Lloyd is the weakest inhabitant of the strongest village on the continent, although he’s not aware of that second part and he’s certainly not aware that this makes him stronger than the majority of humanity. He doesn’t dream of being a great hero or a demon slayer or anything like that, he just wants to become your standard solider in the capital.
But for all his strengths, he’s seriously lacking common sense and that might turn out to be his greatest weakness.
The first two volumes of Hajime Fusemachi’s adaptation of Toshio Satou’s light novel series of the same name covers the first light novel volume in it’s entirety and it’s a rather faithful adaptation. All events and characters introduced in the first light novel are included but to be honest, there was so little substance to the first light novel that not managing to include everything would have been surprising. By being such a faithful adaptation (which to be clear isn’t a bad thing, I don’t think Fusemachi made a bad call here) this means that all of the issues from the light novel are also present; this story continues to be one that thinks it has more jokes than it really does and also has multiple characters who are so over-the-top unlikable that I’m genuinely baffled about what Satou was trying to do.
There is some compression to fit all of the light novel’s events into just two manga volumes (both series are still on-going so I don’t know if the manga will continue with this specific pacing) and the manga has almost created its own, strange running gag in the process. The majority of what was cut from the story was the beginning of the novel, with Lloyd leaving his village and arriving in the capital, which gets abbreviated into a short sequence of panels detailing what Lloyd thinks are totally “normal” things to encounter while traveling while Marie, a witch he’s staying with, correctly realizes are monsters and other disastrous events. And then, Lloyd goes out shopping and when he recounts what happened to Marie again, a short sequence detailing events Lloyd considers “typical” but Marie does not. I’m not sure Fusemachi even realized they created a running gag with this but, like with all of the gags in this story, in the end it wasn’t very funny.
Last Dungeon Boonies has a lot of potential for humor, especially since even non-gamers understand the concept of “enemies, NPCs, and weapons get stronger the closer you get to the end of the game” but Satou really had no idea how to milk it. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend one version of this story over another — if the premise does interest you these two versions are so similar you should simply grab whichever you come across first — but I am still planning on avoiding the upcoming anime adaptation since I’m sure some of these characters will be worse than insufferable once voiced. Who knows, maybe with movement and music the jokes might land better but for the moment, I’m going to avoid both this starter town and the last dungeon boonies!