Click to confirm you are 18+

Review of “My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! Volume 3” by Satoru Yamaguchi

EisahJan 1, 2023, 6:27:02 PM

Buy it here:

Check here for a Braille version: https://ko-fi.com/braille

The beginning of this novel suffers severely from a lot of the issues that are in the previous volumes. For chapters 1 and 2, I was bored, waiting for something to happen. A lot of the text was repeating stuff we already know. For example, I don’t need a character introduction to everyone and who they are, because I read the previous two books. Unfortunately, this book felt it necessary to tell us who they are and how they met Katarina multiple times.

Which isn’t the only information that gets repeated. It also summarizes what happened in the last book. These aren’t necessarily lengthy summaries, but there are so many of them that a huge chunk of book three is just telling us about books 1 and 2.

On top of that, the new stuff is a school festival. That’s fine, but really all Katarina is doing there is eating. As can be said about many anime-style protagonists, “Eating is not a personality trait”. It’s not particularly interesting to hear endlessly about a character eating.

So a huge portion of the beginning chapters could have easily been cropped down.

There are other bits that could have been edited, too. Such as:

“Huh? It’s not gold you’re after? Then why did you kidnap me?” Not… gold? Then why?

Theirs is no reason to have her think in italics the exact same thing she just said. Almost all of the italics could be removed because they’re repeating something that was already said. If the book was edited to trim out the repetition, it could probably be about 170 pages and be a lot tighter.

Unfortunately, that distracted me with this book because, especially for a while, not much was going on to begin with, so there wasn’t something else to drag me into the plot.

When it eventually got to the kidnapping in chapter 3, I thought the story with Rufus was fine. It does suffer from a similar problem that book 2 did, in that it’s a bit disconnected from Katarina – although I give this one more credit in that regard. Whereas book 2 just had the character fall in love with her like the others and that’s the only reason she was involved, this time it has to do with her political position, which makes sense.

Although I felt a lot more distracted by the issues in the series with this book, I did like the end part with Jeffrey, and I thought the overall plot was okay. I would like Katarina to be written stronger from here. Her solution was, again, she said something that happened to remind a character of something from their past, which doesn’t really feel like her actively solving a problem. I want her to start working on the solutions based on her own life experiences.

For example, in this case, Rufus tells her about his dark past. Based on what he’s said, her response honestly feels out of place. Who just says, “You’re cool” after hearing about massive child abuse? Instead of, “There’s child abuse and slavery happening? We should stop this” or something, which I felt would be more in character. But she actually doesn’t even consider stopping the abuse or slavery and it only concentrates on the villain of this book, forget that crimes are still being committed against other children.

So, overall, I found this one weaker because it still suffered from the issues of the beginning one, which it should be getting over by now, and it wasn’t quite strong enough overall. It wasn’t terrible, but I do hope the next books improve from here because there is a good setup to carry on the series.

Next time I’ll review “Ascendance of a Bookworm Part 1 Volume 1” by Miya Kazuki, both the manga and the light novel.

Manga:

Light Novel:

Support Braille here: https://ko-fi.com/braille

Other reviews:
"The Second Jungle Book" https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/the-second-jungle-book-by-rudyard-kipling-1390007675730792452

"We" https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/we-by-evgenii-zamiatin-1390784329147224071