Finally finished Shangri-La Frontier. Premise wears out quickly but its commitment to being intense in the moment but pretty peppy and low stakes in the abstract kept me going. I wanted to see the kid with the birdmask avi do a silly thing while gambling with his hp pool of like zilch. It captures this mindset that only makes sense in video games and TTRPGs: Be bold because what you’re doing is frivolous.
I can’t say if this is some grand turn in naro-kei. I don’t really want to because that’s a large umbrella genre. I can say “Damn. A younger Asuka would’ve thought this was sick. I, the current Asuka, wonders what a glass canon protagonist would be like in a story with more stakes,” and that’s kind of what I enjoy out of naro. I don’t really like thinking in genre building blocks in writing or when looking at media, but I let this one genre be my personal exception. It invites you to indulge in that
