Mar 14, 2019
This is probably the most horribly written light novel I have ever had the chance to read. The issue stems from it's extremely strong start, up until volume 4, then the plateau up until volume 8, and then the sharp drop-off in quality as you slowly begin to not only see the faults in this book series, but see them repeated over and over again with absolutely no progression in the story past volume 4, or at least it doesn't feel like there has been any meaningful progression for the past 9 volumes, even if there is it's so weak that it's nearly impossible to
...
catch.
Let's start with the biggest offender: action scenes. Almost half of every volume is combat, but unfortunately it's completely terrible. Each enemy is stronger than the last, or the main characters have a stupid curse or something is happening to make them weaker. On top of that, every enemy goes through 3-4 different phases and refuses to give up in the most boring way possible. It's so anime and is absolutely horrible on a written medium. You can skip half of each volume in action scenes and miss absolutely nothing in terms of plot relevance. On top of all this, every action scene plays out the same way, over and over again: Naofumi is kicking ass. Enemy pulls out some item or some technique that makes him weaker. Naofumi's party gets through it. Enemy yells "I'm not done yet!" x3, Naofumi's party hits this guy a billion more times. Finally goes down yippy yay that's the 5th antagonist in 3 volumes that have just been killed off after being introduced not even 50 pages ago!
Second point leads from the first. Antagonists. Either they are dumb as bricks (the other heroes), or so eye-rollingly bland you just can't wait for them to be dealt with. Either that or they're just creepy or maybe they don't even have a personality, like the final antagonist from Volume 13. On top of that, their motives are all completely shallow and are just there for Naofumi and his OP party to beat up after anime-style fighting the same way you've read 50 previous times. Either way, Naofumi's enemies are boring and one-dimensional.
Next up is the MCs group. All character growth has completely stopped, and on top of that all the characters are shallow. Atla, a relatively recently introduced character is consistently violent and just annoying but the author is trying to create some kind of romance rivalry with Raphtalia or something? It's not like either one says anything more than one-liners at any point in time, nor does anyone else. I find myself getting annoyed with the amount of characters and their obnoxious habits or ridiculous behavior. There are also so many characters now that the author doesn't have the skill level to juggle properly, and they are, on top of it, all stereotypes or cliches from Japanese Media. It's just "yandere #11" that you've already seen and there's no progression there. And I don't even want to get started about the actual good characters, like Melty and Filo, that just get abandoned for almost entire volumes and replaced by characters I honestly couldn't care less about but the author seems to want to force them down my throat. It's just awful.
Now we have Naofumi himself. The first person perspective eventually becomes a crutch to get the author out of writing anything complicated, since he uses it as an excuse to ignore important details, entire conversations, or just anything he wants. I'll give it to him, though, it's consistent to the point where it is now an obstacle to the story instead of the good trait it was in the first 4 volumes. Naofumi's personality and obsession with his pet, which literally comes up every 15 pages as a way to relieve his stress with the other characters, is just as infuriating as the characters he's ignoring.
Finally we have plot. Since volume 8 the story has gone into a lull. The author has spent 5 volumes covering about 2 months worth of time in Naofumi's world, and this is where all these problems stick out like a sore thumb. I'm not excited for the rest of the story anymore, if between each big event we have 6 volumes of trash to take care of every time.
So yeah, I thought it was great until it was obviously awful.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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