Review: Diamantine

Diamantine by Andrew Rowe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Keras's little side story of capturing the Six Sacred Swords continues, with the lit-RPG world now taking on a lot of inspiration, as Rowe says, from shōnen manga and anime and their tournament arcs. He specifically cites the Hunter Exams from Hunter x Hunter and the Chunin Exams from Naruto, so yeah, now I can see where Rowe gets a bit of his long-term storytelling style from. I never really grew up on shōnen manga or anime like just about every other boy my age, but I've read and/or seen some as I grew up, and I'm pretty sure none of them had a protagonist anywhere close to Keras in age. That's a pretty unique little selling point for sure, but unfortunately, this is clearly another point where Rowe is starting to drag his feet as far as telling the story goes. The implication at the start of this series was that the first two books would essentially be the story told in the time it took for Keras, Corin, Sera, etc. to ride the train between the second and third Arcane Ascension novel, but no, we're not done yet. Not when there's at least one more book to go in this particular series, which hopefully wraps up Keras's prequel tournament arc and doesn't make it drag for 20 repetitive episodes or more (looking at you, Yu Yu Hakusho...)

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