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A review by tani
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, Vol. 1 (Light Novel) by Fujino Omori
3.0
We picked up a copy of this at an anime convention earlier in the year because my husband is a huge fan of the anime. I enjoyed the anime as well, so I figured I would give the light novels a shot.
As others have mentioned, this is a complicated book to review. Grammatically and stylistically, it's strange. The perspective makes strange shifts throughout the book, going from Bell's first person POV, to a variety of other characters in third person. There are also some blatant editing misses scattered throughout the book, ranging from missing words to repeated lines to spelling errors. Having read some other light novels in the original Japanese, I can say that it's likely that the stylistic issues are inherited from the original text, but I wish that the simple editing issues had been fixed prior to publication, as they were a detractor.
Other than that, I enjoyed the book. Bell is a very enjoyable character, and I liked having a more in-depth look at what's going on in his head. I think I felt a bit more of an emotional connection in this part of the story thanks to having watched the anime previously. The world-building is a lot of fun, and I felt like there was more detail given than I had gotten from the anime, so that was appreciated. And, of course, as with any light novel, the text itself is short and fairly fast-paced, which is always good.
We own the first three of this series, so I intend to start on the second one right away.
As others have mentioned, this is a complicated book to review. Grammatically and stylistically, it's strange. The perspective makes strange shifts throughout the book, going from Bell's first person POV, to a variety of other characters in third person. There are also some blatant editing misses scattered throughout the book, ranging from missing words to repeated lines to spelling errors. Having read some other light novels in the original Japanese, I can say that it's likely that the stylistic issues are inherited from the original text, but I wish that the simple editing issues had been fixed prior to publication, as they were a detractor.
Other than that, I enjoyed the book. Bell is a very enjoyable character, and I liked having a more in-depth look at what's going on in his head. I think I felt a bit more of an emotional connection in this part of the story thanks to having watched the anime previously. The world-building is a lot of fun, and I felt like there was more detail given than I had gotten from the anime, so that was appreciated. And, of course, as with any light novel, the text itself is short and fairly fast-paced, which is always good.
We own the first three of this series, so I intend to start on the second one right away.