[Light Novel] Welcome to the Special-Grade Guild! ~ The Beloved Elf Poster Girl Soothes Everyone’s Hearts ~
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Name: Welcome to the Special-Grade Guild! ~ The Beloved Elf Poster Girl Soothes Everyone’s Hearts ~
特級ギルドへようこそ！～看板娘の愛されエルフはみんなの心を和ませる～
Author: Ai Riia - 阿井りいあ
Artist: Nimoshi
Genre: Fantasy, Adventure, Drama, Comedy
Publisher: TO Books
Year: 2019
Volumes: 13 (I think it's completed)
Manga Adaption: Yes (At least there seems be a mini manga from what I have seen)Synopsis: Meg, a former office worker, wakes up to find her soul inhabiting the body of a young elf girl. Found in a dungeon by a handsome, dark-clad man named Gilnandio, she is taken in by the Special-grade Guild "Ortus" to which he belongs.
The guild is filled with beautiful and unique members, boasting a variety of races, from halflings to demi-humans who can transform into eagles and snakes. Amidst them, Meg, with her adorable appearance, becomes the guild's poster girl, living a peaceful and happy life, pampered by the members. However, the elf whose body she now inhabits harbors a secret unknown to others!?
A visually stunning guild fantasy overflowing with handsome men and beautiful women!
I have read about 227 chapters of the web novel version of this series and I think it's a fantastic and well written story. It never seems to get boring as the author seems to always introduce something interesting going on. I think the story is cute, but it also has plenty of deep moments where it can even make you tear up. The story is so good that I am honestly surprised it hasn't been licensed or gotten an anime adaptation yet.
My impressions though are honorifics are kind of important at times to distinguish different characters and stuff, but I don't know if official translations ever opt to preserve them. The protagonist has a speech impediment where they slur their words a lot early on in the series so honorifics become like 'shan' or 'shama', etc.
EDIT: Some more volume cover images:
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I love Nimoshi’s art, have pretty much every book they’ve illustrated, and JNC is the only company to license one of them so far. Although I can’t speak much to the quality of the story here, it did get to 13 volumes so can’t be all that bad…
The clunky sounding “Special-grade Guild” seems to be what a fan translation of the web novel is using; the official English on the manga cover was just “Welcome to the Special Guild”.
I don’t know what you mean by “mini manga” but it does seem to have been cut short at 2 volumes; while it’s not tagged as complete on BookWalker it seems unlikely to continue as it pre-dates To Books’ Corona Ex web manga site but has not been imported from the old Comic Corona site (hosted on Nico Nico Seiga) like other continuing titles were.
With JNC, honourifics are handled on a case-by-case basis.
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@Shiroi-Hane Regarding the "Special-grade Guild" title. The Japanese used for it is 特級 which is essentially the kanji for "Special" and then the kanji for "Rank/class/grade". Having done some personal investigation on this I thought that "Special Guild" might be simplifying it too much considering in chapter 146 of the web novel another guild is mentioned as being 上級 which would be like "high rank" or "high grade". Essentially the guilds have a rank/grade system so it should probably be called "Special-rank" or "Special-grade" to avoid a translation headache later.
I am actually the web novel fan translator myself. I am sure not all of the translation decisions I did are the best though and I have been changing names frequently.
