The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

I May Be a Guild Receptionist, but I'll Solo Any Boss to Clock Out on Time

What's It About? 

Alina Clover thought being a receptionist for the Adventurers Guild would be her ticket to the good life...but her dream gig turns into an overtime nightmare whenever adventurers get stuck clearing a dungeon. To save herself from paperwork, Alina turns to the simplest solution at hand―beating down the monsters herself!

I May Be a Guild Receptionist, But I'll Solo Any Boss to Clock Out on Time has a story by Mato Kousaka and art by Suzu Yūki. The English translation is by Jennifer Ward. Lettering is by Rachel Pierce. Published by Yen Press (October 17, 2023).

Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

Scouring the modern light novel-derived fantasy landscape for a compelling, interesting, or unique story can feel like an adventure itself sometimes. Happening upon a manga that at least promises something distinct up-front lets me go into it with a glimmer of hope. I May Be a Guild Receptionist, But I'll Solo Any Boss to Clock Out on Time has one of those customary too-long titles with the premise right in it, but it's a funny fantasy line on its own and makes it sound like a fun time. Unfortunately, everything entertaining about this one begins and ends with that initial premise, as the book barely finds anything interesting to do with it.

Alina Clover, the titular receptionist herself, makes for a strong enough center for the story that it never devolves into being unreadable. She's a beleaguered worker at what's effectively presented here as the fantasy DMV, putting up with the rigors of customer service for the otherwise cushy benefits of a tenured government job. And she's not a pushover in the face of the kinds of public interactions anyone who's dealt with this kind of work knows all too well, as her infuriated reactions to various turns the story takes help her stand out with relatable rage while also indicating she might do well to address some deeper issues she might have. Those bits are funny enough, and this might have worked had it just stuck to irreverent incitements of anger over fantasy paperwork and overtime.

Unfortunately, any hope of a compelling fantasy take on Office Space is nullified by Guild Receptionist just not being able to help itself in indulging in the worst impulses of the base genre. Alina, a super-powered adventurer in her own right who only uses her abilities to free herself from the tedium of sorting through paperwork of backlogged dungeon runs, is a funny little idea. But the story becomes obsessed with talking about the mechanics of her skill and the broader world system that it exists under. It doesn't detail clever technicalities like the "Sigurd" and "Dia" skills; it's just rattling on general lore gobbledegook. Similarly, the writing drones on about stuff like RPG party composition and monster mechanics, using terms like "Tank," "A.O.E. Attack," and "Aggro" in-universe in a way that marks it as a lazy kind of shortcut approach to fantasy world writing. It's as uninspired as the couple of monster designs we see get battled in the story. There isn't anything else to this one apart from those haphazardly depicted battles and Alina arguing with an adventurer, spending several chapters in a row unsuccessfully trying to recruit her into his party, making this whole thing come off like a waste of a good guild receptionist.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

I'll say this for the manga version – it makes Jade a whole lot less creepy. As you may or may not already know, in the original light novel, super tank Jade Scrade is flat-out obsessed with Alina Clover, the receptionist/secret adventurer, exhibiting a romantic attraction to her and his burning desire to have her use her power in his party. This gives him hanging around, waiting to bump into her a much ickier overtone, giving him some severe stalker vibes. While he still looks a little too invested in her in this take on the story, it's tempered by the fact that he just seems to want her to be his frontline attacker. Any attraction she holds for him is of secondary importance.

That aside, this lacks much of the essential worldbuilding information from the source. It tries, I'll give it that, but that ends up looking like characters name-dropping pieces of information without a logical reason, followed by clunky explanations. It also is too devoted to the details of Alina's office life, seeming to think that scenes of her filing papers or writing things down are just as exciting as her whipping out her giant war hammer and pounding a dragon into pulp. While I understand that the story is trying to set up a dichotomy between the two halves of her life, this is a case where telling would have worked better than showing because, somehow, watching Alina work is less compelling than the rest of the book.

On the other hand, Alina screaming about her mortgage is one of the more relatable aspects of the story. Sure, mortgages aren't exciting, but that's the sort of information that helps to set up what the story is trying to sell us – that Alina would rather have normal stability than riches and excitement. At the end of the day, that's what drives her, and in a world where adventurers are highly prized and celebrated, it's hard to get people to understand that. Regrettably, it also seems hard to get this story to understand what is and isn't engaging. If you desperately need another guild receptionist story, I'd suggest going With the Light novel. Jade may be creepier, but the story plays out more interestingly when all the details are in place.