I honestly had trouble starting this review. Everything I wrote in my draft sounded too similar to the introduction of my first review for Our Crappy Social Game Club Is Gonna Make the Most Epic Game. Because just like with Volume 1, the second volume of this series was intent on including as many recycled concepts as possible from the very beginning. I mean, it opened up with the ‘obligatory’ swimsuit scene and beautiful girls surrounding one (un)lucky guy. From there, it was just more and more of the same stuff… ironically mimicking my first draft. Maybe the light novel is rubbing off of me.
Just kidding! Anyway, I was much more forgiving in my review for the first volume, but my tolerance for reused tropes in Our Crappy Social Game Club Volume 2 was almost nonexistent. And I’m harsher and pickier about pretty much everything. Whether it’s justifiable or due to personal bias, I’m not sure. Let’s find out together by looking at the novel’s plot and other aspects!
After a successful first semester of creating game apps, the Meikun Social Game Club is asked to participate in a game development contest over summer break. To make things more interesting, a new member joins the club: a pretty girl named Aina. Things don’t go according to plan. It turns out Aina and Eru, the club’s illustrator, have some bad blood. Eru refuses to work with (or even acknowledge) Aina which complicates not only the upcoming competition but the club’s general operations. Kai and the other members have to scramble to better understand Aina’s and Eru’s personalities, reconcile their differences, and get a new game finished within a matter of weeks.
The synopsis may not sound that unoriginal on the surface, but when you take all of the different parts that made up the story…it’s things I’ve read or seen countless times before. I don’t want to spoil any main events (although they’re all very predictable), so I’ll use a minor character as an example. The club’s competitor in the contest was a typical ojou-sama villainess — with twin drills and an ‘ohoho’ laugh no less. There’s nothing wrong with this in of itself. I like these characters usually. However, the villainess was a weak character in terms of writing. She was like… every other haughty villainess with nothing new to offer. She felt copied and pasted from other series. She had no depth.
I wasn’t happy with how the other side characters were written either. We obviously learn more about Kai since he’s the main character and the story is through his perspective. We also find a lot about the new character Aina. But the other characters? They’re barely fleshed out at all. With Eru’s art skills and Nanaka’s role as president, both girls are critical to the Social Game Club. On top of this, Nanaka is Kai’s love interest, and Eru has an icy personality that frequently causes problems (even before Aina came along). Yet… their character development is next to none. And don’t get me started on Aya who was my favorite character in the first volume. She had barely any screen time… or, umm, page time? You get what I mean.
It’s a light novel, so it’s understandable that Oriori Siki couldn’t go into too much detail. Maybe they plan to write more and develop the characters in later volumes. But, as of right now, I think they needed to change their priorities. Besides the character development, important and emotional scenes were subpar as well. With not enough descriptive details, these scenes felt anticlimactic or ineffective.
In contrast, Siki would go on these long-winded explanations about social game development or related concepts. In my other review, I mentioned that I liked these explanations since I’m interested in technology. They didn’t keep my attention this time around, however, partially due to the writing imbalance and also because…the content wasn’t that great. Except for the few game developers reading this book, does the audience really need a painstaking explanation about why a social game proposal should be exactly five pages long? No, we don’t.
It might be my bias. I’ve been reading Moby Dick the past few months, and it has many of the same issues, where the author will focus on unnecessary whale facts instead of the main story and introduce new characters instead of fleshing out the important ones. Maybe I’m just tired and taking it out on this light novel.
But I don’t think that’s the only reason. While writing my review, I think I’ve figured out why I disliked this volume. The unique element that made Our Crappy Social Game Club series stand out – the social game aspect – was lacking in this volume. In the first volume, the social game theme was new and novel. I was excited to learn about this field of gaming. However, the explanations dragged on in Volume 2, creating uneven writing and taking away from much needed character development. Coupled with the overused tropes and predictable story, the book ended up being a big disappointment. If I ever continue reading this series, I hope the subsequent books prove me wrong and make me eat my words!