EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

The middle volume of a three-volume story can lean neither on the freshness of a beginning nor on the weight of an ending. Shinkyoku no Grimoire: PANDRA saga 2nd story 2 stands in the hall as the volume that carried the series through its turn.

The grimoires advance to greed, sloth and wrath, and new figures join the story: the alchemist Eva and her homunculus Adam, and Miya, a former head of the library knights who hides who she is. In subject matter it continues the first volume's control by grimoire and sexual violence, and widens its use of gender transformation, including a change into a female body. Several readers write that the series turns here from a fairly bright fantasy to something heavier and darker.

A review at the time of publication described the first volume as the opening movement of a four-part arc and this one as its development and turn, noting that Miya takes centre stage ahead of the nominal lead, Unico. It also credited the book with an orthodox fantasy presence in the pages of Comic Unreal at a time when the magazine's fantasy flavour was thinning.

The print edition came out at the end of October 2014 as Erect Sawaru's eighth book. The same reviewer had expected the second part to end in two volumes, as the first had, but the afterword announced a third, and the second part grew longer than the first. The digital edition followed in February 2015.

Separate readers, independently, name this as their favourite volume in the series. Among the hall's commercial works it stands 54th.