Shangri-La Frontier by Katarina officially has 14 million copies in circulation worldwide. Kodansha announced back in April 2025 that the manga series had over 12 million copies in circulation.
Katarina first published Shangri-La Frontier web novel series on the novel publishing website Shōsetsuka ni Narō in May 2017. A manga adaptation, illustrated by Ryosuke Fuji, has been serialized in Kodansha’s shōnen manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Magazine since July 2020, with its chapters collected in 23 tankōbon volumes as of August 2025. C2C studio TV anime series adaptation aired from October 2023 to March 2024. A second season aired from October 2024 to March 2025. The anime series Shangri-La Frontier season 3 is currently Development
The story is set in a near future, where games that use old-fashioned display screens are classified as retro games, while full-dive VR games have become commonplace. As a result of these games becoming mainstream, there exist many so-called “trash games”: rushed, full of glitches, faulty games, the systems of which have not kept up with the improved visual technology. Rakuro Hizutome is a “trash game hunter”, a great admirer of these usually shameful games, which he plays with the nickname Sunraku until he is able to master them regardless of the difficulty due to their glitches. Rakuro has cleared the oversized “Faeria Chronicle Online” trash game and is suffering a sort of burnout syndrome. At the suggestion of the owner of his favorite game store, “RockRoll”, he buys the best-selling and excellent “Shangri-La Frontier”, a full-dive VR game with 30 million registered players. He enters the world of Shangri-La Frontier as Sunraku, his bird-masked player character, where all the skills he has attained as an expert trash game hunter will come in handy as he progresses in the game.
