Girls behaving badly.
Creative Staff
Story: Mamare Touno
Character Designs: Kazuhiro Hara
Art: Koyuki
Translation/Adaptation: Taylor Engel
What They Say
Akiba’s top-class players assemble! Will the guilds reconcile and join forces?
Top guild masters gather in response to a summons from the Machiavelli-with-glasses Shiroe! At an ultra-important conference that will determine the fate of the people who’ve been trapped in the world of an online game, what will Soujirou, the West Wind Brigade guild master, do!?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The answer to that question above? Nothing! Because this volume of West Wind Brigade isn’t concerned with your game-world problems. These girls are bored, and with boredom comes bad behavior and horniness.
This side story’s main selling feature has been that the West Wind Brigade is a harem, one that started off as a punchline to a joke. That joke being ‘look, Souji is the popular guy who doesn’t realize what a chick magnet he is!’ It’s a very old, tired anime joke. As such, most of the volumes have featured the requisite male gaze fan-service shots of the ladies. This volume sort of cranks that up to eleven, but with one key difference which kinda makes me okay with most of the hijinks in this volume, and that’s agency.
The major story in this volume revolves around the Brigade approaching the crafting guilds to have them construct a bath in their guild hall. The three carpenters who show up have an ulterior motive. They want to make a way to spy on the girls in the bath, being the typical creepy lechers you’d expect. They plot and plan and scheme until Nazuna approaches them with her own request, the girls want a way to peep into the men’s bath!
There’s no reason to think a bunch of high school and college-aged players, stuck in a game world where everyone has crafted Adonis bodies for themselves, wouldn’t be horny as fuck. (My heart goes out to those poor bastards who got stuck with jokey alt characters, which is my only explanation for why the guys from the crafting guild who are up to no good are so ugly.) Even if the author didn’t intend for any of this, it still makes a ton of sense. So the girls quest to get a clear shot of Souji’s wang is both traditional comedy gold and one of those separate-not-equal moments where if attractive girls are the ones sexually harassing someone it’s a-okay.
The girls do get to see some wang, it’s just not the one they were expecting. The pervy carpenters end up abandoning their quest after Nazuna’s sadomasochist supervision. Also, Souji files a former complaint about his peeping Janes to Shiroe, who scoffs and tosses it in the trash. Poor Souji.
In the light novels, we learn that at some point the crafting guilds learned how to replicate the sex-change potion. We discover that the Brigade may have been the guinea pigs which lead to that discovery in a short but humorous chapter.
The heart of this volume focuses on Kawara. Since the events of this volume happen between the founding of the Round Table and the Lord’s Council trip to the capital, it was time to explain why Souji chose her for the newbie training camp. Kawara gets hit with a sudden bout of homesickness in this volume. The others pick up on it, even the typically clueless Souji. He challenges her to a duel and we see in flashback how she came to join the guild. Souji entrusts her to be the guild’s representative at the training camp, giving her a sense of purpose and taking her mind off of things. It’s a nice, sweet moment in an otherwise not very serious volume.
There are no big extras in this volume, just a couple of color pages to open the book.
In Summary
The West Wind Brigade continues to march to the beat of their own drum in this frivolous volume of bath-time hijinks. Nazuna may be a bad influence on her younger guild members, shameless as she is. The nudity loops so far around in this volume it returns to being hilarious rather than skeevy. The girl’s bad behavior is starting to approached real world levels of ‘girls are not perfect beautiful creatures here for your amusement’ truth-bombs. All of this is happening between events that we’ve already seen established. Next volume will be the beginning of more serious events in the timeline, so it’ll be interesting to see where that goes.
Content Grade: B +
Art Grade: B +
Packaging Grade: B +
Text/Translation Grade: A –
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: May 23rd, 2017
MSRP: $12.99
