The Spring 2023 Manga Guide

The Otherworlder, Exploring the Dungeon

What's It About? 

Souya, desperate for cash to pay his little sister's medical expenses, has an offer from a shady company fall into his lap—more than enough money for only a year of work…on the other side of a portal to another dimension, where he'll have to ascend to the fifty-sixth floor of a dungeon! Worse, his gig-work stint as a fantasy world adventurer gets off on the wrong foot when the transfer process malfunctions, stranding him without supplies! Will his otherworld adventure end before it even begins…?

The Otherworlder, Exploring the Dungeon has a story by Hinagi Asami and art by Kaoru Hoshino and Kureta, with English translation by Alexandra McCullogh-Garcia. This volume was retouched and lettered by Adnazeer S. Macalangcom. Yen Press released the first volume on March 21.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

I'll say this for The Otherworlder, Exploring the Dungeon – it makes an effort to be different. Not much of one, but an effort nonetheless. The twist here is that Souya, who agreed to take part in a military expedition through a portal to finance his sister's medical care, is the only survivor of the journey, and now with weapons, medical supplies, and a couple of malfunctioning AI, he has to fulfill his mission to explore the dungeon. Or at least, that's what he opts to do, considering that no one from Japan can get to him for a year. He meets a merman, many ladies of various species, generic thugs, and a cat. Goddess. Whatever.

The goddess-masquerading-as-a-cat is the best part of this volume. Mythlanica was once a feared goddess of despair and/or destruction, but for the last fifteen-odd years she's been hanging around in feline form. As anyone who has shared space with a cat knows, they're all convinced that they're gods in fur, and that makes all of Mythlanica's pronouncements of grandeur hit particularly well. Whether you know she's a divine being or not, her statements just scream entitled feline, and it's entertaining every single time. Apparently, she's quite something in human form, too; poor Souya doesn't get to see her that way, and so neither do we.

Most of the book is devoted to Souya figuring out what he needs to do in order to fulfill his mission. That involves finding a god to make a pact with, registering with the Adventurers' Guild, training…you know. The usual. While the novel went into just enough depth to make this feel less like a rehash of the standard tropes, the manga's shorter page count means that it's selective about what it covers. Only the cat and the merman's characterizations are fully intact in the adaptation. Souya is largely boring and the plot is nothing spectacular. It isn't terrible, but it also isn't great, and I think that's the best that can be said for this volume.

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

Souya's adventures in the Otherworld manage to be pretty engaging. For one thing, he has adversities to overcome. As an ordinary person from the "real world," (regardless of the assault rifle he's carrying), he has a harder time going through the basics, like gaining permission to enter the local dungeon. Unlike other isekai protagonists, Souya doesn't get any kind of broken “useless power”. His victories come from using his tools (read: his handy-dandy AI partner) as best as he can or relying on the help of his party members. The fact that Souya has to work as part of a team and not steal the show, even in battles against wild pigs, is refreshing for an isekai. The bar may be on the floor, but it's a good show of Souya's quick thinking and self-sacrificing nature.

The result is a perfectly engaging fish-out-of-water story. Perhaps Souya will learn magic or gain some kind of superpower from his "apparently divine goddess" cat. For now, all he has are a gun, a robot, and his wit. The fact that The Otherworlder, Exploring the Dungeon avoids the typical pitfalls—no RPG systems as magic, no weird slavery apologia, no over-the-top “useless” power—makes it remarkably refreshing, which compensates for Souya's somewhat dull and bland character. Despite this, I can mildly recommend the series, for now.