RVing My Way into Exile with My Beloved Cat: This Villainess Is Trippin’ Volume 1 - What has to be the most absurd title in a long time, turned out to be just as you would expect. It starts with a carbon copy of every otome game light novel ever. Especially the Level 99 Villainess setup: Overworked corporate slave and otome game player dies and gets reincarnated as the daughter of a duke in her favorite game’s world as the villainess character. She gets her engagement to the prince broken because the game’s main character is falsely accusing her of bullying. She is also mistreated by her family because she is a dark magic user and has black hair which that civilization is discriminating against. Never mind why someone despised by society for black hair and dark magic would ever be chosen as the future queen, but whatever… As I said, they literally threw together all the genre tropes they could think of. MC then uses her special unique skill to summon an RV and head into the sunset. And if the otome game tropes aren’t enough they added the “A strong monster appeared and my evil party kicked me out as monster bait” trope. But is the actual story and that is just 20% of the book. A good 60% or so is just an explanation of what she is cooking. Think of the cooking parts of "Campfire Cooking with My Absurd Skill” and you get it. The remaining 20% are just MC wondering how cute her cat is or how convenient her RV is. That right. musing about the cat and RV takes up as much page space as the actual story progression. I don’t exactly mind aimless novels that are just comfying (yep invented a new word) around but then they have to be at least entertaining while doing so. This one isn’t. And to top it off: If there is a problem the solution to it pops up out of nowhere immediately. For example, they take a herb-gathering quest and MC is having a problem differentiating the good herbs from the bad ones. A paragraph later her skill levels up and now she has a convenient appraisal skill. Another example would be a large monster appearing and not even one paragraph later her skill levels up again and conveniently her RV is now not a small camper bus but one of those large moving home thingies. Not that that was needed though since the solution to that fight was so badly planned that it would have worked with the smaller camper bus as well. I honestly can not think of one redeeming quality of this LN other than the cute cat illustrations. - 2/10
Peddler in Another World Volume 6 - The adventurers found a dungeon that can bring back loved ones from the dead. As you can imagine this was a bittersweet volume that plucked at the heartstrings. I like the series quite a lot and this was the best volume so far. It’s a beautiful conclusion to my favorite character’s backstory and a beautiful setup for my second favorite character’s story going forward. Maybe my judgment has been thrown off a bit by reading the terrible RV Villainess right before, but I give this volume a full 9/10.
Oh man, RVing sounds rough. You aren’t kidding about throwing every genre trope in there. They even squeezed in some other genres’ tropes it sounds like. I also did not really get that there would be a focus on cooking at all from the synopsis. It seems like it was just trying to gather all the right tags on syosetu that were popular, throwing them into a pot on a camping stove, and making isekai-otome-villainess-iyashikei stew that is way too overdone.
And the cooking part angered me as well. It’s just so stupid There is a point where MC cooks for some NPCs and they are all blown away because she fried an ingredient in a pan. The NPCs have the pan and they have the ingredient, but in the entire world apparently no one ever had the idea to fry the ingredient before our isekai MC entered the scene. I really can suspend my disbelieve in novels where they are using complete recipes to create something the isekai world didn’t know before (recreating curry out of dozens of rare spices for example). But just throwing a single ingredient into a frying pan without anything else? Nope.
RVing My Way into Exile with My Beloved Cat: This Villainess Is Trippin’ Volume 1 - What has to be the most absurd title in a long time, turned out to be just as you would expect. It starts with a carbon copy of every otome game light novel ever. Especially the Level 99 Villainess setup: Overworked corporate slave and otome game player dies and gets reincarnated as the daughter of a duke in her favorite game’s world as the villainess character. She gets her engagement to the prince broken because the game’s main character is falsely accusing her of bullying. She is also mistreated by her family because she is a dark magic user and has black hair which that civilization is discriminating against. Never mind why someone despised by society for black hair and dark magic would ever be chosen as the future queen, but whatever… As I said, they literally threw together all the genre tropes they could think of. MC then uses her special unique skill to summon an RV and head into the sunset. And if the otome game tropes aren’t enough they added the “A strong monster appeared and my evil party kicked me out as monster bait” trope. But is the actual story and that is just 20% of the book. A good 60% or so is just an explanation of what she is cooking. Think of the cooking parts of "Campfire Cooking with My Absurd Skill” and you get it. The remaining 20% are just MC wondering how cute her cat is or how convenient her RV is. That right. musing about the cat and RV takes up as much page space as the actual story progression. I don’t exactly mind aimless novels that are just comfying (yep invented a new word) around but then they have to be at least entertaining while doing so. This one isn’t. And to top it off: If there is a problem the solution to it pops up out of nowhere immediately. For example, they take a herb-gathering quest and MC is having a problem differentiating the good herbs from the bad ones. A paragraph later her skill levels up and now she has a convenient appraisal skill. Another example would be a large monster appearing and not even one paragraph later her skill levels up again and conveniently her RV is now not a small camper bus but one of those large moving home thingies. Not that that was needed though since the solution to that fight was so badly planned that it would have worked with the smaller camper bus as well. I honestly can not think of one redeeming quality of this LN other than the cute cat illustrations. - 2/10
Peddler in Another World Volume 6 - The adventurers found a dungeon that can bring back loved ones from the dead. As you can imagine this was a bittersweet volume that plucked at the heartstrings. I like the series quite a lot and this was the best volume so far. It’s a beautiful conclusion to my favorite character’s backstory and a beautiful setup for my second favorite character’s story going forward. Maybe my judgment has been thrown off a bit by reading the terrible RV Villainess right before, but I give this volume a full 9/10.
Oh man, RVing sounds rough. You aren’t kidding about throwing every genre trope in there. They even squeezed in some other genres’ tropes it sounds like. I also did not really get that there would be a focus on cooking at all from the synopsis. It seems like it was just trying to gather all the right tags on syosetu that were popular, throwing them into a pot on a camping stove, and making isekai-otome-villainess-iyashikei stew that is way too overdone.
And the cooking part angered me as well. It’s just so stupid There is a point where MC cooks for some NPCs and they are all blown away because she fried an ingredient in a pan. The NPCs have the pan and they have the ingredient, but in the entire world apparently no one ever had the idea to fry the ingredient before our isekai MC entered the scene. I really can suspend my disbelieve in novels where they are using complete recipes to create something the isekai world didn’t know before (recreating curry out of dozens of rare spices for example). But just throwing a single ingredient into a frying pan without anything else? Nope.