No Game No Life, No Good

Oftentimes, even if I wasn't interested when I saw it at the bookstore, I will pick up a graphic novel at the library simply because it was something new on the shelves.

Sometimes they turn out to be mildly good (Attack on Titan) and sometimes they turn out to be mildly unpleasant (case in point here).

The story begins with a group of high level gamers, going off to challenge a mysterious urban legend known as Blank (who, for some reason, is not outright written as "Blank" but visually represented by an empty space).  Even though they've stacked the deck in their favor, they are all still wiped out, to a man.

When we cut away back to the real world, we see lazy and overconfident brother/sister duo Sora and Shiro.  The two of them make up Blank.

Now, Sora is stated to be a NEET (slacker with no job and no life, sponging off of his unseen parents like a parasite).  Shiro is only eleven years old, yet still, for whatever reason, speaks in a weird-cute Hulk Speak thing where she's, like, missing verbs and such.  "Brother is a NEET", for example.  She is also stated, paradoxically, to have a genius intellect, able to see all 10,000 or so possible moves in chess right out of the gate, as well as learn an entire language in one day.

Both of them are lazy and greedy, having no jobs and no friends.  They are also cheaters and scammers, seeing the world around them as a boring, rotten mess.

So, luckily for them, a mysterious email comes up and invites them into another world after beating a chess game.

Now, I know what you're thinking: .Hack and Sword Art Online, right?  Wrong!  Shiro and Sora are entirely different.  They just want to keep surviving in a fantasy world that is way more fun than our current one.  They literally have no interest in going home.

That's unexpected, to be sure, but it's not how things work.  People can't just run away to a better world when life gets hard.  People have spent your entire life teaching you how to live in the real world, and you can't just throw that away.  You have to dig in your heels and fight to prove that you can survive on your own.

Anyway, this new world is your typical sword and sorcery stuff, where all issues, large and small, are decided by games.  It is, almost literally, the perfect world for our "heroes" (and I use the term loosely).  Therein, they meet an alleged princess of that world, who is naive and bad at gaming.

And, perhaps thankfully, that is where the first volume ends.

I personally would not advise wasting your time on this series.  There is no action, little comedy, no real likeable characters, and a small amount of bathtime fanservice thrown in simply to get the pervert fans hooked.

These people have so much potential (such as it is), yet they waste their lives alone in their room, no one else around but each other.  And then they get thrown into a world that is practically just sitting there and waiting for them to manipulate it.  They seem to care about each other, but that's it.

I can only hope that these two good-for-nothing jerks get themselves a good old-fashioned wake up call, and quick.  Now I understand how my brother doesn't like people like Soma Yukihira from Food Wars, although he may be slightly better than these two.