Every Adventure Needs a Weapon! The Blacksmith Life of Rudy the Obsessed Volume 1 Review

When you’re embarking on an adventure in a dungeon day after day, you need to be armed with a powerful weapon to defend yourself from the monsters that lurk within. But what about the lives of the blacksmiths behind these weapons? Well, that’s what Every Adventure Needs a Weapon! The Blacksmith Life of Rudy the Obsessed is all about! But is it entertaining? Let’s take a closer look.

Our story is set in the dungeon town of Whale’s Maw, where there are adventurers aplenty and our protagonist Rudy dreams of making over-the-top weapons to sell to said adventurers. Except she’s an apprentice smith working for an ordinary hardware store known as Lock and Key that deals in things like kitchen knives and everyday essentials rather than the grandiose products she dreams of.

Still, despite her master disapproving of her chaotic products, Rudy refuses to be discouraged and tries to solve every customer’s request with her ideas. Even if they’re just looking for an ordinary knife for cooking or a hoe. And when she’s not at Lock and Key, Rudy goes dungeon diving or paddles her goods to adventurers or simply goes on adventures to test out her ideas – and generally cause chaos for herself and everyone around her!

Chapters tend to be episodic and focus on one client or weapon idea. We meet a variety of different characters who come to the store or Rudy runs into on her adventures. Over the course of these interactions, she begins to figure out that it’s important for her to consider the needs of her customers rather than just barrelling on ahead making whatever she’s been dreaming of. Particularly as her items tend to be stylish rather than actually useful.

While Rudy’s adventures are entertaining in their own way, I couldn’t help but feel this wasn’t the blacksmith story I was hoping for. While there’s detailed information of Rudy’s creations in extra pages between chapters, the manga itself doesn’t spend a great deal of time going into the creation process. It’s a comedy manga and I think it portrays its humour well, but I also think it will be a bit disappointing for others who might have been invested in the idea of a blacksmith selling weapons to adventurers. Because there is surprisingly little of that happening!

This isn’t Madoguchimoto’s first series, nor is it their English debut. Readers might already be familiar with them through one-shot Studio Dungeon Investment (published on MANGA Plus), or Tokyo Interstellar Immigration (published by VAST Visual). While I haven’t read the latter series, I had previously read the one-shot, so I was somewhat surprised to find that the art is so cramped in Every Adventure Needs a Weapon!

Madoguchimoto draws each chapter with quite small panels, but they’re packed with speech bubbles or too much detail. And this meant I often lost the sense of what was happening or what I as a reader was supposed to be focused on. There’s a good deal of variety in the character designs and I think the mangaka has done a great job coming up with the eccentric weapons and items Rudy creates, but this is overshadowed by the busy page layouts. There’s some action scenes toward the end of this volume that are quite engaging, but again they just don’t flow as well as they could have done. Which puts this series in an awkward place where it doesn’t feel like it has a good hook.

Every Adventure Needs a Weapon! Volume 1 comes to the West thanks to Yen Press and has been translated by Caleb Cook with lettering by DK. Given the sheer amount of text here, I think both have done well in terms of translation and the presentation of the text with the lettering. Extras amount to the detailed pages of information on Rudy’s creations between chapters, with no colour pages or translation notes on offer.

The series is still on-going in Japan with 4 volumes currently available. However, here in English there’s currently nothing else in the schedule so it seems unlikely this will be continuing until 2027 (Yen Press’ schedule currently goes through to the end of the year). A shame as I think by that point this will be long forgotten by readers.

Overall, Every Adventure Needs a Weapon! has its charms but it’s difficult to stay engaged with due to the crowded pages. If you’re looking to have a laugh watching over a blacksmith with some pretty outlandish ideas, then it’s worth a look, but I fear it’s going to fade into the background relatively quickly.

A free preview can be read on the publisher’s website

Our review copy was supplied by Yen Press
©Madoguchimoto/Futabasha Publishers Ltd.