½ Prince

“Are you discriminating against clams?” What do you get when you have an adventurers' party consisting of a perverted Game Master, a beastman priest, a loli angel necromancer, a gay demon bard and a quiet mage who is seemingly into beastiality, all led by a transvestite elf warrior with a talking meatbun as a pet? Something that will cause you to throw your money at the screen while doubling over laughing. A hundred years from now, in a world where technology has advanced to the point where virtual reality games are so close to reality that the difference feels almost indistinguishable, there lives a girl named Xiao Lan.She has lived out her virtual gaming career leeching off of male players' XP and gear boosting with the help of a fearsome tactic called feminine wiles. However after getting verbally beaten into the ground by her little brother because of it, she decides to prove to him and herself that she is capable of leveling up a character legitimately on her own, without making other players do the work for her. As it happened, just a few days later, the newest huge title in the VR gaming world was released and Xiao Lan wasted no time on becoming the world's first player in the new game “Second Life”, boasting a whopping realism level of 99%. Because of this level of realism, every player can only create one character which would then act as their in-game alter-ego, but as the first player to ever log on to the new game, Xiao Lan was given the privilege of having one unique request granted for her character. Willing to show to her brother once and for all that she doesn't need to seduce guys to help her level up, she requests to be allowed to play as a male character within Second Life. And thus begins the crazy adventure of Prince, a man of unparalleled handsomeness and fighting prowess... and the game's one and only transvestite. “French bread vs a meatbun, this certainly is something you would only be able to see once in every ten thousand years” Half Prince is a Chinese novel written by Yu Wo which portrays the outrageous adventures of Odd Squad, a guild consisting of one of the most random main character casts you'll ever come across. There have been a lot of novels and manga in recent years which utilizes the concept of being trapped inside a video game in one way or another, however Half Prince doesn't quite do something as cliché and/or dramatic as that. Quite simply this is about a fully functioning game world as well as the real one simultaneously without any great catastrophe or incident causing problems for everyone... most of the time at least. What I really loved about this novel was how its strong point was based on the main purpose of video games and nothing else. In other words: fun. This story is unbelievably silly and not serious whatsoever the vast majority of the time, and it does it *so* good. It parodies countless other media works and has tons of pop culture references used in a very sarcastic sense but it essentially never stops being plain entertaining. And in the end, that's what really keeps you reading. “That’s right, a can of Pepsi as tall as a man has appeared in front of my eyes...” Of course this doesn't mean Half Prince doesn't have a story. In fact it has a constant progression and a quite satisfying and conclusive ending. The only thing that bothered me a bit was that it became a bit more cliché the longer it went as it started to mix in a grander conflict on a more serious level over time which didn't really fit the atmosphere of the story, however even so it always stayed true to its own theme and never stopped putting a smile on my face while reading it. It just didn't do it quite *as* much as it did in the first few volumes. Overall though this was one of the more entertaining reads I've gone through in several months and I definitely urge you to at least give it a shot. As always with over-the-top silly storylines it's probably not something for everyone but as long as you don't take it seriously, you're in for a ton of fun.