FREE LIFE FANTASY ONLINE: IMMORTAL PRINCESS

DESCRIPTION

CAST

CHAPTERS

MANGA AdventureFree Life Fantasy Online: Immortal Princess

REVIEWS

• 

  slabdrill

  83/100
  Actually feels like an MMO, despite still being full dive

  This review was written after Volume 10 (the most recently translated volume as of the time of writing).
  I didn't write this looking out for being spoiler-free, but there's no major spoilers in here. I feel like the second half of this review is a lot weaker (and more spoilery) than the first half, but I thought I'd be able to write more precisely about those topics before I started and then I couldn't.
  I read the english translation and thus everything I talk about is in the context of that. This is mostly relevant because I think there's a chance I'm mentioning some details here which actually aren't in the original, though I haven't checked this myself.

  ---

  Free Life Fantasy Online (which I will henceforth shorten as FLFO because they use that shortening in-story) is a story about a Full Dive Virtual Reality Massively Multiplyer Online Role Playing Game (FDVRMMORPG for short... and yes, they used that one in the story too), called FLFO. Specifically, it's the kind where they're just playing the game and experiencing the world as a top player with no stakes corresponding to outside the game (e.g. BOFURI and Shangri-La Frontier are some other stories in the genre); just a nice MMO gaming experience.

  The part that makes this story stand out to me is how much the story makes sure to depict the game as a... good game. In many of the stories similar to this, there's some sort of content that feels extremely imbalanced that the MC exploits for their claim to power, the inclusion of which just makes me wonder how the game would ever be considered good if it doesn't properly reward those people who work hard grinding in a mundane way. The game does still include the unique one-ofs that seem to litter the genre, where once someone does something it's just permanently locked away from others, but the rewards actually feel like they matched the amount of effort the MC had to put into obtaining that secret. But even that has less things than usual that feel like they're necessarily unique; the MC took one path to get to the result they reached, but it wouldn't be unreasonable for someone else to find a different path that leads there that doesn't actually need the unique items (they show enough that it's clear what the requirements are and how you might get there). Although there is one blatent one-of position with world-level consequences and unique abilities that the MC did get, it's also a role that has little enough importance (aside from NPC interactions) that it mostly just feels funny that there was a whole chapter dedicated to the cutscene that granted that role in the first place. (Well, it's a good way to get character introductions.)

  Additionally, the game is shown to have some of the limitations inherent to being a game. Instead of feeling like a mostly dynamic world that's essentially equivalent to an average litRPG (fantasy world with a game/levelling system attached, usually isekai), they have plenty of mentions of practical limitations (how detailed the 3D model mesh is and how you need to spend real money to increase fidelity) or how things actually show up UI-wise to the player (there's a lot of progress bars and cooldown bars and the like; they even detail how spellcasting has a kind of awkward-feeling (chanting) bar between selecting the spell and it being able to be casted) or NPCS acting like they're actually just acting in accordance to some preprogrammed algorithm (despite the inclusion of a powerful enough AI that they can actually act like a real person during an encounter, they just use your affinity values for what interactions you get to encounter in the first place...)

  Not that everything in the story is all fine. Kotone (that's the MC's name) is shown to actually have a life outside of the game (going to school) as do most of the other top players. In most MMORPGs, your progress is almost entirely proportional to the amount of playtime you put in (skill is a factor too, especially for full dive ones like this), which implies that someone who has more free time would be able to overtake the tops just out of grinding more. This is, of course, never mentioned in the story, instead feeling like everyone just plays approximately the same amount with no exceptions; so those players who only got access to the game later lag a pretty constant X months of progress behind those who got in at launch (although slightly faster) and the entire playerbase is just stratified by join timings rather than it being a smoother curve based on how much of their time they spend playing. (The existence of some curve is implied, but it's still far more bunched up than it should be, based on descriptions of strength levels in volume 9.) But apart from this issue, I find myself not seeing any problems with the way the game mechanics are depicted; a nice break when that's usually my biggest problem with the genre. (There's also the extremely case where the MC found something that everyone else assumed didn't exist (a library in Starting Town (yes that's the name)) by... asking an NPC about it. Which is completely unreasonable that no one else would've been able to find it.)

  I find myself really liking the core aesthetic sense of the MC, especially earlier in. In the early parts, the MC's class turns her into one of those elegant princesses who acts graceful including while fighting, which apart from just being an aesthetic I've been a fan of lately, also makes me connect that to other stories where such a transformation is often adversarial (...half of them are fetish works). Kotone is really completely fine with it though; even if she wasn't just able to live up to the role acting like herself normally, this story's designed to be peaceful and it likely would've gone similarly regardless of that fact. The fact that she's actually a little rich and has experience actually going to tea parties and such is just a bonus in this case.

  Later parts of the story instead pull on the Cthulhu mythos for most of its content, which while less cool is still something interesting to me since this is the first story I've read that's gone into it for real. There's many stories that mention things in passing, but seeing an actual depiction of Cthugha in an illustration (though it's just the ingame representation, so naturally it doesn't make you go insane) or the "Iä! Iä!" chants feel like it's actually trying to actually be focused on the concept. I like stories that are based on common established content like this because it helps with understanding it when I'll see other things based off that same content in the future. No longer do I need to go off of imagining Nyaruko's weakness to forks as a trait of Nyarlathotep now that a somewhat accurate depiction was given. Unfortunately, the MC is left in a weird middle ground where they get neither the cool parts of being an outer god nor the ability to keep the previous aesthetic as they shift into the priest/angel/etc role, which really just makes me wish they went back.

  The other highlight of the story is the way it's full of small jokes that make me chuckle throughout. The story's not a comedy so I tend to expect a high enough amount of seriousness to not have anything that's intentionally in there to be a joke, but then right at the start it throws in a bit where the MC stops reading the (actually pretty short) list of disclaimer notes like 3 words before the end (and you can tell that that's probably the case before they explicitly point it out by actually reading it). While there's not that many points that make me chuckle like that one did, they still exist; the fact that they're infrequent probably helps with making them such a highlight, as having them be frequent starts to feel a bit boring. Some of the other ones I liked was the description of "cooking terrorism" (if you try to cook things with a certain method before unlocking that method, your food explodes), or when they were complaining about how useless Corner Smack (from the Book skill) is by just showing the skill description with no other explanation of why she thinks it's useless, (The skill is about using a book as your weapon (typically as a spellcasting catalyst). I don't think they ever actually state that one outright either.) or when the MC gets divine punishment for insulting god (this is related to the priest thing), or when the MC ends up being tasked with making the new thread due to reaching the post limit of the previous thread... on the thread of her fan club, and then decides that she'd rather not do it.

  The story intentionally shows a really positive community around the game they're playing too. Most of the generic unimportant character interactions come in the other genre staple, the BBS chapters, where everyone talks about the events of the story. I really like that this story makes a lot of the shown posts not about the MC and her antics; it makes it a way to catch up on what some of the other people are doing too. Or just shitposting. There's a lot of shitposting, in a way that actually feels reminescent of what I imagine good forums are like. Obviously everything shown is still somewhat tangentially related to the plot, and there's the bunch of people thirsting after the MC, but everywhere it happens it's never anyone actually taking things seriously. I'm probably a big fan of this sort of thing just because it's nostalgic and actually feels familiar, like a sign of when I was a kid and was able to play around without actually thinking about if something would be harmful or impossible for anyone to get.

  In short, FLFO's mostly just a relaxing positive experience that's great if you like the culture and gameplay style from MMOs, even if it's filled with a bit of unnecessary full dive baggage that makes the MC more powerful than they really need to be.

  ---

  If you're planning on reading the official translation yourself, there is an extremely large amount of minor typos (the most common one is swapping two digits on post numbers in the BBS chapters) and it's actually pretty annoying. I started to get pretty good at ignoring them after a while.

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