Reading Report: 05 July 2026

タワーダンジョン

タワーダンジョン

Volume 5 starts a little bit before the end of volume 4 and fills in the gaps for the main party before they met up with the secondary party and started fighting the Dark Dragon Marquis. After defeating him, the threat of the necromancer's army re-emerges and Yuva and Aridelia are thrown off a chasm. Yuva tanks it with his natural vitality but Aridelia appears to die, only to return to save the day seemingly unscathed a moment later. She runs away in shame and threatens to kill herself, but Yuva promises to hear her out without judgement. The following chapter is a flashback showing Aridelia's birth(?) in the Tower Dungeon as a necromancer, her escape, falling in love with a prince, and the tragedy that followed. Everyone in the party accepts Aridelia and they manage to return her to her senses.
Volume 6 introduces yet another set of characters, two people from an "Eastern Nation". One is a swordsman and the other is a princess who pilots a mecha samurai. They are given a mission to journey to the Tower Dungeon, and they join the fray at just the right moment to save the (already bloated) party from another evil Dragonkin guy. By the time those two members are in the party, Yuva's sister, Funapa and one of the kingdom's elite wards, Mirigoa, have also joined the party in addition to several members of the mining guild. I'm honestly hoping they split up soon because there are just a lot of characters to keep track of. Have I even mentioned Churafi the rat princess or Salgan the crow-riding warlock?

As of this week I'm all caught up with volume releases of this manga. Now I'm in that unpleasant place where I'm not sure if I should follow the releases closely and get a less satisfying drip-feed or let it sit for a while and risk forgetting why I was so invested in the first place.

妖狐×僕SS

Only watched a handful of episodes of this because my evenings have ended up fairly busy in the last week. There was an extremely funny episode where Riricho's fiance (who she basically didn't know about) showed up. His entire gimmick for the episode was labelling people and things S (sadist) and M (masochist). The last few episodes have had a subplot where Riricho wants to return her affection to her servant, but she can't get over her mental blocks.

ダンジョン飯

Having caught up to Tower Dungeon, what other dungeon-related stuff is out there? According to Anilist search, Solo Levelling is a "top % #dungeon" anime, but I honestly don't want to watch or read that at all...
I read the first volume of Dungeon Meshi in English years ago, but never continued from there. I have trouble re-reading things, so I basically felt like my English-reading created a block unless I wanted to skip a volume. Well, thankfully my desire to read beyond volume 1 and the time spent not touching the series gave me just enough momentum to get through the retread content and I'm reading the series smoothly now (on volume 4 as of writing). It's interesting to see how different this and Tower Dungeon are in their approach to the subgenre.

DUNGEON ENCOUNTERS

Slowly moving through this game, partly motivated just by my desire to see what new things it can throw at me. I'm currently in the deep 20s, which feels very far but might be less than 25% of the way through the game. After my unfortunately encounter with the treasure reset monster which stole 10k gold from me and put me in the red, I decided to sell some stuff to dig myself out of debt and I had a clock weapon from the dungeon (it resets enemy ATBs with a pretty bad hit rate) which sold for over 100k gold. So I've been coasting off that windfall, hoping that selling a unique item won't bite me in the back later. I find all the gimmick items to basically be bad, and so far status effects have not been useful for my party to use yet. I finally unlocked the Jump skill, and I also got a passive (though it needs to be "active" to show any information) to find lost party members, which have given me new ways to approach the dungeon. I'm also surprised to see how the few stats can produce a variety of enemy encounter types. Enemies with 0 physical or magical armour but lots of HP, or enemies with 1 armour, or 1 hp, or flying enemies with 0 physical armour (which are immune to the most effective, consistent physical weapons).

I feel like even in an abstract game like this, there are a few missing functions I would like to see, such as event tiles that trigger an encounter (think talking to a Boss to start a fight) and having that event add tiles to the dungeon (think lowering a drawbridge or raising a gate). While each stratum of the dungeon has some personality (Stratum 3 has a lot of ziggy bits with dead ends, and Stratum 2 had a lot of loops), it would be nice to see events play into the identity of the dungeon.