Shangri-La Frontier Manga

Shangri-La Frontier Manga Info :

• Author(s): FUJI Ryosuke, KATA Rina
• Genre(s): Action, Shounen
• Type: Manga
• Released: 2020
• Official Translation: Yes
• Status: Ongoing (Scan), Ongoing (Publish)
• RSS: RSS Feed
• Description:
  Second-year high school student Rakuro Hizutome is interested in one thing only: finding “shitty games” and beating the crap out of them. His gaming skills are second to none, and no game is too bad for him to enjoy. So when he’s introduced to the new VR game Shangri-La Frontier, he does what he does best—min-maxes and skips the prologue to jump straight into the action. But can even an expert gamer like Rakuro discover all the secrets that Shangri-La Frontier hides…?

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• Shangri-La Frontier chapter 1

Shangri-La Frontier Reviews:

This was a very casual read of a series focused on hardcore gamers. Visually, the series looks pretty nice, and it’s packed with action. The story is set in a stereotypical virtual reality MMORPG, which for some reason is still distributed on the optical disc. The main character is a passionate gamer who likes challenging games. He likes to conquer bad and buggy games in particular. The initial hook was twofold. The idea of following a veteran gamer who is used to unfair games or using underhanded tactics to win is always appealing. He even goes as far as going in with no gear on his character except a bird mask and weapons. Don’t worry, he wears some shorts. There is no nudity in the series, nor any fanservice. The second thing was the subplot of getting unknowingly baited into the game in order to give the girl, who likes the main protagonist, a chance to get close to him because it’s the game she and her sister have been playing for some time. This predictably doesn’t work as well. Especially if the girl plays as this intimidating knight in heavy armor.

The story has several things very typical of the genre. The MC gains through luck hidden or hard-to-obtain unique quests and items. What did surprise me was the fact that the MC is not overpowered, at least not that much. He even dies several times, but it doesn’t matter, because there is no permanent death in this game. He does solo some boss monsters, but to defeat the strongest monsters he has to team up with other players. These are mostly skilled players who are sort of friends from other games. One of them is a very scheming woman archetype, kind of fun with going my way principles and backstabbing if necessary. The last one is a pro-gamer, which doesn’t make sense for him to play the game if it isn’t competitive in principle unless it’s sort of fun to do more games after work. There are other important characters, including NPCs. The story occasionally shows what other characters are doing, but overall, it’s told from the viewpoint of the MC.

The mystery element relates to the game’s main storyline and the intent of the developers behind it. It shows a bit of the game company’s side, but it feels very unrealistic and convoluted for the game company to care if somebody progresses in the game sooner than expected.

One other thing I should mention is that the MC occasionally plays other games as well. There were chapters dedicated to what initially seemed like a pointless side story, but it ties in some regard to the main storyline in the end.

Visually, the series looks quite good. I didn’t notice any issues with panel flow. Characters tend to have realistic designs. The scenery looks really good. The weapon design is quite nice. On the other hand, the enemies are of the usual kind, except for the unique monsters, which do have some interesting twists to them.

Overall, it’s quite a straightforward virtual reality game series. A compression offers itself quite readily. It shows what Sword Art Online could be if it didn’t suck – in terms of time skips, too obvious plot armor, and lack of direction. I do recommend the series if you want a solid video game action-adventure series.

Release frequency: ~3 months between each volume release.

Japanese difficulty 6/10 (see my profile for details about various difficulty scores)

This series is deceptively harder than you would infer from the fact that it does have furigana. However, it doesn’t have it on everything. For example, when a character sheet pops up in the game, it has none. It expects you to be a gamer and know all the terminology in Japanese. The series tends to be on the wordy side. It’s toned down during an action, but still, there is quite a lot of text to read per page.

This review is written after reading 9 volumes (all existing at the time).