By fukurou and johndee. Released in Japan as “Jiji Baba Yuusha Party Saigo no Tabi: Oita Saikyou wa Iroasenu Mama Mirai e Susumu you desu” by DRE Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Vasileios Mousikidis.
I was looking forward to this title from the moment it was announced, and I’m pleased that it did not disappoint. It’s not that surprising, but that’s not what you want from a series with this premise, which is comforting and happy, even when it’s dealing with terrible people who are murdering squads of faceless guards. I especially enjoy seeing elderly men in their 60s and 70s, who are among the most powerful in the world, suddenly becoming shy fanboys in front of their senpais when faced with the titular characters. Every grand master was once a young boy or girl, and the same goes here, where we meet the powerful mage’s teacher, or the guy who taught the incredible swordsman what he knows. It also helps to underline the other point of this series, which is that those folks are, while mind-numbingly powerful, at least on the human scale. Our protagonists not only left that behind long ago, but were never like that.
Once the world was on the brink of destruction. The sky was blood-red, monsters were everywhere, many died, and everything was about to fall to the Demon Lord. Then the Hero and his party won the day, the sky turned blue again, and they all lived happily ever after. Now, over seventy years later, the hero and his wife the saint, now in their nineties, decide that they are going to be dying soon, and want to see their great-grandson for the first time before they do. He’s not on that continent, so it’s time for a journey. Along the way they meet the other surviving members of the hero’s party – a drunken swordsman and his witch wife, a bald “exhibitionist” monk with a muscle fetish, and a lying merchant who keeps changing his name. They’re all incredibly old… but I would advise against thinking they’re feeble.
There’s a lot of shonen stereotypes here, as you may have guessed. There’s one character who reminds me a lot of Usopp, but he has a surprising backstory, and also a surprisingly hidden power. The big guy who loves muscles and walks around with only a loincloth comes up a lot (I saw it in Last Dungeon Kid, and it wasn’t new there). That said, the main thing is that all of them are now called “eccentric” but back then had nastier names applied. Ferd the hero is so powerful that after the final battle he has to live on a remote mountain as almost no one can get near him, Elrica the saint was literally built to fight against evil (and has all the cliches you’d expect from that role), and Sazaki the swordsman is from the school of “If I sword good enough, I will be best at sword”, with an added drunken master aspect. This shouldn’t work as well as it does, as they’re all such types. But it does, as they’re all fun. I love it when Ferd and Elrica play at being a feeble, elderly couple. I also liked seeing the next generation of heroes, who are far more “normal” than Ferd and company but also appear to be writing their own story.
I’m not sure how much more of this we’ll get, but there’s at least a second volume out. Given the first book ends with them actually starting out to see the grandkid, I’m not optimistic we’ll get there. But I’m gonna love the ride. On a robot horse carriage.
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