灰と幻想のグリムガル level.1 ささやき、詠唱、祈り、目覚めよ

もともとあぶれ者なんだ...曲がりなりにもパーティになった... 仲間になった。うまくいかないこともあるし、腹が立つことも、喧嘩することだってある。だけどやっぱり、みんな大切な仲間なんだ。

"...we were the leftovers to begin with... but we managed to become a party. We became comrades. Sometimes things don't go well, and sometimes we get angry and fight with each other. But, in the end, we're all still precious comrades."

Story: Grimgar of Fantasy & Ashes is a very atypical 異世界. You're not following around the special chosen hero, who becomes OP and changes the world. Instead you're following a party who struggle intensely at what they do. You get to watch them slowly and painstakingly become better at what they do, and their struggles along the way. Sometimes their failures and setbacks are huge, and often their successes are moderate. But occasionally they pull off something really profound.

For the most part, the characters are all likeable (except for Ranta who is intentionally made to be as dislikeable as possible). While the characters are mostly good people, they're not necessarily the noble heroes you might expect of a fantasy story. If you've seen the anime, book 1 lines up almost identically with the first half, although it's not as deep on the slice of life aspect of it. You also get Haruhiro's perspective on things, and a bit of world building that wasn't present in the anime (and more to come in future novels).

Writing style: The writing style isn't perfect, but one of the things I really appreciate with the series is that the author improves with each book (I'm in the middle of book 5 right now). One of the things I find interesting about book 1 is that it has an incredibly even pacing, almost to a fault. It never felt like it dragged, but also never felt like it sped up (this is not the case in future books, which have more solid action in them). The lead character's thoughts can definitely be a bit gloomy - which is understandable, given their circumstances. At the same time, it's not overly bleak or depressing. One of the shortcomings is that the author relies very heavily on the banter between Haruhiro (our lead) and Ranta (who is always turned up to 11). It gives you all too clear a sense of how wearing it is on Haruhiro and the rest of the party. Thankfully this is something that (slowly) decreases over subsequent volumes.

Language: Grammatically I found it fairly approachable, with the exception that sometimes you get very long sentences with 4-6 clauses, which I found challenging to parse. One character, Yume, speaks in a Kansai-ish, cutesy accent, which can be a bit incoherent, but it's usually followed by another character restating or correcting it to standard Japanese. Ranta speaks There is a lot of repeated vocab and phrases (sometimes too much), which makes it very useful for learning. There are also a lot of onomatopoeic words, which made it challenging (but useful) at first, and lots of great phrases to pick up. Comparatively, I found it a lot easier to read through than ソードアート・オンライン | L33, once I got into it, and probably somewhere similar to 本好きの下剋上~司書になるためには手段を選んでいられません~第一部「兵士の娘1 | L31 (tho I didn't get far enough into 本好き to make a fair comparison). However, I found it a lighter read than 本好き, b/c it has less deep internal monologue. I think the series is probably a good starting point, if you're looking to read fantasy LNs.