Schools out for summer (never heard that before)! And Claire and Rae, newly joined at the hip, are spending it together. But, as Claire learns how the other half lives, it’s woe betide as they’re beside the seaside when the undead show up and things take a turn even Rae couldn’t anticipate.
Despite my misgivings for this story, I clearly have a fairly large amount of affection for it, having followed it across three different written (re)incarnations and one animated one. There are good parts here, just sometimes sandwiched amidst awkward ideas.
While I suspected as much last time out, I am pretty convinced with this volume that the manga version might be the best way to engage with this narrative across all its various formats (maybe throw in Claire’s light novel spin-off for good measure). That runs contrary to some of my earlier opinions, but each volume has felt like an improvement over the last.
This summer break arc was fine in the light novels, but it’s a lot more fun here and it clearly made the artist’s day getting to indulge in some fanservice amidst all the usual school uniforms. Most of it focused on Claire, of course, since Rae’s not particularly thrilled with her body.
Unlike a lot of isekai I’ve engaged with, this one never forgets where Rae came from or that it was originally a game. The commoner swimsuits being the same as Japanese schoolgirl swimsuits is an easy joke, but it also feels like something a thirsty programmer would actually do.
This game stuff gets used to even better effect later, when a scenario that Rae knows inside and out becomes an unknowable danger after all the changes she’s made since her arrival in this world have lead to a knock-on effect that means her uncanny knowledge is no longer guaranteed to be true.
Claire really gets a lot of development, starting with butting heads with her dad over the commoners. I don’t remember him being quite so harsh in the light novels (and, while I wouldn’t be quite so harsh, he’s not wrong to decry incest, no matter what the narrative thinks), but he’s very punchable here.
This neatly leads to Claire abandoning the palatial digs of her lineage and staying with Rae and her parents, which is eye-opening for her, to say the least. Minus one glaring problem, this is a stellar illustration of Claire’s changing perspective.
That glaring problem is, unfortunately, Rae’s mom, who is very nice, minus her predilection for stripping people to measure them, which is really tacky and one of the worst excuses to jam in some fanservice. You’re already at the beach, for heaven’s sake!
This keeps cropping up with Rae feeling inferior because of how flat and un-curvy she is, even though her design is actually just… regular and perfectly okay. It’s one of those old saws that really doesn’t add anything.
The rest of it is very choice though. Now that Claire’s come around on how much Rae means, the two of them are slowly getting closer than ever and Claire has taken to some mild affection that’s terribly sweet. The tsundere trope exists for these sorts of things.
And the story bothers to actually do something with Claire’s cronies, who show up on the scene looking to cause trouble and end up coming around on Rae and possibly each other as well. That’s a cute little sidebar, including their ridiculous attempt at disguise, that I don’t recall from the original either.
Combine that with the action sequence that goes awry, which makes the story that much more interesting since Rae is suddenly fallible rather than utterly omniscient, and the art really bring all of this to gorgeous life and you have a real winner.
Doubly so with that absolutely cracking omake about the visit to AX, which has a beautiful spread of the characters in the modern day. I’d read the reverse isekai version of that, but the taste is lovely. That illustration just pops and makes for a wonderful little send-off to the volume.
4 stars - Rae’s mom really twigs me the wrong way, and the usual rough edges are hanging around, but this feels like an interpretation of the original that shores up some weaknesses and expands on it in cute ways. One of the stronger volumes in this run.