sa090
Written on Feb 11, 2020
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This volume continues the previous volume’s encounter with the new UBM and wraps up this trip to Torne, which again was meh at best. I mentioned last time that this novel is mostly filler, and it shows that it is, since the novel ends about 70% into the book with the remaining pages dedicated to short side stories. Personally, I don’t care all that much about tians, so these two volumes which contained the story of the tian family in Torne + the fight against Monochrome kind of comprised the things that I don’t really care all that much about in Infinite Dendrogram. Thing is, the series will seemingly continue to show Ray in various situations helping and saving tians for the sake of his embryo. A maiden type is said to be given to those who view the game’s world like real life and the tians like real people, which puts yours truly on the very far end of the spectrum. Therefore, I can see why this is here; however, I still don’t understand the frequency.
You get it after it’s been emphasized a few times, right? No need to continuously try to prove to me that this guy is so different from everyone else that he got the “rare” Maiden type embryo and WHY he got it. Anyway, he’s a lost cause at this point because I don’t need to do anything to know that Sakon Kaidou will continue the trend. I don’t mind side stories and side missions, sometimes they’re awesome. However, when they add absolutely nothing to the story, the character or the world building, then it is pointless and a waste of pages that could have been used to do something completely different.
The encounter proceeds in the similar convieninace heavy fashion the previous Ray vs X ones do, but we do get to see something new here so let’s consider that a small plus for now. I think the one who got the bigger spotlight here was B3 and one sentence to describe her instance: She talks waaaaaaaay tooooooo much. Doesn’t help that she was dealing with fodder, but she’s not Ray so let’s make her do something that should have been given to fodder masters not to someone who could possibly be a superior at some point.
I’m very disappointed with how this one went if my above comments are not enough of an indication, at the very least though; the short stories in the back weren’t bad. The writing continues being amusing to me and there are some bits and pieces of lore thrown around that makes me wish it would take a much bigger space than this and hopefully it will soon enough. For now though; meh at best.
Final rating: 1.5/5