Quality Assurance in Another World 1

この世界は不完全すぎる [Kono Sekai wa Fukanzen Sugiru] #1

by Masamichi Satō

You think you're living a quiet life in the countryside. Then, one day, a dragon shows up, and everything changes--not because of the fire-breathing serpent, but because of Haga, the man who shows up and "debugs" the situation. Can it be that your life is nothing like what you thought? And what, exactly, is "QA?" A thrilling isekai action fantasy from a fresh, new perspective!

The Day the Dragons Arrived
Nikola is a village girl, living a quiet life in the countryside. Then, one day, a dragon shows up and everything changes -- not because of the fire-breathing serpent, but because of Haga, the man who shows up and "debugs" the situation. He's a part of an elite society called the "Seekers," created to address a series of maladies plaguing the usually peaceful world. Could it be that your life is nothing like what you thought? And what, exactly, is "QA?" Nobody's getting reincarnated here!

Genres: Manga, Fantasy, Comics, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Science Fiction, Comics Manga

208 pages, Paperback

First published October 9, 2020

Reviews

[Violet ♡]

I think virtual reality/isekai manga is not for me.



The art style is good, though. 🔵

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

i thought this opening volume was a lot of fun! i really enjoyed this take on isekai where the deuteragonist (nikola) is one of the game's NPCs and the protagonist (haga) is a debugger unable to log out (and still taking his job very seriously). this title feels mostly comedic, but there's definitely darker parts when it explores what would real people do when trapped in a video game world with no hope of leaving.

my biggest complaint is that the other debuggers who have begun to treat this world as their personal playground are a bit too dark at times - i mean, honestly, i have seen people play video games the way they do, but the contrast between their literal torture of the NPCs with the more humorous aspects felt a bit unbalanced in the narrative.

i found that what happened to haga's debugger friends had a much better balance between humorous and dark - they began using debugging mode when they lost hope of being able to log out and have been trapped in a dungeon with game breaking glitches, unable to escape an infinite death loop glitch, stuck teleporting through a floor, etc.). like, yeah if you think about these things from their perspective that's horrifying! but also. one of them did just fly off into the sky and never came down and that made me laugh a lot so. it's a better balance with the rest of the story i think vs. the evil group of debuggers haga encounters.

i'm a little surprised this has a bit of a lower average rating (3.54 at this time) - but also I'm not a big fan of modern isekai so i might have different tastes than others picking up isekai-esque manga. i would definitely try more of this series.

[Riski Oktavian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buku terakhir di bulan ini (yang ada di TBR), dan mungkin saja menjadi buku terakhir yang aku selesaikan di tahun ini.

Bercerita tentang Nikola, anak perempuan yang bekerja di desanya, sampai suatu hari desanya diserang oleh sekawanan naga. Seorang pria bernama Haga menyelamatkannya, dan lambat laun, Nikola mulai mengetahui bahwa Haga bukan orang biasa, melainkan seseorang dalam golongan elite yang juga dikenal sebagai pengintai.

Long story short, Haga melakukan "kesalahan" yang menyebabkan desa Nikola hangus. Namun Nikola tidak mengalami gangguan apapun, dan sejak saat itu Nikola menjadi partner Haga untuk melakukan misi yang lebih besar lagi.

Aku sendiri juga butuh waktu agak lama untuk menyadari bahwa setting tempat di komik ini adalah di dalam sebuah sistem atau di dalam game! Yang mana tugas Haga adalah untuk mencari bug-bug apa saja yang ada di dalam dunia yang mereka tempati tersebut untuk "dikirim" kepada bos atau creator, atau yang kita sebut sebagai developer.

Cukup keren jadi makanya aku lumayan tertarik, meskipun jujur saja setengah bagian awal komik ini bikin aku bertanya-tanya ceritanya tentang apa sih!?

[Mehsi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun, interesting, love the stuck in the game world and trying to make the best of it, but I am just not a fan of the other debuggers and I think I would have just liked the story more if we didn't have some psychopathic randos with too much power doing shit. I mean, who the fuck does all those things to NPCs? Or goes totally bonkers when someone doesn't want to be part of it?

[tasiahydrangea · Rating 4 out of 5]

i don’t generally love isekai but this one is really fun and handles the weight of the situation well. really excited to see how it finishes!

[Pam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the idea of this manga was wonderful. I know the bad guys need to be bad, and that the mission is to remove them from the game; however, I felt that they were a touch too 'bad' for me. I do very much appreciate the main character and his sidekick.

[寿理 宮本 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hesitantly tagging "cat" since Nikola calls Amano one of a "kitten" race, but I don't know... similarly the "dragons" that look like giant frog hippos...

I'm also not sure if I like the story enough after one volume. I like it more than others I've read recently, at least, but that isn't saying a lot. I do know an anime just got released, and I wanted to read the manga first before seeing it, since it's usually the other way around for me (pick up the manga/light novel because I saw the anime) as it's easier to browse lots of different shows on a streaming service than to go out of my way to a bookstore/comic store to search for very specific titles.

The core premise is fairly obvious from the title: Debuggers (Haga, Amano, etc.) entered a VR world and could not leave. Unlike similiar stories, the Debuggers SHOULD have a way out, but they just don't know how to do it. The only thing Haga can do is to keep finding and reporting bugs in a curiously lifelike (other than the fantasy elements) world.

It reminds me a lot of Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai, style-wise. That might be intentional, since the world is a lot like the world of Dragon Quest. I suppose I might have to see it animated, though, since at the moment, the only thing I really find interesting about Haga in specific is he's a lefty, when nearly the only obvious lefty in media is Link (other characters are more often ambidextrous or don't do as much that show off their left-handedness... I'm glad to be proven wrong, though).

I'll definitely update my review after watching the anime, including whether it'll be worth continuing the story. It does feel like just a new polish on an old story, though.

(update)
The anime sure got a lot of mileage out of one volume! FOUR EPISODES to cover just this book! (and a few extra minutes that make for a RATHER ROUGH opening to book 2) I feel like other shows get one or two, MAYBE three episodes before having to go to the next one (and some condense an entire light novel into ONE episode, because the DAMN BOOK is ALMOST ENTIRELY FILLER).

That said, the choices of voice actors surprised me a bit (except Nikola, since most lady voice actors sound identical to me... to be fair, I'm not terribly great at hearing distinct sounds, so ALL actors sort of sound samey to me until I can identify specific quirks that I can recognise regularly). I'm not ENTIRELY sure how I feel about the series as a whole, but at least it temporarily has my spouse's interest... if by virtue of we caught up on all the more INTERESTING shows, haha.

[Niche · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another addition in the "trapped in an MMO" genre this one follows a lone bug tester as he hopes fixing all the bugs will eventually free them while risking other players having evil power trips. It feels fresh in that it still treats the world as software rather than going full isekai the video game turned into a "real" world. It scored low for me as the tone seemed uneven in serious to silly. The game aspects also feel underdeveloped as we only see other players using skills/spells infrequently and little to no interaction with system mechanics other than wallclipping. These aspects were merely off-putting and may improve later.

Edit: In hindsight the protagonist might be avoiding spells/skills out of fear of bugs but this is never stated and merely said he avoids using dev-mode due to increased likelihood of glitches.

[Ellyn → Allonsythornraxx · Rating 4 out of 5]

20/08/2024
3.75 ⭐️
This was just a goofy silly time and I loved it.

read for the graphicsathon august bingo challenge

Letterboxd | Instagram | Bookstagram | Tumblr | Twitter | StoryGraph | Hoemance Book Club | Graphicsathon | Scoobathon

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

TBH I was confused by a lot of things. Like the “dragons” that were giant frogs, Haga saying he was motion sick when he didn’t seem to be moving, the bizarre way he killed the dragon….

I gather he is essentially a game tester, and somehow he and everyone doing his job got stuck in the game. This isn’t an unknown trope, but…..what is happening to their real bodies? Normally when I see these, they died outside the game. But here we have people that have been…in virtual reality for a year?

The other testers suck and are terrible people. I don’t feel they were necessary at all except to showcase abusive testers. IMO the story is way too confusing and boring. I might give it one more chance, but it’s unbelievable how many volumes there are…

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this much more than anticipated - it reminds me of Heir Apparent and Deadly Pink. It's not a new take on the stuck-in-a-VR-game genre, but it does remind me why I enjoyed it in the first place.

[Ozsaur · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

This is a "trapped in a game" manga. The ideas are really fun, but the execution wasn't for me. As much as I like the main characters (and the art!) the bad guys were just a turn off. I would have preferred it if the story had gone in a more cozy, exploration direction instead of the nasty bad guy direction.

Still, the art was very good!

[My · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty interesting premise! I'm gonna give this the 3-book rule before I decide how I like it.

I guess the biggest detail of note for now is that I didn't expect how graphic the art can be in that one particular panel (not really graphic graphic, but more than I expected).

[Gary Sadosky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Longer than it needs to be, but it's a fun setting and their depiction of dragons is hilarious. The end makes it worth reading, but it was a little rough to get there. I won't be continuing the series.

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gave this a try since it was half-off at the comic book store and it was better than I expected! More thought out than the vast majority of isekai are with clear and readable art and layout that still finds room for personality.

[R.B. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This looks fun on the surface but gets very dark and depressing the further in you go. It does have some comedic moments with the debugging but they don't balance out the dark themes. Most of the female characters are also barely developed at all.

[Shay · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first chapter hooked me, it's such a clever way to introduce exactly what to expect from this Manga. Incredibly excited for more.

[Aurora · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a little more dystopia-y than I was expecting, but I want to stick with it for now.

[Allie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this!

[Amanda Muir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super cute premise! Now if I could just find volume 2 somewhere!

[Ang · Rating 3 out of 5]

I genuinely do not know if I understood this. It's VERY meta. Because of that, I was hoping to find book 2 at a library, so I could maybe SEE if the rest would be my jam, but alas. Hmmm. A dilemma.