I could hardly get through it. I was mildly horrified to learn that it got a 2021 TV anime adaptation... and I've since seen the first few episodes of that and they're essentially the same. It's a faithful adaptation. The main differences are that the anime: (a) works a bit better, thanks to well-chosen music and the actors' line deliveries, and (b) has censored the manga's modest nudity.
The anime's sort of vaguely okay-ish if you don't mind the modern fashion for ignoring the concepts of plot and drama, but I won't be continuing with it. Similarly, the manga's idea made me laugh and I happily bought this volume on finding it in the bookshop. Nonetheless, it strikes me as fundamentally rotten.
Letty is a pathetic dragon who's been kicked out by his mother. It's house-hunting time! That's a fun juxtaposition, right? Unfortunately, no one's even considered trying to build a story around this. After a bit of preamble (which works okay and is quite entertaining), Letty meets Dearia the thousand-year-old estate agent who then spends the rest of the volume showing fantasy RPG properties. That's it. No plot. No dramatic point. Dearia spends an entire chapter showing us around a house that his client obviously hates. He also doesn't seem to have noticed (or doesn't care?) that Letty has no money to buy any of these properties. Meanwhile, Letty makes no attempt to engage with what he's seeing or update his limited worldview, but instead just whines, complains and has accidents. (He's admirably polite, though.)
Other features of this manga include:
(a) references to things like mobile phones, "hidden camera" prank TV shows, etc.
(b) lots of RPG references, some of which are explicitly to D&D, e.g. sahuagin (first appeared in the 1975 D&D supplement, Blackmoor). Page 10 of the manga shows us Letty's character sheet, with his level, hit points, magic points, STR, CON, INT, defence and luck. Similarly, this is a gaming universe with resurrection spells, etc. so the same heroes can be encountered and killed repeatedly with no permanent ill-effects.
(c) harpies and medusa are sexy females with their tits out. (But only for a few pages and the art's downright classy. Faces are beautifully drawn and don't resemble manga stereotypes.)
(d) Letty's judgement calls are offensive and stupid. He's offered a four storey temple-dungeon with anti-hero traps and everything you could want if you're a monster who'll be targeted by heroes everywhere. (They think he's a walking goldmine.) Letty rejects it because he keeps getting clobbered by his own traps. (Instead of, say, learning where they are and drawing some maps.) Next, he's offered a haunted mansion with some lovely, friendly ghosts, wraiths, etc... and he reacts like a Klu Klux Klan member with a black neighbour. (Well, he gets scared. But I still hated him.)
The book's not a dead loss. The art's good and some of the genre/game deconstruction is amusing. I liked the dwarves, hunters and heroes who want to sell Letty's internal organs. The book starts well, before settling into its formula of "another house". Also, at one point Letty talks in a Nagoya dialect. But hell no.
UPDATE: my son found this volume on the bookshelf, read it, liked it and bought volumes 2-3 when we were next in Japan. So that's a thumbs-up from him, at least.
