Full review here: https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/review-of-no-game-no-life-volume-1-by-yuu-kamiy... ( )

Terrible translation, I can't read it. I've seen better fan translations than this, I'm appalled this got sold with this quality, or better yet, lack of quality. A big miss, just read the manga and watch the anime, and I'm sure fan translations of this are better and probably float around out there.

An interesting premise for a story and a bit of a twist on the old "sucked into gameworld" theme.

I liked the idea of the brother and sister gamer protagonists, and a violence-free world is a cool premise that still allows for conflict. It's all a bit meta (lots of explicit rules that get articulated to the characters and the reader), but I can deal with that.

I'm not entirely convinced by the writing; translation always makes things tricky, and it's possible that it felt smoother in Japanese.

There's also the undeniable fact that it's the first novel of a manga artist, and I suspect being used to the dialogue-based conventions of that medium may have led to a writing style that can feel a bit jerky without the contextual cues provided by illustrations.

I'm kind of weirded out by the bizarre "romance" plot that may or may not involve the protagonist mind-controlling someone by exploiting the stake-setting rules of reality. The writing is unclear enough there, and the dialogue trying so hard to be clever and Machiavellian, that I genuinely couldn't tell and I don't feel like rereading it all to try and puzzle it out.

Suffice it to say that the arguments would make no sense either way - no plausible interpretation of "a little favour" includes "fall irrevocably in love". But that leaves us with, as far as I can tell, a brother protagonist who's a manipulative pickup artist trying to exploit legalistics to control a woman for sex. It's not exactly edifying.

On the other hand, fiction conventions about romance, sex, relationships and so on are sufficiently odd - and Japanese fiction's specific attitude to sexual content and relationships sufficiently hard for me to get my head around - that I don't really know how to interpret it within genre tropes. To be clear, I don't have a problem with sexual content; I'm just not sure how I'm expected to parse it here.

Like, there's some clear incesty vibes coming off the sister protagonist, and both of them are keen to get Steph naked and treat her like a plaything. On the other hand, the book is keen to persuade you that she's secretly enjoying it, and neither of those seem to be particularly uncommon themes. I kind of give up and shrug here.

I think I'd have found it easier to accept the weird romanceish bits if the writing had been better at conveying subtleties, since I can handle it in romance novels. However, it's mostly focused on the games (which is fair enough) so there just isn't enough wordcount devoted to making the relationships convincing as anything other than "all of these people would benefit from professional help".

On the plus side, I did find the main storyline somewhat interesting, and I'd be vaguely interested to find out what happens. I can sort of guess, since it seems to be a rough equivalent of a battle manga, but still. ( )