The “Omae Gotoki ga Maou ni Kateru to Omouna” to Yuusha Party o Tsuihou sareta node, Outo de Kimama ni Kurashitai series, which has a completely different English title, starts off incredibly similar to Shin no Nakama only to quickly diverge.
While as that focuses on slice of life events and romance (with interludes of action/drama), this instead mainly features gore-flinging violence and body horror (with slice of life and romantic interludes). And rather surprisingly, it does a pretty good job managing the balancing act through these first four novels. There only ends up being two issues: The first and less serious (since it only really applies to the first novel) is that the setting’s slavery implementation is little better than a plot device with basically no logic behind it.
The second, more serious issue, is the shoujo ai elements that piggyback off the central yuri relationship. There is not one, but two old woman <-> young girl pairings in here that advance very quickly in red flag-triggering directions.
Free Life Fantasy’s second novel meanwhile is basically more of the same content present in the first. Which is to say detailed cooking scenes take center stage with hemming and hawing over mechanic choices coming in second. Action and setting development then round things out as almost filler content. To give you an idea of just how important this series considers cooking to be: A fighting tournament is completely glossed over in favor of describing the preparation of some beef stew. Let the implications of that sink in for a bit.
And yet… it still ends up entertaining for the most part. Only real potential issue is that it looks like it may be going down the same road as Bofuri in piling overpowered abilities onto the protagonist.
