EXP Is Golden: Volume 1 - Great first volume. It’s at the core a kingdom-building and game character progression story. MC more or less stumbles into the role of the final boss but decides to embrace it completely. No altruistic saints cosplaying as “Evil™” is to be found here.
Babel, Vol. 2 - I really can’t follow MC here. She takes actions that are completely unfathomable. For example, trying to kill herself to win an argument. I wish I could make this up. It’s also made up of a lot of conflicts that could completely be averted if characters wouldn’t treat information as if it were a secret. A simple “Oh hey Mr. Employer, I’ve overheard two suspicious people in the courtyard and it seems they want to use some sort of item on you. They sounded as if they didn’t like you but they really were a fan of someone called “insert name here”. I don’t know more but I thought you might want to know…”. I wonder if this is its own thing or if this belongs to the “oblivious MC” trope. I mean looking at how stupidly oblivious MC is in general I feel it would fit at least. That all being said, there are some genuinely interesting concepts in this series. If those concepts were handled better (and MC were different) it could really be one of the stand-out titles—so much wasted potential.
High School DxD: Volume 1-14
Recently took the time and actually read the books of this. Obviously the target demographic is horny teenage boys of which only the first part still applies to me but oh well, it’s still a good read anyway, if only because some aspects of the story are just way too funny to my adult brain.
For a harem series the MC is expectedly dense, although the author does have an explanation ready for that and gives the MC some character development this “early” on into the story, reducing the annoyance of it somewhat. Still even after supposedly overcoming his issues the MC displays a typical lack of self-awareness and a profound ability to not actually do anything lewd while constantly doing lewd things. I find other approaches to avoiding graphic descriptions in the novel preferable to somehow making the audience believe a hormone driven teenager wouldn’t try anything if surrounded by willing girls, but that’s the genre I guess.
Enjoyable enough to be very good if you like Ecchi Harem stuff, definitely wouldn’t recommend if you don’t
