Rising of the Shield Hero
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Evening ladies and germs.
Has anyone read the entirety of the series, thus far? I've got about half way through volume 5 and just put it down, it just became an absolute slog for me. With the 2nd season of the anime slated for an October 2021 release, is it worth me attempting to pick the series back up again?
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Honestly, the series for me became a slog much later on as the series suffers a lot of Deus Ex Machina moments in the late teens.
The early chapters being the better. If the series is hard going now, may not be for you.
I fell into the to aru trap, buying 17 volumes in 1 go and started disliking the series at about volume 13. Have not bought a volume since, but will probably buy them to finish the series -
@custodes Thanks. I enjoyed the first couple of volumes but it started to feel more of a chore, than entertainment, by 5.
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I bought a few because I thought the intro scenes were interesting and wanted to see where the author was going with it. By about volume 5, it seemed pretty apparent that the author wasn't going anywhere in particular, but I still kept reading through volume 12, before finally dropping it.
I have no intention of picking it back up and will probably skip the anime as well.
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@rsog412 I enjoyed the first season the anime, which is what made me buy the novels. But I would have preferred being forced to watch omnibus editions of coronation street than carry on reading the books, after dropping volume 5.
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I generally avoid talking at length about things I dislike (I'd much rather spend my time on this planet thinking and talking about things I like), but I've got something more general to say here so I'll keep going.
Setting up a story is a different exercise than telling a story. Rising of the Shield Hero sets up a lot of very interesting stories. It starts with "Why does the Princess have such unbridled hatred for the protagonist?" but there's lots of others: "What is the Shield of Wrath? (And later, Seven Deadly Sins weapons)?" "Why is the weapons' growth dependent on what the hero knows or believes?" And so on, and so on. Even by the time I gave it up, it never stopped being good at introducing additional interesting mysteries, like stuff about the second level cap, Raphtalia's origins, and the multiversal war.
I dropped it because I stopped believing that the journey to the answers to the mysteries it created would be worth my time.
I'm reluctant to call this a "quality drop" and to say that the first volumes were better than the later volumes, or that the anime was better than the books, or anything like that though. The series is consistently setting up interesting scenarios and then consistently unsatisfactorily executing them, and that's as true in volume 1 as it is in volume 12. I kept reading because I wanted resolution, not because I was having fun.
If you dropped it at volume 5, you're savvier than I was and realized it sooner. (I'm savvier now, and dropped In Another World with My Smartphone way faster.)
I plan on skipping the anime because the illusion is broken for me. I've already read what would happen in the next season, and there isn't a single sentence of what I read that I think is interesting enough for me to want to watch it animated.
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@rsog412 said in Rising of the Shield Hero:
(I'm savvier now, and dropped In Another World with My Smartphone way faster.)
FWIW, Smartphone did eventually get to the resolution for basically everything it set up. It just took them a long time to do so (~20 volumes), and included a truly excessive fascination with inserting mecha-everything where it didn’t need to be (seriously, there’s a multi-story mecha just to act as a speaker platform for one character whose singing contains magical buff/debuff qualities, and another extra-large one that comes together from multiple others like Voltron or Power Rangers’ Megazord). But I will admit it was an impressive-enough slog to get to that point that I can’t at all fault someone for bailing prior to that.
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@mystyk Shield Hero resolves everything it sets up, too! (...well, probably; I did drop it so I don't know if it resolves everything.) My issue was not so much that it didn't resolve things, but rather that it didn't do anything interesting with them before resolving them.
I've got no problems with leaving mysteries open for a long time, as long as the journey is interesting. Otherside Picnic is four volumes in and hasn't really unveiled any of its mysteries. One of my all-time favorites is So I'm a Spider, So What? which is mystery-on-fakeout-on-mystery-on-fakeout-on-mystery and is more confusing after 10 volumes than when it started.
I care less about how or how soon the mysteries are resolved and more about how well the story uses them. I care about whether the series develops its characters, settings, or plot beyond the initial presentation.
That's vague, though, so for a more practical explanation: the "Second Read Test." If I'm considering whether to pick up the next volume of a series or not, I'll pick the first volume back up and read it again. If the things I have learned in the later volumes (about the plot, the characters, the setting, etc.) make me see the first volume in a new light, then the series is going somewhere interesting and I keep going. If not, I'm being strung along by a teasebox. Smartphone failed this test for me after five volumes.
I consider this a pretty low bar to clear. It's not that every mystery's answer should be earth shattering as to reframe everything that came behind it, but if a series goes 5 or 12 volumes, there should be at least one development that reframes at least one element in the earlier volumes, enough to make it interesting on a second read.
Bringing things back on topic, Rising of the Shield Hero answers most/all the questions it poses, but those answers didn't mean anything to me. Knowing that Church worships only three of the four heroes and why doesn't change the way I look at the way the heroes are treated in the first volume (they hate him for some reason -> they hate him for crappy reasons). Knowing who and what Glass is and why she's attacking alongside the Waves doesn't change the way I look at the scenes when she first appears.
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@rsog412 - that's something I've enjoyed reading Death March, at volume 13 it's still pulling on threads from volume 1 and making them interesting to me. (It helps that in his situation I'd rather be a tourist than a legendary hero too :) ) I'll second So I'm A Spider as one that's done an great job of making re-reading it worthwhile.
It's a shame to hear the Shield Hero LNs aren't like that since I did enjoy the anime. I guess I'll just watch season 2 and see if the adaptation works better.
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@HarmlessDave I am caught up on Spider and reading Death March now, just finished volume 4. Both great series that have so many connecting threads. Those are the types of book series I love, ones that make people who read and really pay attention understand something before it gets spelled out.
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@HeroicScrotum If you thought it was bad by volume 5, you should absolutely stop reading it. It only gets worse as it goes on (I read all of them but the most recent). For me, it took until volume `11 until I thought it crossed from ok to bad and it never really recovered, so I haven't even read the most recent (18 I think). It kind of devolves into a mediocre harem isekai witch constantly repeating set-ups and deus ex machina payoffs.
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I finished vol 13 and then gave up. The series started really dark and realistic but than became easy to predict future stuff and IMO waifus do waifus thing.
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Thanks for the input guys. As much I'm loathed to leave a series unfinished, it sounds like dropping Shield Hero was a wise move.
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@HeroicScrotum Good for you. I read the WN FT all the way through and beleive me, it did not end in a way I considered worth it.
Spoilery as fuck shit from the WN. Only look at if you don't care. -
@jampodevral Thanks buddy. As I said, I lost interest in the series, but a little bit of OCD in me didn't want to dump it until I finish the last book. But from the spoiler you posted, it sounds like the whole thing just devolved into a bit of a farce.
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I can't say I can endorse the series, I've read all translated novels so far (up to 17) and 18 is sitting on Kindle since release at about 30% read, I just lost interest when it looked like the rest of the volume would be a cooking contest.
The series suffers from extreme fluctuating power levels, the author tries to come up with reasons why Naofumi and company are struggling against the latest round of antagonists when he should really not be facing many issues against most of them.
An incredible amount of extremely long conversations in the middle of what should be large fights can also be annoying.
I'll probably carry on with it just to see what happens at the end, but there isn't much in the way of anticipation for the next volume.
Death March is certainly better although I've had a couple of volumes out of the 13 so far that I thought were weaker (for some reason the Elf village - just didn't click with me). It does suffer a bit from too many characters when Satou stays in one place too long. A few parts of Volume 13 just felt like name drops so you know the author hadn't discarded anyone.
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If you're looking for a series that very successful does what Shield Hero tries to do I'd recommend reading Lazy Dungeon Master. Pretty much every misstep that Shield Hero does wrong, LDM nails the landing. IMO at least.
I already know what some people who only saw the SH anime are thinking: How on earth can you even compare LDM and Shield Hero. I think that might explain why people say the quality of SH drops so much since it went from how it was in the beginning to something that radically different and doesn't even do a good job of it.
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@db0ssman I tried reading Shield Hero after watching the anime, and I found the novels to be a toxic mess.
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@db0ssman I'm up to volume 5 of LDM and, yeah, it is a very good series so far.
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@mbuono I was pretty similar in why I started reading SH. I was looking to try and start reading Light Novels and since I liked the anime and the manga (which I read years ago) I decided to give it a go. For me though, I mostly liked it and found it slowly got worse until a certain character was introduced and the quality tanked.
I don't think that it helps that the second series I read was Ascendance of a Bookworm and that just highlighted how poorly Shield Hero was done.
