Title: My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lvl999 Vol. 5
Author: Mashiro
Publisher: Inklore
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 176
Genre: Slice-of-Life, Romance
Publication Date: March 18, 2025
The Story
We open with Akane enjoying her new life as Yamada’s girlfriend! Although, nothing much has changed between the two of them. Akane does some extra things for him, though, such as making him lots of bento boxes. While this is going on, a situation comes up at her job where her manager needs to find a replacement for her since her work term is coming to an end soon. She hires a kid named Hasegawa who plays FoS as well. Turns out, he’s in a guild named Espion and wonders if there is a possibility that he might be able to lure Akane over to it; however, he doesn’t make a move just yet.
While this is happening, Akane logs into FoS and comes across a character named Yui who is looking for help despite being a mid-level character. Akane agrees to help her and the two of them become quite attached to one another. One day, Yui asks if she can join Akane’s guild despite the fact that she’s already in one… Espion. Akane says yes; however, Eita shuts it down immediately which takes Akane by surprise. Yui doesn’t know about the rejection yet; however, she agrees to meet up with Akane in real life. With Eita finds out, he calls Yamada and tells him to tag along and even tells him to ruin their friendship!
After they meet, Hasegawa and Akane continue to work together. Various members of her guild stop in and he witnesses them together. He gets the wrong idea and believes that she’s a girl that loves to sleep around. He ends up reporting this to his guild master, a guy named Ren, who also is Yui’s boyfriend. Yui and Ren have quite a turbulent relationship but despite that, Yui and Akane go out to dinner once more. Ren and Hasegawa are invited to join them and as soon as Akane sees Ren, she immediately gets some odd vibes about him. Things escalate and we are left on quite the cliffhanger!
Characters
We have several new characters to get through here.
First up is Yui. While we don’t know the full story behind her as of yet, we know she plays FoS in the guild Espion. She also seems to be alone in the game which, given the information we were led to believe so far, tells me that Espion is full of elitist players and she’s only in the guild because she’s the boyfriend of a high-level player (Ren). So, I’m assuming she’s not very good and therefore she has to spend most of her time wandering around on her own which would explain why she got so attached to Akane. Give a lost puppy some attention and all that. As for her relationship with Ren, it seems rocky. They always seem to be fighting; however, she doesn’t want to leave him. We don’t know the extent of things as of yet but it kind of seems like Stockholm Syndrome to me. Outside of her complications, she seems rather nice and bubbly… for now.
Next up, we have Hasegawa. At first, he seems like a lost soul at the convenience store; however, when he learns about Akane being an FoS player, his true colors start to seep through but not completely. You can tell that he’s an elite player. He even admitted that if he found a stronger group, he would love to play with them rather than the people he played with now. That tells me he is ultra-competitive and doesn’t take kindly to casual players. The fact that he assumed Akane was a noob cemented that. Despite the elitist tendencies, he also is a bit of an idiot. When all of Akane’s guildmates came to visit her at the store, he took it at face value and thought that she was sleeping around. He never once thought to ask to clear up the misunderstanding. The stupidity does give him a nice balance between serious and comedic.
Next, we have Ren. Again, not much is known about him right now but from what we’ve seen, he doesn’t seem like a controlling type of boyfriend but he does seem like one that gets agitated quite easily as he and Yui argue all the time. If he were controlling, he wouldn’t let her wander around by herself and let her have the freedom that she has so I think he just has anger management issues. However, when Hasegawa reports to him that Akane is the type of girl who likes to sleep around, and given the fact that he thought that Hasegawa and Yui might be an item and were okay with it, the word swinger comes to mind. Maybe that’s his thing? It’s too early to tell but it’s just the vibe I get from him… that one girl isn’t enough and he doesn’t mind sharing what he has. I could be wrong but that’s just my guess based on what we were given.
Eita showed a bit of a dark side which is hard to imagine given how we’ve come to know him. At the mere mention of Espion, he became very outspoken and downright strict. The fact that he would tell Yamada to try and sabotage Akane’s friendship with Yui is quite underhanded and very uncharacteristic for someone like him; however, as he learns more, we know that Eita and Ren have a history together as do their guilds. There seemed to be an incident that led the two of them to meet in real life. Ren can’t see Eita as anything more than a filthy Nekama (a guy who pretends to be a girl online) and thinks Eita only does it to trick girls into liking him or that he can get closer to them. That’s a pretty wild accusation but Eita’s case is that he wants to protect Runa with his guild. There’s definitely a lot left unsaid here but it got pretty interesting.
And after all that, we still have Akane and Yamada adjusting to their new relationship… although I don’t think much adjustment is needed. Akane makes him boxed lunches and Yamada just chills and goes with the flow as you would expect. I do think it’s funny that Akane and her friends at school gossip about relationships and some of the pitfalls of them and in any other romance series, this would cause the main character to panic and overthink things but it doesn’t happen here (at least not that much). It just shows the level of love she has for Yamada and how lucky she feels to have someone like him in her life.
Final Thoughts
So, in my last review, I couldn’t wait for this volume because I was under the impression that we would get a lot more of Yamada and Akane together as a couple, and while we did, it was almost a footnote compared to the new arc we have entered. In a way, I was a little disappointed because we had spent four entire volumes to get to this point so I wanted to explore their new relationship a bit more before we jumped into something new but I also can’t complain because the new arc that started is pretty interesting as well.
The new arc shifts the focus of the story back to the gaming side of things. In a way, this is an arc a lot of people who play online MMOs have experienced before. A history between guilds, some animosity between other players, and sometimes how it can spill over into real life. I know that I found myself in a similar situation when I played EverQuest. I used to play on Vallon Zek which used to be a PvP Teams server. We had player-created rules about having honor in PvP and there were some guilds who didn’t care about stuff like that. They earned themselves a pretty bad reputation and it almost felt forbidden to interact with any of the players in those guilds.
That’s kind of the vibe I’m getting here between Eita and Ren… except this issue has spilled over into real life and isn’t just contained within the game world. That raises the stakes just a bit and with the way this volume ended, I have a feeling that Volume 6 is going to open up and blow the lid completely off the mystery. It’ll be interesting to see what the justifications are behind some of the accusations and, if some are true, what kind of direction Eita’s character is going to take… how will Akane feel about everything, and what will become of Yui?
There’s a lot to process but things escalated rather quickly and reached a fever pitch! I’m not sure how long this arc will last but we’re certainly in for a one heck of a ride!
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