@the-green-death said in Novel pick-up requests:
I have a hard time understanding people who like Smartphone but bag on Asterisk War. I haven’t seen the anime so can’t comment but have enjoyed the first four books, they’re simple fun Battle School harem stories with largely enjoyable characters. It’s not high art but then something like Smartphone is really just a relaxing pleasure read too, I feel like people who like the one should at the very least understand someone liking the other. If anything IMO, Asterisk War is the better written of the two, helped along by the fact each volume is short and concise.
As someone who likes Smartphone but hates Asterisk War, I feel offended by your post.
Alright, sarcasm aside, I feel like this is a poor comparison given the completely different focus of both series, with Smartphone being more of a SoL adventure anything-goes comedy series and Asterisk War being a magical battle school series. While both might be generic as hell and back, Smartphone has fun with its own setting and gets away with it because it's a self-aware comedy series, AW on the other hand fails hard by taking itself too seriously but presenting subpar plot and character development ending up looking just edgy. I have a completely different mindset while reading each because of the way the series are presented. Enter Chivalry, that is inside the same genre as AW and presents itself with pretty much the same feel for it, and while it has plenty of cliche moments and is fairly generic, the characters interactions and development is leagues better, which makes for more compelling story-telling. So it's more of not meeting the expectations it sets for itself. Being generic/cliche doesn't make something bad by definition, you can get away with it as long as you execute it well. Smartphone does a decent execution, while AW does not. Of course, this is just my opinion, if you like AW we can agree to disagree.
With that little bit done, I'd like to second that reverse isekai story. Sounds fun as hell.