I have to say that I preferred the fight with Gloria, it felt more tense and involved.
Seeing Huamglong in action and knowing that he still didn't qualify for the ending makes you realize how great of a margin of improvement the regular cast of the series have. And since I'd love to read the conclusion before I reach the age of retirement I hope Ray in particular will speed up his growth.
A fair amount of backstory was given in this volume, which made it more interesting than it were simply a side quest. Sometimes I even fear the author is adding too much world building to be able to wrap things in a satisfying way but we'll see in the future.
More SP volumes will come, meaning more opportunities to expand on things that were mentioned in the main story. Woukd be nice if this lead to more focus on Ray in the regular volumes...

@Lex said in Infinite Dendrogram Vol. 23 Discussion!:

This series is well written but while I don't know if the release odder in Japan was the same, four volumes in a row without the protagonist are too much.

It sort of was. V22 and SP1 came out in the same month, and SP1/SP2 were just expanded releases of a BluRay bonus volume that they already had, so dedicated fans likely wouldn't have considered them too disruptive, so might be 3 volumes without Ray to them, which is more disruptive to us since the (lack of) backlog here doesn't really require JNC doing multiple volumes simultaneously on this series. But yes, otherwise JNC has followed the same release order in Japan.

It was a nice read, helped by the fact that Shu is one of my favorite characters.

So when I first saw this volume my immediate thought was "oh, a side story about characters I don't care about" and even considered skipping it if I found myself running g short of time before the volume expired. But there was a clearly familiar bear on the cover, you might argue, but fir some reasons I assumed he was the other bear introduced in volume 17.
In the end I read the book and was really happy to see that it instead featured our beloved brother bear Shu, who is one of my favorite characters. Plus a giant robot battle, I can never say no to giant robots. Needless to say, it was an enjoyable read, I'm glad I didn't skip it.

@Lex There's actually Ray stuff in this volume since the whole G part was LN exclusive content.

i was reading volume 2 chapter 2 when instead of getting dendogram i got a random chapter from how a realist hero rebuilt the kingdom, i have a picture but it isn’t letting me link it

There’s a mistake in the ebook version, apparently the pages of the bonus story are switched.

Sometimes you just need to Falcon Punch a dude 😎

The premium epub color illustration (character intros) say Gerbera has a "Sentinel type embryo". Did I miss an updated / new terminology? Or is that just a typo for "Guardian" (type) embryo?

@Lisast Given

Bonus Short Stories - Coming Soon

So much for hoping that the title of the bonus story was Coming Soon.
Really liked how the last one ended though. Really fits with how everyone but Ray can see what vibe his appearance is giving off.

I poked them on Discord and confirmed that it's not intended to release today, they've pushed back the date and will update it again when it's ready.

Alto's S-rank pull is really funny, Jubei seems to have decided that Ray really was related to the accident 10 years ago (but can't stop fighting long enough to find out ^^), and I wish Xunyu got more screentime cause she rules. (I get why she can't, but I still wish it'd happen.)

I'm not entirely pleased with Chelsea's though.

@legitpancake changed

For those interested in the whole drama around Franklin and A-RI-CA and how much it affected Franklin. There is an extra WN SS that can be read after volume 16, though if you don't know Japanese you'll have to MTL it. Don't go poking further though if you don't want to be spoiled for the current WN arc / future LN arcs.

@22144418 said in Infinite Dendrogram Vol. 15 Discussion!:

the Theodore and his fellow knights die is a bit sad... are there even enough tians left in the palace to even sustain a town? The post-launch mortality and carnage rates are so high, compared to how it was before, that the game's worldbuilding would likely keel over and die faster than the devs losing fresh changes to keep the game from burning out.

They didn't die. Arc Sage maybe be the worst but she is a capable healer.

@terabyte I know, right? I was planning on reading the LN last month during catch-up, but I just couldn't find the time
sigh I'll get around to it eventually...probably

well I shall cross my fingers and hope for another season of the anime