Volume 1 Description: Over 220 million cumulative page views! The mega-hit from "Shōsetsuka ni Narō" is finally getting the manga adaptation fans have been waiting for!
Hiyama Rakurō is a man with an undying love for shovelware games. His next challenge: Shangri-La Frontier, a "god-tier" game with 30 million players worldwide. Companions (of questionable morals) gather, a vast world unfolds — and an encounter with his ultimate nemesis sets in motion a destiny that will change him, and every play...
Did not disappoint
Watched the anime, and then came to the manga. I was not disappointed.
The first volume covers the start through the meeting with Vysache, plus a BERP/便秘 scene. The action is great, the expressions are great, and although I still think the anime adaptation is phenomenal, the manga is pretty damn good. I've got the next volume ready to go.
From a language learning perspective, however, things are a bit different. The main language used throughout the text boxes is fairly easy to get through, but there are two outliers.
First, this is a story about video games, and video games need to make skills, moves, locations, epithets, etc as flowery and detailed as possible. These, when appearing as UI elements, do NOT usually have furigana, and even when they do, the language used is not the type of language that is useful in everyday conversation. The opening to the game (which is present in one of the inter-chapter guides) contained about as many new words for me as the rest of the volume (manga portion) combined.
And second, the last eight pages - which are a novel story. Compared to the difficulty of the main volume, suddenly getting non-Joyo kanji (without furigana for pronunciation) combined with proverbs and katakanified attack names was a sudden increase in difficulty. I'd say that the eight-page extra story took around 2-3 times more time to read than the entire rest of the volume since I had to use a dictionary for a few dozen words.
Still, I highly recommend Shangri-La Frontier, and of course the game opening and the extra story are skippable if you don't want to get hit by unlabeled kun'yomi like 蹲る, 厭う, and 捲し立てる.