Keina has been a hardcore “World of Leadale” player for a long time, as after a serious accident there wasn’t much else for her to do except play the VRMMORPG while hooked up to life support. But one day, between one moment and the next, Keina finds that her life support has failed and yet, somehow, she seems to be alive again in “World of Leadale.” According to the game menus that only she can see, her name is now Cayna and it seems that 200 years have passed since she last logged in.
So, with no better options, Cayna and her computer support program start exploring this familiar world to see if they can discover why Cayna ended up here in the first place.
Like many other isekai books, this one boasts a “slightly different set-up than every other story” set-up and creator Ceez actually notes in the afterword that when they first worked on this story (around 2013) that “the idea of ‘being reincarnated as a game character’ was still pretty unheard of.” I do have a quibble with that since, while Keina might be dead, effectively the set-up of the story is no different from other “trapped in a game world” isekai stories like .hack//Sign or Log Horizon which both easily pre-date it. And by 2021, the idea that this “gimmick” is unique is laughable, it’s practically a passé set-up at this point.
This is another story where the technical details of the game, which it appears only Cayna can make use of, come up frequently in the story and these moments really took me out of the story. Normally this isn’t the case for me but some of the programming in the original game “World of Leadale” was just bizarre, like Cayna being at the max level 1,100 and knowing the maximum 4,000 different in-game skills. Ironically, these details made the story feel even more like a fantasy to me, in the sense that no one would ever design a game like that; my honest first reaction was to wonder how much the game must have cost for the number of programming hours that would take and how much storage space it must have taken up, rather than being suitably impressed at how “detailed” the game was. I certainly felt like the focus could have been slimmed down but I suppose some fans must enjoy these details, simply because of how often they continue to come up in anime/manga/light novels.
The story also sits at a weird junction between being more of a “slow life” story and being more plot focused. To be clear, I would be fine if the story was to go either way if Cayna decides she wants to enjoy the new life she’s gotten or if she wants to dig into exactly why she’s here/what happened to Leadale since she last logged into the game version of it. But, if the story does want to go the second route, it’s not giving itself much to go on. Cayna is definitely puzzled by her situation but her one lead is to search for her fellow Skill Masters’ towers, the 13 other players she was friends with who had also mastered all 4,000 of the in-game skills (since surely those locations would still exist after 200 years), and she has no idea where to start. So we have a bit of a mishmash between the goals of the character and the actual story, even though at 288 pages, longer than a many light novels, it has time to do them both.
Unfortunately, while the plot-focused side of the story is a bit of a wash, the “slow life” side of the story is just dull. Again, it’s far too focused on “here’s what skills Cayna used and how” for my taste and the story doesn’t focus on any of the side characters long enough for readers to develop a relationship with them. The side characters with the greatest focus are Cayna’s in-game children (another gameplay detail I found strange) and, well, two of the three are incredibly, deliberately, annoying to read about. It’s another strange choice by Ceez and, by this point, none of their strange choices have worked for me. I’ll check in to see how people receive the upcoming anime adaptation but I doubt I’ll continue In the Land of Leadale myself.