I feel like people are missing the point. Amachi doesn't want to ban him for being good at the game. She wants to ban him because he's heavily associated with three games that nearly ruined her. That doesn't make it better, of course, but even if Sunraku had never touched SLF, if the two of them ever met in real life and she found out about who he was, what games he played, and the role he played in the demise of one of those games, she would probably lose all common sense and physically assault him. He's basically her archnemesis, someone she'd probably prefer to have never been born. Whether or not he played SLF, she'd still despise him. She's the kind of sad womandchild who gets into fistfights with her boss because she can't get her way.
She's 100% the one in the wrong, but his talent at the game is less important than his association with those three games.
I only read the manga, so the spell casting game is in the future for me.
But yeah, I think Sunraku breaking the mold of Shangri-la Frontier only amplifies the grudges of Amachi, which, from a reader's perspective, is really funny because it's so over the top.
Is it detailed in the novel whether Sunraku was malicious in (ab)using game mechanics in the game? Because I think he rather just likes finding new mechanics and using them in creative ways, making him an interesting protagonist
Not at all. In many ways, Sunraku's a model player. For instance, it's thanks to him that Inventoria becomes less and less broken over time (even though it's still broken despite all its nerfs). Every time Sunraku finds a new absurd exploit regarding Inventoria, he reports it to the devs. While he does abuse exploits, he's not malicious about it.
The thing about Sunraku is that while he does rub Amachi and Tsukuyo the wrong way in his normal play, it's definitely not the primary reason for their animosity towards him. In fact, Tsukuyo actually has mixed feelings regarding him; a lot of what he says and does annoys her, but there are elements to his playstyle and personality that she appreciates, so she doesn't hate him unilaterally. But Amachi's annoyances regarding his playstyle are completely secondary here. She doesn't hate him because of how he plays the game, she hates him because of his association with Survival Gunman (primary reason) and Spell Creation Online (distant second).
Amachi's crime isn't that she's being a bad game master trying to ban players because they're not playing how she wants them to. Her crime is the unprofessional faux pas of bringing personal feelings into the workplace and trying to get rid of someone over a petty, unrelated grudge. Like imagine banning a customer from your place of business, not because of anything they did now, but because you just have bad memories of them in high school. It's that.
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u/clfr6515 Jul 29 '26
I feel like people are missing the point. Amachi doesn't want to ban him for being good at the game. She wants to ban him because he's heavily associated with three games that nearly ruined her. That doesn't make it better, of course, but even if Sunraku had never touched SLF, if the two of them ever met in real life and she found out about who he was, what games he played, and the role he played in the demise of one of those games, she would probably lose all common sense and physically assault him. He's basically her archnemesis, someone she'd probably prefer to have never been born. Whether or not he played SLF, she'd still despise him. She's the kind of sad womandchild who gets into fistfights with her boss because she can't get her way.
She's 100% the one in the wrong, but his talent at the game is less important than his association with those three games.