Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, Vol. 5

By: Fujino Omori, Suzuhito Yasuda

Narrated by: Bryson Baugus, Shelley Calene-Black

Bell, along with his adventuring party of Welf the swordsmith and Lilly the supporter, has made it into the middle floors of the Dungeon, but the schemes of another party have stranded them there! Hestia's going to need to send help, but will the rescuers arrive in time to save Bell and his friends from the monster that's got them cornered? The familia> myth of the boy and the goddess continues!

Story was great it's just soon you guys might want to assign character roles

so please assign the voice actors to their roles please. it's just there are going to be more female characters and want them to be in the correct voice actor and not switch every chapter

Would Be Better If The Voice Actors Didn't Switch

Story-wise, this volume is good and continues the pattern of Bell being in a tight spot and then pulling a miracle and becoming even stronger at the end.

My complaint as with every other volume in this series is that I really wish they'd assign the voice actors to specific characters instead of having them switch between chapters. (like In Another World With My Smartphone; the male reader voices the male characters and the female reader voices the female characters). It messes with the flow of the story in my opinion since both readers voice the same characters differently.

Also, it seems like in every volume Shelley Calene-Black reads more than Bryson Baugus (about 2/3 of each volume), and she doesn't do as good of a job as Baugus when it comes to character voices. While Baugus is great at making each character sound unique and distinct, Calene-Black voices every female character almost the same, which makes it hard to keep track of who's actually speaking. Her voicing also comes off as sounding like an old lady a lot of the time. What's even more annoying when she's reading however, are the action scenes. She does a very bad job at voicing male characters when they're angry, making them sound like they're hoarse, out of breath, and are trying to talk and growl all at the same time (think Christian Bale's Batman but much worse). Her monster sounds are also very jarring and sound more like she's dry-heaving/puking. It instantly takes me out of the story whenever she tries to roar/growl and I find myself wincing every time.

I know I'm probably coming off as harsh, but there are other light novels which use both male and female narrators together and the story flows very well between the two (Sword Art Online for example - Bryce Papenbrook and Cherami Leigh are absolutely amazing voicing the same characters; it never gets confusing and the story flows smoothly even though they alternate. Cherami Leigh also does a great job voicing growls/yells etc... in action scenes).

People complain about this because of bad transitions?

I like both these people narrating this book there even roaring and stuff I haven’t listened to a lot of books but I don’t see a lot of these people add sound effects.

Middle Floors were interesting, but a bit hectic

This volume is the final arc in the anime, aka when Bell, Lili, and Welf actually try the middle floors of the dungeon.
There was good enough drama about how they get stuck and how a bunch of characters have to go rescue them, which leads into figuring out how rest points, floors, and Danmachi’s dungeon works.

Having a lot of characters involved in this particular volume was a blessing and a curse.

On one hand, it was nice to continue the development of the party of Bell, Lili, and Welf. In addition to even giving Hestia herself some time to be a little bit more directly involved, and seeing Ais and other members from her familia that showed up in volume 3 for a bit was kind of nice.

On the other hand, characters that were indirectly the cause of Bell's group getting trapped in the middle floors of the dungeon to begin with—I just didn't care about them? Similarly, we’re also more actively seeing screen time of the god Hermes, and I don't know, I didn't really care about him either, even though they’re clearly hyping him up as something of a chaotic neutral trickster sort.

I guess at least it was nice to see Ryuu do some stuff when she was only hinted to be pretty strong earlier on.

Once a big fight starts toward the middle/end of the volume and there are a lot of characters—both friends and antagonists with the main characters—it just becomes a little bit too much to follow in light novel form. I needed to watch the anime version just to get a sense of all the little things that were happening, even reading it in audiobook form.

What doesn't help is that while she has gotten slightly better, the female audiobook reader, Shelly Calene-Black, still kind of struggles with differentiating voices between the different characters when it's time to voice scenes.

I think it's kind of sad that Bryson Bogus, the male VA, who voices, makes it easier for him to differentiate different female voices than an actual female voice actor for this light novel.