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apr · 2012-11-30, 01:02

Finished Mahouka-koukou no Rettousei vol 1 by Satou Tsutomu. It takes place in the year 2095, where magic has been discovered to be real, and augmented by technology, it's turned into a kind of advanced engineering field. To fully take advantage of this setting, our protagonist is, of course, a high school student with a fawning little sister and pretty girls surrounding him.

This title is surprisingly popular, having started out as a free web novel on an amateur site, where it racked up 30 million views. A publishing house noticed it and convinced the author to publish it in book form, and now it's just a matter of time until it gets animated. Not that any of this saves it from being shit.

The author has the most hardcore infodump fetish I've ever seen, making the book horrendously tedious to read. If a character is taking the train to school, he'll waste two entire pages describing how trains have evolved, including superfluous information on how the pricing differs if you occupy more seats. To make matters worse, the magic system is filled with fictitious jargon, and working through what it all means in page-long explanations on the different branches of magic or the maintenance of magical devices is worse than studying for a biology test.

I can appreciate his passion for world building, but randomly stuffing encyclopaedic paragraphs of completely made-up information into his plot is a terrible way of doing it. It would make more sense if it at least had some kind of connection to what's going on, but nope, someone uses the train, so we've got to explain the history of the train! Someone uses a mobile device, so we must describe every minute detail of these devices! Why is there no teacher in the classroom? Here's a few pages on how the school system is developing in this imaginary future! You get the picture.

As I reached the final page, it dawned on me that this volume is actually just the first half of a longer novel, so it practically ends in mid-chapter. In spite of that, I sincerely doubt I'll ever bother to get the next part, since it'd probably put me into a coma. Maybe the inevitable anime will cut down on the tedious bullshit.

2012-11-30, 01:02	Link #742
apr Pedestrian Join Date: May 2003 Location: Sweden	Finished Mahouka-koukou no Rettousei vol 1 by Satou Tsutomu. It takes place in the year 2095, where magic has been discovered to be real, and augmented by technology, it's turned into a kind of advanced engineering field. To fully take advantage of this setting, our protagonist is, of course, a high school student with a fawning little sister and pretty girls surrounding him. This title is surprisingly popular, having started out as a free web novel on an amateur site, where it racked up 30 million views. A publishing house noticed it and convinced the author to publish it in book form, and now it's just a matter of time until it gets animated. Not that any of this saves it from being shit. The author has the most hardcore infodump fetish I've ever seen, making the book horrendously tedious to read. If a character is taking the train to school, he'll waste two entire pages describing how trains have evolved, including superfluous information on how the pricing differs if you occupy more seats. To make matters worse, the magic system is filled with fictitious jargon, and working through what it all means in page-long explanations on the different branches of magic or the maintenance of magical devices is worse than studying for a biology test. I can appreciate his passion for world building, but randomly stuffing encyclopaedic paragraphs of completely made-up information into his plot is a terrible way of doing it. It would make more sense if it at least had some kind of connection to what's going on, but nope, someone uses the train, so we've got to explain the history of the train! Someone uses a mobile device, so we must describe every minute detail of these devices! Why is there no teacher in the classroom? Here's a few pages on how the school system is developing in this imaginary future! You get the picture. As I reached the final page, it dawned on me that this volume is actually just the first half of a longer novel, so it practically ends in mid-chapter. In spite of that, I sincerely doubt I'll ever bother to get the next part, since it'd probably put me into a coma. Maybe the inevitable anime will cut down on the tedious bullshit. __________________ ...in my humble opinion.