By KONO Tsuranori and ttl. Released in Japan as “D Genesis: Dungeon ga Dekite 3-nen” by Enterbrain. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by JCT.
This was the second recommendation by folks when I was asking about series I hadn’t tried before, and this one was far more vocal and vociferous than The Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects. People really, really pushed hard for this series. When it was licensed, I was simply absolutely sick to death of dungeons, so did not bother to read it, despite the fact that it had an obvious sell on the cover art: Noa Izumi. OK, that’s not actually Noa Izumi, but close enough, frankly. I do hope Miyoshi pilots a Labor before this ends. That said, the people selling me on this series turned out to be absolutely correct: this was very, very good. I will be reading more. The main reason it’s very good is that there is minimal dungeon crawling. It’s all about the “what if” concept of dungeons appearing all over the modern-day world, how they would be regulated, and what happens when our heroes accidentally find a game-changer but want to stay having a normal life?
3 years ago, dungeons appeared all over the world, leading to a new industry. Today, Keigo Yoshimura is currently in a horrible R&D job where he is being abused by his middle-management boss. Then one day he’s part of a bad traffic accident. He’s not injured, but it turns out a dungeon opened up in the street. He accidentally runs over a goblin (thus making him eligible for dungeon rewards), and then accidentally pushes a huge mass of rebar into the dungeon, where it drops aaallllll the way to the bottom. This clears the dungeon, and makes him the top dungeon clearer in the world. He knows he does not want to be famous for this. Fortunately, his co-worker, kohai, and bestie Azusa Miyoshi finds out about this, and about the skill he picked up by clearing it: he can essentially analyze dungeons and figure out how to get whatever he needs. The days of random drops are over! And now he *really* has to try to hide.
The worldbuilding is pretty good. I didn’t hate it. It’s perhaps a bit unrealistic that our protagonists are allowed to do this, but the author freely admits that’s part of the fiction. The best reason to read this are the two leads, who are terrific. Keigo is the sort of guy who tends to narrate cynical but also tries to help everyone he can – which in this book is mostly young attractive women, this is still a light novel. That said, he has absolutely no filter and says everything he thinks, so I do not expect romance anytime soon. Miyoshi has known him for a while, so is clearly used to him. She’s a math genius and also a food/drink gourmet, so she is very interested in helping him so that she can get rich and get the best food and wine. They’re also having fun examining stats, seeing what the unknown drops actually do, killing slimes for 300 … erm, slimes till they discover what that does, and healing grievous injuries in a very secret, don’t tell anyone way.
I assume the second book is going to have more people get involved in their lives, and no doubt will have more dungeon crawling (there’s a big wolf on the cover, for one). And I warn people that there is considerable math in this. In any case, my bad. This is a great series so far, and I will try to fit the other, erm, eight volumes to date in my schedule when I can.
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