Andrew

Narration reviews are way too positive

Revisado: 03-21-25

An average of 4.4 stars for the Performance shows just how low some people's standards are. I really wanted to read this series because I loved the anime. But I could only get a few hours in before the narrator's complete lack of interest and effort made me completely unable to care at all. The only way I can ever tell the person talking isn't the main character is when a woman says "honey" and that's only made worse by the fact that the narrator says it completely flat.

Only an hour in I decided that I would be super happy for once if they changed the narrator for the next book. Sadly they did not. By the time I got 3 hours in, and there were now half a dozen recurring characters and I still couldn't tell if who was talking was Kelvin or Melfina or Effil, I decided that since the next book keeps the narrator, I don't even need to finish this book. I've only ever returned 1 or 2 books out of over 600 I own, but this is a candidate for a return if I've ever seen one.

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Great performance, not so great characters

Revisado: 10-02-24

I'll start by saying this: If you really like the fights in these books, and that's all you care about, you'll probably love this one. Most of the book is just going from fight to fight to fight.

Also, if not for the fantastic narration, I would probably not have made it through the book. Christian Gillilland is a new one for me, and I'm definitely going to try to find more of him to listen to.

Now, there are 2 major strikes that make me unwilling to continue this series. Both are pretty closely tied to the aforementioned "would you like some book with your fight scenes?" nature of the book:
1. The main character's primary motivation, even by the end of book 1, is "find good fights". If you're all about the fights, maybe this works for you. This makes it really hard for me to find a main character compelling (Primal Hunter is the exception that proves the rule).
2. There are 2 characters with a personality in the entire book, and the main character is definitely NOT one of them. Unfortunately, since Zane is all "I fight alone" those 2 people are in the book maybe 20% of the time? I didn't even realize how wooden all the rest of the characters were until the very end when the female with a personality talks to Zane on the phone and I was like "man, she's so great, how has it been like 15 hours since we last saw her?"

I could list a few other things that matter (like, the litRPG elements are pretty underdeveloped), but to me, having a main character with no personality or real motivation, and not having any major characters that have any personality makes for a pretty uncompelling read.

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Better than the anime

Revisado: 07-20-24

Despite the terrible combat animation in the first season, I really like the Arifureta anime, so I was excited to see that J-Novel Club has been following Yen Press in trying to get the English dub voice actors to narrate the light novels. It did not disappoint. I think this part of the series really benefits from the extended time, since we learn a lot more about the social dynamics of the class, and the relationships between the characters. Also, since the combat animation was so bad, honestly I enjoyed both Matt and Morgan's narrations of the fights at least as much as I did watching them.

My one hope for future books is that they do more of a team narration for the books, rather than having one person read an entire chapter. Especially since the chapters are so long, we lose a lot of the benefits of dual narrators when there are 5-10 POV changes within each chapter, even if they don't trade off in dialogue in the same sections, at least having the character being followed determine who is reading would be nice.
That said, I'm not even taking a star off for that, since I thought both of them did such a great job. I'm just hoping in the future that they can make that improvement.

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No villainesses nor Rank SS+ Adventurers here

Revisado: 05-17-24

Normally I start off a review with the best stuff because I'm a positive person. But my conclusion actually contradicts my rating. I absolutely would recommend reading this book, as long as you take into account that it is NOT a story about an overpowered adventurer. It's a story about a spoiled little girl who may or may not be overpowered, but we don't really know because she never really does anything. So, despite the high rating, I'm not planning on reading anymore of the series, because I really liked this book but it was essentially the same 3 or 4 gags over and over and over and over again, and they were just good enough to be fun until shortly before the end of the book (Except the soap thing. That one stopped being funny after the 2nd time).

That said, I did rate this book really highly, given that first paragraph! And the reason for that is the delightful Brenna Larsen's narration. I've never heard of her before, but I'll be keeping an eye out for more books narrated by her. She's a very high energy narrator, and she pulls off the outrageousness of the main character perfectly, and the insanity that is the 2nd major character even better, honestly. I think the repeat gags might have lost their savor a lot sooner if they'd been delivered by a less capable narrator.

As for more detail on why I didn't love it? Like I said, certain expectations are implied by the title. Since the other series by this author is a high school slice of life series, I went in expecting the title to be misleading. But then the opening sequence made certain implications about Juliet's power level, which made it seem like the title maybe wasn't misleading. It was. The main character might be overpowered (Maybe? It's not really clear). But Juliet, is...extremely dumb. Most of the time. If I had to name a character she reminds me of the most, it would be Bill Murray's character in The Man Who Knew Too Little. Completely unaware of what's actually going on most of the time, an absolute bumbling fool 95% of the time, but things just kind of work out perfectly anyway. That's a great character for a movie. It even worked out for a book that was 3-4x as long as the movie. But by the end, I was ready for her to show some more dimensions. And it seemed like maybe she was going to for a minute! And then she was just Juliet again, and that was the moment I decided I was going to leave this confusing review.

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Such a great series-narrator pairing

Revisado: 05-05-24

I've always loved how Travis reads these books, but his Sandy voice is absolutely peak. The book was also great. I love how the power leveling time skips are just built into the character/story.

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Looking forward to the next one(more Reba please!)

Revisado: 03-13-24

Loved this book, and loved the narration. Reba is amazing as a narrator in other things, and she's a delight as Myne in the anime, so I was really glad when they got her to narrate this one. And as expected, she did a wonderful job here. She voiced Myne the same as she does in the series, including the way she says Turi's name, which is super cute. Absolutely zero complaints on narration, and I would be really sad if she's not back for the next book.

As for the book itself, it was surprisingly great! I was surprised at how well the anime covered events (this novel takes us to somewhere in episode 6 in the anime), but there was still plenty to get out of this book, and I look forward to the next one, which I will definitely be pre-ordering as soon as it's available (assuming Reba is back as the narrator).

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Amazing

Revisado: 02-04-24

I'll admit I was predisposed to like the narrator, given she was Taiga in Toradora. But she is also fantastic in her own right here. The story is also really good. It's a very chill slice of life story at this point, since the main character is still a very young child. There are plenty of hints that it'll get more exciting in the future, but honestly I feel like I could get really into a series that was all like this book, if the narrator was this good.

My one gripe is that I could honestly do without the dad's POV chapters. Graham does a fine job. Not amazing, but fine enough that I'm not sad they have a guy to do the alternate POV. A solid 3.5-4 star performance, maybe a little higher if he was paired with somebody less talented to compare him to. Maybe in future books these sections will become more valuable, but in this one they were mostly just distracting, though. The only reason I'm not detracting a star is that they're a relatively small part of the book. If it was half and half, this would be a much less good read.

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How does a narrator have a speech impediment?

Revisado: 01-10-24

This seems like a pretty solid isekai series. I really want to continue it. But I just looked and saw that the narrator somehow continues on to do the next book. I usually hate it when they change narrators, but sometimes you gotta bite the bullet and do it.

I thought at first "How cute, the narrator is kind of talking like a 4 year old when he's narrating a 4 year old." But then the character grew up a little, and the narrator didn't. If this dude wants to keep narrating, he needs to learn how to pronounce "th." 80% of the time he pronounces it like V, 19% of the time he pronounces it like F, and that makes the extremely rare occasion he pronounces it correctly stick out even more. Other than having a speech impediment, he's not actually half bad. But I can't sit through 8 hours of listening to somebody talking like my 6 year old nephew again, so I'm gonna skip anything else this guy narrates, which sadly includes this series.

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Way too much non-Kumoko stuff happening

Revisado: 01-09-24

I'll start out with the most important thing: Caitlin Kelly is still a genius as a narrator. I wish she narrated more stuff I'm interested in. Also, the primary issue with the earlier books, the super long appraisal readouts, is much less present in this book, as there just isn't much combat.

Ok, now that the well-deserved praise is out of the way: After the main side storyline in the earlier books finally ended in book 5 I was like "yay, now we should get more than 50% of the books from the spider's POV! There are 28 chapters, and only 5 (!!!!!) are spider POV chapters! It's especially bad in the middle, where there's a 3 hour stretch (11 chapters!) with nary a spider to be found.

All that aside, the first time I listened to this, I really enjoyed all the side character POVs, I thought they were much more interesting than Shun and his annoying friends, but I'm here for Kumoko, and when I listened for the second time I had much less interest in Ronandt and Aurel and even the vampire buddies. They're super important and progress the story just as much as the main chapters, but it feels like I'm eating my vegetables during these chapters, while Kumoko is somehow both the steak and also the pie for dessert. And the overall world and story is still super interesting, so I really hope the next book is more spiderful.

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Great book, but...

Revisado: 04-06-23

This is the only book Monica Rial is narrating! The next few have a different narrator, and then the one after that has yet another one! I'll continue complaining after the review.

I watched the first couple episodes of the anime and wasn't remotely interested. But thanks to Audible having a return policy, I figured I might as well give the audiobook a chance. Boy am I glad I did. Such a great Isekai-Fantasy-WW2 alternate history...I could probably list more genres this thing touches on. But it does all of them well. Monica is fantastic as a narrator, and as the English voice of Tanya, she obviously wins at that. The 2 major complaints I saw in reviews were "anti-religious" and "too many asides" and I want to address those.

Anti-religious: the character has a very good reason to hate God (which is the first thing in the book, so not a spoiler). And since this is fiction, the God in this universe is not the same as the one in the real world. As a religious person I took absolutely no offense at anything God-related in this book.

Asides/footnotes: literally every time there's a footnote after the first chapter, it happens as I pull my phone out to Google thing thing the footnote explains. I personally thing the detail these sidetracks go into are perfectly reasonable. Early on there are more footnotes that are a bit long and unnecessary. That's a legitimate complaint. It makes the early going really slow to get into. But once you get into the story, that's over!

Ok, finally, more complaining about the narrator changes, which have nothing to do with this book by itself:
I find it hard to listen to a series when they change narrators, most especially after an epic performance by a narrator. Which this was. So I'm really disappointed, even though I'm sure whoever they got is perfectly capable. I won't be getting book 2 right away, if at all, because of that. Which sucks, because I was really looking forward to it when I finished his one. I will be going back to the anime, though.

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