As an Amazon Associate, Natively earns from qualifying purchases through any Amazon links on the site.
All of our Movie & TV metadata comes from the wonderful project,
The Movie Database. Thank you! While we are permitted to use the TMDB API, we have not been endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The 陰キャオタク Fumiya Tomozaki has some distorted thinking about the world, and how it's a クソゲーム, and essentially thinks the responsibility lies everywhere but himself. The リア充 Aoi Hinami condescends and clashes with him, claims that real life is a 神ゲーム, and then decides to take him under her wing, gamifying real life to help him improve his shortcomings (real or imagined).
If you've seen the anime | L23 this book is basically identical to the first four episodes, with the bonus of getting Tomozaki's inner-narration. Delightfully there is no info dumping and I was tempted to give the novel a 5 just for that! There are times when he's way too stuck in the mud, but that's kind of the point (for now), and it never drags on to an extreme.
There's a lot I can relate to in this story - especially Tomozaki himself (I was similar back in high school), and Hinami's lessons/coaching (mostly very solid advice). The main joy comes from watching Tomozaki slowly mature and open his eyes to new things, as a result of the work that he's putting in, and how that enables him (and others) to grow. The way Hinami is able to analogize アタファミand other games to real life, is also brilliant. Getting to see both Hinami & Tomozaki's analysis of things each time around is also very interesting.
That said, the whole premise is a bit over-simplified in the first place, and it would probably be fair to say that sometimes things are a bit too convenient... though there will definitely some bumps along the way, in the upcoming volumes.