Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.
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Disappointingly enough. There was much less food in this volume. I'm amused that now the girls are all over level 50. Satou is much more reckless about showing his true strength. It also looks like Parion is definitely the one who summoned him originally. For her own reasons.
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I think an increasing number of people at least suspect that his various aliases are aliases for the same person.
Among them the ladies managing the store.We know Hayashi figured it out.
...I continue having a major problem with his store and how he's got it set up.
If anything happens to him they're hosed.
He's subsidizing them like you wouldn't believe, and so much of their stock at all levels is stuff he's supplying.
It's effectively a money laundering operation, allowing him to intervene in social matters under an alias.
Which is fine so long as he's around, but eventually he won't be and even with the research going on (that he's subsidizing) I'm not seeing how they'd be able to keep going for long given there's no source for so much of their inventory aside from him. (And I start to repeat myself, yes.)
For me the downside of less food related sections would be fewer references to 'Mr. Meat'.
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Oh, fun! I never thought to discuss non-JNC books in the JNC forums. I guess it's allowed. Now that I'm thinking about it the Death March sub-reddit is pretty dead (contributing to my concern that the series might get cancelled due to lack of popularity), and I've never had the chance to discuss any of the books there.
So, my overall impression of this one was that it felt a bit rushed. I will say that many series feel different when binged vs. when read serially, and so my impression might change if I were to read through the entire series again.
My favorite thing about DM is when the group enters a new area and slowly makes their presence felt while becoming familiar with the local people and customs. That didn't really happen here, which I thought was a missed opportunity. True, they had to rush to rescue Hayato, and that may have been part of the reason. But I also feel like they were sucked into the Demon Lord hunt too quickly. I found that I had a hard time remembering all the side-characters - all the different knights and priests and their factional affiliations - and this is actually pretty rare for DM which usually has such distinct and memorable side-characters.
By comparison, my favorite arc in the series so far is the Celivera Labyrinth arc, and the first book of that arc didn't feel rushed at all to me. They managed to do all the house-hunting, and cuisine sampling, and side-character interacting, and yet had plenty of space left for adventuring. Consider that this is the book that introduces the Lovely Wings, and Besso, and Princess Metia, and the plunderers. All of whom remain distinct and clear in my memory. Whereas, there was a twist at the end of V20 (the identity of the shadow man was revealed) and I couldn't even remember who the character was, which certainly dulled its impact.
Overall, I still enjoyed the volume, but I'd love for them to get back to more of a slow-living vibe.
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@unknownmat said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
discuss non-JNC books in the JNC forums
Yes it is fine, in fact please do!
Sorry but J-Novel Club does not publicly comment on any potential licensing decision or acquisitions.
J-Novel Club, Future Volume Release Schedule
Manga FAQ
Premium Content List -
@PuckGoodfellow00-0 said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
I'm amused that now the girls are all over level 50. Satou is much more reckless about showing his true strength.
Good catch. He did mention that part of his reason for hiding his powers was to keep the girls safe, so it's believable that he'd cut a bit looser now. But I share your surprise by just how much he was willing to reveal (e.g. the fact that he could make a hero-sword glow blue). I thought that maybe this was because Hayato already knew that he was a Japanese transplant. But I do wonder how much the hero's companions picked up on.
It also looks like Parion is definitely the one who summoned him originally. For her own reasons.
Agreed. There's also the sub-plot of a goddess (Parion?) falling in love with a human, and that the human would require many lives to be large enough for a goddess. This is clearly tied-in somehow with the many-worlds mechanism and the fact that Ichirou seems to have gone missing in all of them.
@Geezer-Weasalopes said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
I think an increasing number of people at least suspect that his various aliases are aliases for the same person.
Yes! I was wondering this myself. I can't remember what it was, but he had an interaction in the last book or two that I remember thinking strongly hinted at Satou or Kuro having inexplicable knowledge about something that happened with the other. I don't know if that was intentional, or an authorial slip, or if I'm reading too much into it.
Fundamentally, one of the things that makes Death March so fun is Satou's ability to interact organically with the side-characters. That would no longer be possible if it became widely known that he was a hero. He would enter every relationship from a position of power and it would completely change the dynamic. I think the series would suffer for it.
It's effectively a money laundering operation, allowing him to intervene in social matters under an alias.
That's hilarious, but you're not wrong. It makes me laugh that Satou directly controlled two of the primary movers (Pendragon and Ichigoya Company) during the auction scene. Imagine how much panic there would be if anyone realized that a single noble were accumulating so much influence so quickly.
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@Rahul-Balaggan said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
@unknownmat said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
discuss non-JNC books in the JNC forums
Yes it is fine, in fact please do!
It would be nice to see more active threads from other published LNs.
There are so many i read and would make a great discussion thread.
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@unknownmat said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
Agreed. There's also the sub-plot of a goddess (Parion?) falling in love with a human, and that the human would require many lives to be large enough for a goddess. This is clearly tied-in somehow with the many-worlds mechanism and the fact that Ichirou seems to have gone missing in all of them.
..and that parts of his own memory keep changing on him, like the hair color of his childhood friend at the shrine, or when Mito brought up being a co-worker he remembered that for a second.
I haven't read the web novel so this is just speculation, but it does seem like hints that Satou is a fusion of multiple Ichirou souls from the multiverse, and has become a baby god because of that. See also the mention of his greyed-out Immortality unique skill in an earlier volume (the one where he met the Boleman elves and his sweetie miss Ahz?)
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@HarmlessDave All good points. There's also the fact that he's exceeded level 99 which seems to be a hard limit for most other characters. I haven't quite pieced it all together yet, but I like that the author clearly has a resolution in mind that the story is building towards.
As a non-WN reader myself, the Reddit forums are brutal. I'm not usually anti-spoiler, but when you enter a discussion 15 volumes in and posters are casually giving away details about the end of the series.... sheesh. I've heard that the WN is different enough from the LN that they should just be considered separate works - so not wanting to mix them up accidentally, I've mostly shied away from the WN. But this leaves me at the mercy of the pace of the English LN translation.
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@HarmlessDave said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
See also the mention of his greyed-out Immortality unique skill in an earlier volume (the one where he met the Boleman elves and his sweetie miss Ahz?)
I... don't remember that. It's been so long and he's got so many skills, titles, and secrets that I wouldn't be surprised he has another unique skill that isn't fully(?) active yet simply because it hasn't been mentioned in 15ish volumes.
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@endoftheline said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
I... don't remember that. It's been so long and he's got so many skills, titles, and secrets that I wouldn't be surprised he has another unique skill that isn't fully(?) active yet simply because it hasn't been mentioned in 15ish volumes.
It's mentioned at the beginning of book two, if you wanted to check. I don't think it has been mentioned since.
Incidentally, my four abilities turned out to be Menu, Unit Creation, Unit Deployment, and Immortality.
and a couple paragraphs later...
The two unit-related skills ... were greyed out and couldn't be selected. "Immortality" was, too...
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@unknownmat said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
Overall, I still enjoyed the volume, but I'd love for them to get back to more of a slow-living vibe.
The afterword mentioned next volume would be still in Parion province, so it should have much more slice of life goodness.
Also, Satou not suspecting the sage (who might or might not be the evil sage in the side POVs) is totally in character for him. He's mentioned many times that he's terrible at detective work and that he never guesses the real criminal when reading detective novels. That, and he often figures it's not his problem to solve :)
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@unknownmat
Oh ho!
While he hasn't developed everything required to 'activate' it, immortality is a possibility down the line.
That would take care of at least some of my concerns about how he's managing the companies; he's be around under some guise or another, and could continue providing them with the things only he can. -
@Geezer-Weasalopes said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
@unknownmat
Oh ho!
While he hasn't developed everything required to 'activate' it, immortality is a possibility down the line.
That would take care of at least some of my concerns about how he's managing the companies; he's be around under some guise or another, and could continue providing them with the things only he can.I don't remember where I read it, but I remember seeing Immortality translated as Indestructible before. Which means that he doesn't have to worry about becoming a Demon Lord because his "soul vessel" can't break.
Honestly, I realized that it would be okay to post about Death March in this category, because I read the category descriptions. I'm glad to see an official seal of approval though. 😉
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@HarmlessDave said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
@unknownmat said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
Overall, I still enjoyed the volume, but I'd love for them to get back to more of a slow-living vibe.
The afterword mentioned next volume would be still in Parion province, so it should have much more slice of life goodness.
Also, Satou not suspecting the sage (who might or might not be the evil sage in the side POVs) is totally in character for him. He's mentioned many times that he's terrible at detective work and that he never guesses the real criminal when reading detective novels. That, and he often figures it's not his problem to solve :)
I assumed that it was. Since the powers matched up.
I'm wondering more about whether or not the "Holy Woman" that was mentioned is the same one Satou found from a map search. It would explain why Parion Province was having so much trouble with infighting.
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@PuckGoodfellow00-0 said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
I'm wondering more about whether or not the "Holy Woman" that was mentioned is the same one Satou found from a map search. It would explain why Parion Province was having so much trouble with infighting.
I just assumed that there was but one "Holy Woman" running around inside Parion.
Never even considered otherwise. -
@HarmlessDave said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
Also, Satou not suspecting the sage (who might or might not be the evil sage in the side POVs) is totally in character for him. He's mentioned many times that he's terrible at detective work and that he never guesses the real criminal when reading detective novels. That, and he often figures it's not his problem to solve :)
Yeah. As someone who is similarly bad at mysteries, I find Satou's cluelessness particularly relatable. Encyclopedia Brown always stumped me...
Although Tama's reaction was pretty telling. She's so good at sniffing out malice that it hardly even counts as foreshadowing at this point. I do feel that maybe Satou should have at least done a better job of picking up on her reaction.
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@unknownmat - yes, Tama detected the demon worshipper cleric who brought down the evil god fragments a couple of volumes back, and has had similar reactions before like with Poputema the mind-controlled green man. Lazy Satou just checks his AR display, sees nothing obvious, and shrugs :)
I'm not 100% convinced that the sage that fought alongside them is the evil sage. I'm wondering if the author is trying to fake us out instead of repeating the pattern and it will turn out that he is a good sage fighting against the evil one. It's not too likely, but we'll see.
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@HarmlessDave said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
I'm not 100% convinced that the sage that fought alongside them is the evil sage. I'm wondering if the author is trying to fake us out instead of repeating the pattern and it will turn out that he is a good sage fighting against the evil one. It's not too likely, but we'll see.
The impression I got was that there were two sages, and the clearly totes insane one despised the other as a goody two shoes or something like that.
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@unknownmat said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
@HarmlessDave All good points. There's also the fact that he's exceeded level 99 which seems to be a hard limit for most other characters. I haven't quite pieced it all together yet, but I like that the author clearly has a resolution in mind that the story is building towards.
As a non-WN reader myself, the Reddit forums are brutal. I'm not usually anti-spoiler, but when you enter a discussion 15 volumes in and posters are casually giving away details about the end of the series.... sheesh. I've heard that the WN is different enough from the LN that they should just be considered separate works - so not wanting to mix them up accidentally, I've mostly shied away from the WN. But this leaves me at the mercy of the pace of the English LN translation.
I hate to say it, the Web Novel is NOT currently different enough from the Light Novel to consider them separate works. I went and read ahead on the Web Novel once I caught up to the Light Novel, and while some details have changed to keep the story more engaging and less 'I win over everything with ease', the broad strokes of the greater plot are identical, including a fair amount of the foreshadowing. A lot of the major 'plot points' that have changed were clearly minimized in later writing of the web novel, and thus changing those details has done no damage to the plot.
My opinion is all the changes to the Light Novel has made the story better to read and more worthwhile to read - that being said, the broad strokes of the greater plot remain intact for the same outcomes to be discovered down the road as the Web Novel.
This was a pretty good volume, and I do like the sub-plot of the Evil God's Curse and the villian introduced - the latter certainly didn't exist in the current format in the web novel, but it both introduces the later WN arcs via hints as well as fleshes out the world.
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@Geezer-Weasalopes said in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Vol 20.:
...I continue having a major problem with his store and how he's got it set up.
If anything happens to him they're hosed.
He's subsidizing them like you wouldn't believe, and so much of their stock at all levels is stuff he's supplying.
It's effectively a money laundering operation, allowing him to intervene in social matters under an alias.
Which is fine so long as he's around, but eventually he won't be and even with the research going on (that he's subsidizing) I'm not seeing how they'd be able to keep going for long given there's no source for so much of their inventory aside from him. (And I start to repeat myself, yes.)Except that isn't entirely true. The reason they were asking for more employees for all departments (alchemists, magic tools creation, etc) is because their side businesses are thriving. Remember, while all the military contracts are basically him laundering money, but a lot of the items they are selling are things he or his party invented (restaurants, hair growth potions, lingerie, pantyhose, other inventions that Arisa came up with) which are actually made by the rescued people from his various good deeds and overcharging the nobility for fashion's purpose. He's not concerned about losses, true, but he's already handed over the money for his investments. Making villages on Muno's territory is mostly reclamation work, and the hard part was done in a fortnight. (The culling of all the monsters).
