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Nov 15, 2025
This show is fresh in that the main character Chitose is the antithesis of your typical male rom-com main character. He is smart, athletic and adored by a large group of equally stellar friends. However, his popularity also draws him a lot of unjustified hate which ends up being one of the main sources of drama for the show.
One of the aforementioned unjustified haters are Kenta, your stereotypical otaku shut-in who is refusing to attend school and slings all sorts of hate at Chitose and his friends, both online and in person, simply for being the most popular group in their school. The first
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story arch isn't about Chitose so much as it is about Kenta and his personal growth that is sparked by a major intervention in his life by Chitose and his friends. The show ends up meaningfully demonstrating how a lot of Kenta's toxic behavior stem's from a lack of social supports and caring relationships, and how much it can turn someone's life around when they are provided these things and have positive role models.
As much as I love the messaging of this show, the dialogue and interaction leaves much to be desired. Additionally, Kenta does feel like a fully realized character by the end of the first arch, but he turns things around a little *too* quickly and easily for me to fully suspend my disbelief. The show has other stories it wishes to tell though, and majorly pivots back to the kinda issues that Chitose and his friends face for being popular, with one of the side characters Yuzuki having to deal with an escalating stalker situation.
This show is about halfway through a one month hiatus at the time of this review after only releasing less than half of the total planned episodes for the first season (5/13). I started reading the manga because I did not want to wait to see how the story continues. I started from chapter 1 though because I know shows tend to skip a lot, and this case I would say there are decisions made by the director that I consider to be especially egregious. The difference in writing qualify between the manga and anime is big, and a lot of it has to do with dialogue being significantly shortened if not outright cut from the show. As although this tends to be inevitable with shows, I would say it hurts the enjoyability a lot in this case.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Aug 12, 2024
Grand Dwarf has an interesting enough premise that is absolutely wasted by the author's apparent inability to write a compelling story to save their life.
Our MC is a 70 early old craftsman who is a master of his work, whatever that is. He's some kinda metal worker that runs his own shop, but the author never elaborates on exactly what services this shop provides or what work is actually done there. He dies from a heart attack, is reincarnated in a high fantasy world in a young body, and quickly finds that his whole workshop and all its tools were conveniently transported with him.
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He also has an eye that grants him very convenient super powers for a craftsman like analyzing the properties of different materials.
It doesn't take long for our MC to meet a native adventurer of this world who is adventuring alone after being betrayed by her party. He quickly enters into a sorta arrangement with her where he'll craft her equipment to use to defeat the demon lord, and after only a few days, crafts her an extremely powerful sci-fi sorta laser gun that uses her mana for ammunition.
This gun is incredibly OP and one-shot monsters that are hyped up to be something incredibly scary and formidable. It can also be used to immediately heal anyone of any injury short of death. The next eight chapters I read are literally just our heroes one-shoting all of their problems away and effortlessly gaining tons of fame, recognition and riches along the way.
I don't know how anyone can maintain interest in this story beyond what I've read, but it's gone on for 33 chapters as of the writing of this review, so clearly it appeals to SOMEONE. If you love stories that provide nothing but effortless wish fulfillment then this story is for you. For everyone else: don't give this manga even a second of your time.
Manga does get points for having nice art, including some beautiful landscapes and appealing character designs, but that's it. That is all the nice things I have to say about it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Nov 8, 2023
Shangri-La Frontier is a manga that drew me in real good at the start and held my attention pretty well for the next 96 chapters. This author very obviously knows his stuff when it comes to action RPGs and put a ton of thought into creating the imaginary video game this manga is named after. Discovering more and more about this game world from the perspective of Sunraku was very entertaining for me for a time and I enjoyed the steady drip of exciting quests, new locations, mechanics, equipment and so forth that we expect to see in a good open world RPG. Sunraku himself
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is also a rather novel character to me as someone who has honed his skills through the obsessive enjoyment of poorly designed trash games.
With that all that being said, I did slowly but steadily lose interest in this series until finally deciding to drop it once and for all on chapter 96. It never failed to continue presenting what seems like a very good video game, but the thing is that this author isn't actually making a game, but writing a story. He has one part of a good story with excellent and thoughtful world building, but he's unfortunately not nearly as good at writing interesting and compelling characters to drive that story forward.
The author has populated the world with tons of characters, but none of them really go beyond the stereotypes they're based off. Their dialogue and interactions all felt painfully shallow and predictable to me after a while and I didn't feel invested in any of their personal stories, not that I ever actually learned very much about any of them across 96 whole chapters. I did say that Sunraku was a novel character at first, but playing shitty games and being a god gamer is really his entire personality. I also started to get bored by how Sunraku is effortlessly so much better than the millions of others supposedly playing Shangri-La Frontier, including those who are also the best of the best and playing the game much longer than him. He starts to feel exactly like the "Invincible Hero" trope that One Punch Man parodies so well, and this is despite the fact that the author did try to give him weaknesses as a glass canon.
To conclude, I don't think it's an awful story. The author did some things very well and others rather poorly. Some people aren't going to be nearly as bothered by these templated characters and that's fine. They just failed at being interesting characters to me and it slowly but progressively started to outweigh the fun I was having witnessing the interesting game world the author thought up.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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