The Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? audiobook is a standard fantasy experience primarily kept afloat by a few novel ideas and strong performances from the narrators.
It should be noted that this is my first outing with the series. I knew of the title previously, but have not engaged with the light novels, manga, or anime before this. I understand that other releases down the line might change how these elements are implemented, though for now, all I can speak on is this volume.
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? is a pretty standard fantasy romp with some thirsty elements thrown into the mix. It’s a tried and true setup and a tale as old as time, really, which can be both an advantage and disadvantage. It doesn’t take long to get up to speed – everybody knows what we’re doing here. Bell is the young hero; he journeys into the dungeon to slay beasties; he likes pretty girls and wants to impress them. Sure, that’s fine. The problem, of course, is that this setup (and ones like it) has been done so many times now that it can be hard to stand out from the pack unless you’ve got some genuinely compelling elements to differentiate what’s on offer. While this first volume does show a few glimmers of new ideas, many of them are not the focus or are bogged down in their unique problems.
Before we discuss the fantasy elements, let’s hash out the character and story beats. Overall, Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? is fine but not necessarily exceptional. Bell is a young hero with big dreams yet little skill to achieve them. He’s ambitious and has great potential that no one outside of Hestia recognizes yet. He thinks about girls all the time, not knowing how to talk to or act when they interact with him. The world has a big magical dungeon with levels and monsters, and adventurers go into the dungeon to get treasure. Again, it’s nothing all that original, but it’s a good enough setup. A few other side characters are in the mix, like the goddess Hestia, the human warrior Ais Wallenstein, and other deities like Loki and Freyja.
The big issue in these early stages is that Bell is the only character we get to know. The rest of the cast doesn’t have much narrative presence, so it’s hard to get a read on them, and even when they are the focus, they often think about or discuss Bell. Most scenes are Bell running around doing his thing or Hestia worrying about Bell. Because of this, a lot of weight is put on Bell’s shoulders to carry character work in the novel. It’s not bad, though it’s not engaging either. Your enjoyment of this will depend on how much you identify with Bell’s youthful awkwardness. He’s nervous but a bit brash in battle, constantly chasing women, yet a novice when interacting with them—a typical awkward teenager who doesn’t stray too far from the archetype.
The setting is similarly standard fair for fantasy stories. A city where adventuring is a reliable profession and a dungeon full of monsters and treasures to ply said trade. Goblins and minotaurs and scheming gods, elves and dwarves and magic powers. I can’t complain about a standard fantasyland setup – it’s as comfortable to me as a well-worn pair of jeans – though it’s also nothing too creative, and I know that bothers folks who want a bit more out of their fantasy settings. I, for one, enjoy the magically alive dungeon shtick, and I’m always happy when a setting is a valid secondary world and not a video game or what have you.
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? adds a few new wrinkles to the fantasy format, namely familia and hero abilities. Gods and goddesses form groups called familia, which serve several roles, incorporating ideas like family, adventuring parties, and gang-like cohorts into the mix. There are stipulations about who can pair with whom, how selections and blessings work, etc. I think it’s a pretty interesting take on the typical fantasy trope of the gods being present yet still working through mortal intermediaries. The only negative is that there isn’t much time to explore this meaningfully – it’s all rather surface level, “my group of friends is better than your group of friends”-style bickering. That said, there’s a lot of potential here for future drama and conflict, and it’s fun having divine beings antagonizing one another.
The hero’s abilities are another area where there are some interesting ideas. Fujino Ōmori tries to take some classic fantasy elements wherein the secondary world is a real place with specific logic and metaphysical conditions while also pulling from the modern-leaning fantasy tropes of prominent game-like elements such as stats and powers. Essentially, each hero has their stats and abilities written on their back, and the gods and goddesses can read them and determine a person’s capabilities. I’m pretty mixed on this element, to be frank, as I think it is still too game-like without just leaning into being a game world. The most common iteration I’ve seen of this sort of trope is when there is an adventurer’s guild that ranks guild members or quests on difficulty (“A fifth-rank adventurer” and “an s-rank enemy” and the like). Having Bell and the others walk around with what amounts to a character sheet on their back is a bit too on the nose for me and breaks my immersion.
Most egregious is the numbers involved, though. At multiple points throughout the novel, characters (usually Hestia) simply read stat lines out. Hearing someone recite long strings of stat names with rankings and rating ranges like “Strength: I 72-99, Dexterity H 43-61” ad nauseam is tedious writing and kicks me out of the narrative. Having characters harp on about stat points increases after each dungeon delve like patch notes in a video game, which does not make for riveting prose, to put it mildly. It would be one thing to refer to them vaguely (“Bell’s strength has increased two-fold since yesterday!”) or to keep it to perhaps one number the reader has to track (“His magic level is 15,000!”). But having characters in fiction reading Bell’s character sheet, line for line, number for number, at multiple points in the novel just made me mentally check out while also resetting my suspension of disbelief for this fantastical setting.
The actual prose in most scenes is either serviceable to good most of the time. The character dialogue is nothing all that exciting, either lots of exposition delivery or Bell going “Bwuh?! Boobs?!” in most instances. The action scenes are handled quite deftly, though, with Fujino Ōmori using a strong variety of techniques to express action. There are times when the action is in a detailed, cinematic-style blow-by-blow where every thrust and dodge roll is accounted for. There are also times when battles are little more than monster roars interspersed with Bell’s thoughts as he leaps from encounter to encounter. There’s a lot to enjoy here in that regard, and hopefully, future volumes will maintain this fun variety.
The actual audiobook presentation is high quality as well. Any time an audiobook has more than one narrator, I think the experience is generally improved overall, if for no other reason than that it adds some variety to the listening experience. Both narrators here do excellent work and read in clear, crisp voices. I think their enthusiasm is evocative, too, and I have to call special attention to Baugus’ monster noises and Calene-Black’s maniacal laughs. They both went all in on making the material a fun listen.
On the net, Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? was a worthwhile listen. It plays it safe with the fantasy setup and adds a few interesting ideas into the mix. The characters are just so-so throughout this early phase, and there is plenty of room to grow. Despite my hangups with the hero stats and missed opportunities with divine familia, there’s a lot of potential here, and the narrators do a great job bringing the material to life.
Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.
