen’s eventual retort to this is to then become a big spender at hostess clubs and sleep around a lot felt a bit strange. I would’ve expected him to be a little bit traumatized by the idea of getting close to women after this, both physically and emotionally. The entire set-up to this series felt like the creator was too chicken to write an actual revenge story but just couldn’t let go of these initial story premises and that’s how we end up with four “disillusioned” adventurers.
Admittedly, when the characters actually do form a party and firmly declare that it’s going to be strictly a working relationship, it feels more like a sensible agreement between adults than anything else, nothing ground-breaking. It felt like the difference between planning a trip with friends in high school and college versus planning one with friends as adults when you realize that yeah, you probably need to create a spreadsheet just to keep track of what fees need to be paid where, contact information for everyone, etc. If this is “abnormal” for parties then I’m surprised that parties falling apart isn’t an even more common event in this world.
But once the characters start crawling dungeons together the story truly slows down to a crawl with overly detailed explanations about monster spawn rates, attack abilities, etc. To be clear, I grew up reading sword and sorcery fantasy novels so I am not at all opposed to detailed descriptions of fight sequences! But describing how characters dodge and clash is a lot more dynamic than the “clearly inspired by video game fights” writing here. If I wanted to deal with this level of video game details I’d either go play a game myself or multi-task by watching a streamer play a game while doing something else myself, not devoting my full attention to this light novel!
It really feels like Fuji had a basic idea: what if a bunch of cynics are actually the best people to save the world (at some point in the future, no world saving occurs in volume 1) but really didn’t do a good job at fleshing out the story beyond that initial tagline. I was initially interested in the anime series when I first saw it on the winter 2023 season charts but reading this light novel completely put me off the series and frankly I’m not surprised at how little chatter I’ve seen about it, now that the anime season is halfway over and there are so many other shows competing for attention and eyeballs.