A good story, plagued by inexcusable production

Alright, i went into this not really caring about it, as i got it with the monthly token.

tl;dr; good story, reasonable va, good performance, terribly subpar production


The story: the story is good. I like it, i'm an isekai trash. that's about it.

The translation: as per usual, the translation is inferior to fan translation. This is normal for anime, therefore i'd never recommend buying it as a physical book unless you can read Japanese.

The voice actor: she's good. Her range as others have said, is not word class, but it's good enough for this story. Seemingly she lacks experience reading up for a long time. Chapters have a noticeable volume change as her voice tired out & got some time to rest between chapters. I'd argue it's not on her Too bad she's changed in the next one.

The production: this is where everything goes to hell. While the VA did her job reasonably well, whoever coordinated the production is a totally unfit for the job.

1: The VA got tired between chapters and the volume difference is extremely jarring. It's not reasonable tho ask ANYBODY to speak for a long time, especially if it's recorded. This should have been managed BEFORE the actual production, and at worst in post. It would have taken less then a day to fix these issues by re-recording segments.

2: whoever had the idea that FOOTNOTES should be read up in the middle of a chapter have clearly never thought about the listening experience. Take note of how this is handled with this book: 48 Laws of Power, By: Robert Greene, Narrated by: Richard Poe. While you may disagree with the premise of the book, the way footnotes and stories and handled are stellarly tailored to an optimal listening experience. I should know, as i own the book in real copy too.

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loli hitler best hitler

this gave insight that the anime couldn't. Tanya wanting god dead now seems reasonable, even justified. 10/10.

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Dense but worth staying with

It took me a chapter or two to get to grips with this as the jumping between events, perspectives and monologues can be jarring, but after a while I just couldn't stop listening.

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Audible we need MORE Lightnovels

Absolutely loving this series, I have about 6 credits as there isn't any book I was interested in but when Audible start having light novels and saw Tanya was one of them that 6 credits immediately seems not enough 😂😂

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Fantastic

Much better than the animie the detail is great and the voice actress does a great job

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Brilliant listen

I enjoyed the Anime and the Light Novels so was pleased to see a few series i like getting audiobooks.

This one was a joy to listen to especially as the narrator is the Dub VA.

My only notes are she does the tanya voice for Victoria so if you lose focus you can lose track of which character she is voicing. I slap hope they’ll bring in other VA’s from the Anime to give it a more lively feel

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can be a bit difficult to get into

the book have a lot of inner monologue and the writing is generally very densely packed, however after around halfway through i got used to it and it became much more enjoyable. if you have watched the anime then you might struggle with understanding where in the story you are, the light novel is a bit different from the anime but also a lot better imo.

the light novel flesh out tanya a lot more, she is very morally gray and the light novel have some really good scenes that the anime unfortunately skipped (24h artillery rain). the generals get a lot more time in the light novel and their inner monologue about tanya makes her a lot more terrifying than in the anime.

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The constant economics reference is odd

There is a constant stream of reference to markets and behavioural economics where those things are not relevant, for example, the MC references market demand for military situations. Yes its really odd, yes, depending on personal views the ideology of the MC can be a little obstructive, it's probably the case that the authors a nut for right wing economics, but that's not actually a criticism of the writing. Quite frankly, it's pretty excellent.

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Painfully dragged out and silly

Scenes dragged out by repeating the same thing over and over (both in narration and dialogue).

Childish dialogue (even from adults) - arguments between characters boil down to them repeating "no u".

Really quiet narration, in contrast to loud direct speech.

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bad narrator can ruin an otherwise good experience

Yeah I'm gonna be completely honest here with this, for the opening volume of a series, this is a BAD Adaptation, in no other reason than the person chosen to narrate the piece.I'll explain now that I largely watch anime on subs and refrain from dubs because of the reasons I'm going to get into here.

Ms Rial has no true control over her ability to create voices, whether its radio communications in Chapter 1 or the general flakiness of her ability to get a young voice out throughout, it fails to be convincing or discerning in characterisation. She provides a clean read of the work but a very poorly acted one, the western voice acting anime scene is littered with people who have small talent but large vocal control, either able to do one voice well or falsely claiming they have range when it is in fact a half-tone dip in vocalisation rather than a changing of voice to portray different characters.

There were times when listening to this that I was taken completely out of this because I was hearing Bulma speak as narrator or when several characters are in the same scene and all voices sound identical to each other, or as explained briefly before with Tanya, Ms Rial's control over the youthful voice slips and she falls into a character range that does not fit the character at all. It is a sign of 2 things and something I am neither happy with nor content with, those things are a lack of a voice director who requires multiple takes from a narrator and an overconfidence in an actor who has no qualifiable talent to perform roles.

I'm hoping as I've seen that the Narrator for this is a different person from Volume 2 onwards, that this gets better because this volume has shown me no real skill or dedication to the story of Youjo Senki, and as I do love this series, I want to listen to it narrated in audiobook format, I want this to succeed and be a mainstay in my library, but if this quality remains I'll be dropping this and remaining as a Light Novel only reader as I neither want to be thinking "is that the Major or2nd lieutenant
Serebryakov?" when listening to them speak to each other. (and if I'm going to be honest, if a series set in a fictionalised Germany of WW 1 and has names like "Degurechaff" and "Serebryakov", you'd think having the American pronunciation of Lieutenant would be a mistake, but apparently, like this...it stays for some bizarre reason)

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