- #1
This is a pretty enjoyable isekai about building up forces. It falls a bit short of others in the genre but it is enjoyable to read about the MC coming up with plans, commanding troops, showing new technologies to his kingdom, and occasionally fighting demons.Some of the strengths of this novel are competent allies, good pace for events and battles, and interesting downtime (sometimes). For competent allies, I mean that the MC is the heir to a mid-ranking noble house and has proper support and recognition from his superiors and subordinates. There are some who are jealous of the MC, but the rulers are competent enough to recognize his value and support him appropriately. He is also able to delegate tasks to intelligent subordinates. So none of the usual nonsense where the MC is the only one who can save the kingdom and everybody is getting in the way due to pettiness or incompetence. There is a steady stream of interesting events and in between those events there is some interesting world-building (and occasionally dull points but they are rare).The big weakness is that it is a "jack of all trades, master of none". The MC is a good fighter but not the best, so he only occasionally engages in battles. The MC is important enough to make some decisions but there are other nobles who outrank him so he is usually engaged in managing small areas. As a result, there are small pieces of everything you might be interested in but nothing really stands out. The fights are all right, the politics are all right, the development stuff is all right, but nothing gets enough focus to be impressive.Having said that, the whole thing is above average and you can read this for a while and enjoy it if you like any of the tags.edit after chapter 178: Wow did this get painful. I will leave my score at 4 stars because it is still decent for the first 100 chapters but at this point the story is a real chore to get through. The author is way to obsessed with portraying the MC as intelligent and spends a ridiculous amount of time talking about the MC's thought process when dealing with the most trivial bullshit. It has been ages since anything interesting happened and I have no idea when something worth reading about will come up, because the author wastes entire chapters on nothing. This last one was paragraph after paragraph of the MC's internal monologue as he thinks about: "As a noble, every word and action matters. So I have to address this person like this and bow in this way. Ah, they have spoken in a suitably polite manner but not overly polite. It is important that I also speak to them politely. Oh, that five word sentence they just uttered has this other interpretation, so if I am a moron I might accidentally promise something but the author will keep pretending that this nonsense is complicated and meaningful." When he could have just wrote: "The MC picked the person up from the tea party. The other noble wanted them to commit to a political friendship but the MC was careful not to make any promises." See how easy that was? Two sentences instead of two pages. So yeah. Tons of that. It started earlier but it has really gotten bad lately. This is barely a 4 in the early chapters and now it is a low 3 for me.
