No Game No Life, Vol. 7 (light novel‪)‬

Incredibly confusing but very charming in a way I’m beginning to think only no game no life can be. It’s ridiculous but so entertaining.... and it ended on a very interesting note. I like the manic style of writing these novels have and it came out in full force with this volume. The whole thing kind of felt like a fever dream. I hope they make a season 2 of ngnl because it would be pretty nice to see this - and volume 5 - animated. I truly don’t know how I became so involved with the series after watching and not thinking too much of the anime but here we are. I am in love with the art style and there were so many illustrations in this volume. Good, confusing, problematic, ridiculous times.

While I really enjoy this series, I’ve always found that it’s very poorly written. More specifically, it’s written in a way that just barely allows the reader to keep up. There’s so much mislaneous info that frequently occurs between dialogue from the characters that a lot of reveals, explanations, and buildup fall flat on their face (even the afterward is drawn out an annoying to read). This is the only series where I at times find myself doubling back and rereading pages, filtering out a lot of what’s written just so I can comprehend what’s going on. While this is something that’s been a constant in the series, it's especially bad with this volume for some reason. I get that it’s trying to separate itself from other series in that regard, but if it didn’t have so much useless info and, more importantly, didn’t break in between every other portion of dialogue to include said useless info, it’d be a much smoother read. The best way to describe the writing is that’s it’s trying to be poetic in order to deep, which isn’t really necessary at all.

A part of me feels that the translation, in it’s attempts to be true to the original text, doesn’t really help much and possibly makes things even more confusing, at least for this volume. There was one particularly important sentence, more specifically one task (which isn’t really a spoiler if you don’t know what’s going on), that, while mentioned twice, made no sense to me, even when explained in the next couple of pages. This really annoyed me as I sat there wondering, “How did you come to this conclusion from that sentence?!”

The other problem with this volume in particular is it’s lack of re-telling key points of recent events, something that’s common in every other light novel series I’ve read. There’s so much going on in the story at this point that I’ve completely forgotten some characters and plot points. That however might simply be due to the way this series was written as not only does the current arc start at the very end of the last book (volume 6, which came out more than a year and a half ago), it was revealed to be a prequel to the series rather than a continuation of the story. So in order to not be as confused beginning this volume, one would have had to recently read volume 5, completely skip the bulk of volume 6 with the exception of the final chapter, and then start this volume in order to have a decent grasp of the events in this book. After that you’ll want to go back and actually read the rest of volume 6 as it might play a big role in volume 8. Or preferably, if you’re lucky enough to have started reading this series by the time this volume was released, simply read though all three volumes in a relatively close timeframe.

All in all, though I enjoy this series, I can only hope that the original writing improves in the next few volumes. Thankfully, the next one is set to release in a few months so I don’t forget anything. That’s the last bad part about this volume (in a good way): it’s the first of two parts that ends in a cliffhanger!!!