Advertisements
Infinite Competitive Dungeon Society

Type
Genre
Tags[ ]
Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 1014 votes)
5 | 51% (520 votes) |
4 | 17% (169 votes) |
3 | 13% (129 votes) |
2 | 8% (85 votes) |
1 | 11% (111 votes) |
Advertisements
Language
Support Book
Author(s)
One entry per lineArtist(s)
One entry per lineYear
Example: 2012
2015
Status in COO
Status in Country of Origin. One entry per line
352 Chapters (Completed)
Licensed
Yes
Completely Translated
Original Publisher
One entry per lineEnglish Publisher
One entry per lineRelease Frequency
Every 2002 Day(s)Activity Stats [Graph]
Weekly Rank: #8419Monthly Rank: #7175
All Time Rank: #65
Reading List [Graph]
On 13639 Reading Lists
Monthly Rank: #208
All Time Rank: #102
Description
Links are NOT allowed. Format your description nicely so people can easily read them. Please use proper spacing and paragraphs.The story follows Kang Shin from South Korea, who is raised on tales of fighting monsters by his eccentric father. One day he learns it’s more than just a tale. Follow this brutish lad on his journey as Earth is exposed to outside forces and unparalleled existences.
Associated Names
One entry per lineICDS
무한경쟁던전사회
무한경쟁던전사회
Related Series
N/ARecommendations
Everyone Else is a Returnee (21)Seoul Station’s Necromancer (10)
The Second Coming of Avarice (8)
The Tutorial Is Too Hard (8)
Dimensional Sovereign (3)
Stop, Friendly Fire! (3)
-
- A constantly growing harem of bland girls, that are all attracted to him because of his OPness and no other reason. I might be biased against harems, but surely this is 'poor' by harem standards, with every female character basically made from the same cookie-cutter, only decorated differently. It was when I reached the 'vote for your favourite female lead' that I realised none of them are likeable.
- Poor development of MC. In my opinion, he does nothing admirable apart from killing monsters and being strong enough so that no one can oppose him. His defining character traits are being calm, confident, strong, and nothing else. The novel goes from challenging and entertaining grinds in the dungeon and going through actual hardship
to get achievements, to generic world-saving with a terribly fake harem.
- Recycled plot of 'an enemy pops up which puts all of Earth/another world in danger, but our MC is
just strong enough to beat it, hence he gets amazing abilities and rewards which coincidentally synergise with his existing abilities and will counter the next enemy that comes along'. Battles are nothing beyond a display of MC's abilities and showing how he's stronger than these Goliath-like creatures.
I don't think this can be boiled down to different writing styles, because the characterisation and plot simply falls short from Everyone Is a Returnee. Overall, it's a great read to start with, but don't look for any commitment, and feel free to put it down any time as it does not get better.This novel is quite close to The Tutorial Is Too Hard in terms of overall atmosphere and setting. However, I feel that it is slightly inferior due to a few problems.
The first is that there is no seriousness in the novel. I dislike slice of life, so this is a minus for me. There has been 50 chapters already and there has been zero mentions of anyone doing anything bad ever. The author tried to excuse this by saying the dungeon only chooses those with a good personality, but what about the ability users? Are they "chosen" for having a good personality as well? Seems pretty strange to me. Especially after Guardian became corrupt and profit-seeking instead of seeking to protect humanity from monsters, it seems that ability users aren't all saints, yet there is no mention of any evil ability user even though these must exist. Every character whom the MC interacts with is a good person. Every single one. Even if you are the most reclusive hermit, if you live in a big city you are bound to encounter a thief or a scammer at least once in your life, but not the MC. Every girl he meets is tsundere (or dere-dere) for him and nobody ever tries to cheat or betray him. In short, this novel suffers from a lack of villains. I personally don't see why the MC wants to get stronger if he doesn't have a reason to. I mean, his father makes good money just from doing the dungeon level 5, and it's not like they're under threat from monsters or anything, so why go through that much trouble?
The second is that the grinding became a little bit annoying for me by chapter 49. There is no reason to read through the MC fighting with minor monsters in a dungeon where there are no consequences for dying, and even fighting with boss monsters does not seem to teach any lessons that might be useful in future. The Tutorial Is Too Hard also has grinding, but it mixes in interesting things during the grinding that relieves the tedium, for example:
This is, for me, what sets The Tutorial Is Too Hard apart from Infinite Competitive Dungeon Society. TTITH is littered with musings on life, whereas ICDS can only be barely considered self-reflective through the jokes. Although the jokes contain hints at a deeper meaning, they never manage to delve as deeply into human nature as TTITH.
Third, and yes, you might laugh at this, but the fight scenes in TTITH are more interesting and better written than the fight scenes in ICDS. Compare the TTITH MC's fight with the lizard woman Idaltaru to the ICDS MC's fight against the lizard knight. In the battle with Idaltaru, although the MC thought up a strategy to win against her gaseous form transformation by using a weak attack to bait out her evasion ability and then following up with his most powerful attack, it didn't work because she went berserk after his provocation and didn't use the evasion ability at all. He only narrowly avoided death by appealing to her love for him. Whereas in ICDS, the MC won against the lizard knight by simply cancelling its attack spell with his own attack and then beat it up using martial arts. And this "spell cancelling" is supposed to be some super special high level technique, wtf! Anyone who has played a video game knows it! The fight against the spider woman was also rather underwhelming - the MC literally just jumped on her and punched her to death. Not very interesting for a boss fight.
This novel does a lot of things fairly well. Firstly, on the humor side, it pulls off a lot of jokes well (like the quote above, from chapter 38) because they are in-character, making fun of the characters' ignorance for example. It does not overuse the jokes too much, for example the MC keeps on forgetting to call back Palludia (a running joke).
Fourth, the MC has to interact with multiple annoying female characters, such as Palludia and Loretta, whose lines are just frankly annoying. Yes, Loretta has her counterpart in TTITH in KiriKiri, but at least TTITH has normal female characters like the archer and the leader of the Order. In ICDS there has not been a single normal female character in the entirety of the first 50 chapters! The author even notes this himself:
Yes, recognizing a problem is not the same as solving it. The fact that the author cannot write a normal female character speaks volumes about the nature of this novel. It is not a serious work. It does not even try to be serious, unlike TTITH with its Representative Federation. The entire story in the 50 chapters so far is just the MC grinding the dungeon along with a few side characters that are literally no more than comic relief.
Also, it is frustrating to read about the MC's plans to hide his identity constantly being thwarted by his comically s*upid father. If hiding your identity was important then wouldn't everybody be doing it? And if it isn't, then what's the point? None of the other dungeon explorers concealed their identities.
Fifth, there are some plot holes that stick out to me. First of all, why does it take years to clear dungeon levels, when the information on how to clear them should be publicly available? The ability to form parties seems incredibly abusable, given how easily higher leveled people can help lower leveled. Of course in the story it is stated that you cannot challenge a lower level boss once you defeat a higher leveled one, but why is it that nobody in the other continents thinks of doing things similar to what the MC did, i.e just staying at a level and helping others get through it through parties? Isn't Palludia supposed to be super important in her continent? So why didn't she have higher leveled people helping her for e.g level 5? Especially given that certain continents are facing life-or-death threats from demon lords? Surely it should be a priority for the high levelled dungeon explorers to teach other people how to level up in the dungeons?
All in all, I think this is not as well written as The Tutorial Is Too Hard and it is not anywhere near as interesting. It's just a dungeon-crawling slice of life basically. I should have stayed away after seeing the Shounen tag.