- #1
If you want a short review, here: it's fine. It is about what you would expect and you get what you sign up for. If you enjoy reading the first 100 chapters, keep reading.Now for the rant. (Please note, this is my opinion. Disagree if you want.) There are some things in this novel that really irritated me. So let's go through them and why I think they happened.First, the generalized things that occur throughout the entirety of the story. I don't want to go back and go over every single word or phrase that is repeated incessantly but just to name a few: "boss", "sieve", and "devil." I don't believe this really impacted my rating but it was one of those things that I couldn't help but wonder if the author (or perhaps this fault lies with the translator and editor? Whose to say.) had never picked up a dictionary. I don't want to harp on this too much but a piece of advice, just google the word and find a synonym. Reusing words is fine and it isn't like everything must be unique permanently but when "Throwaway Person A" all the way to "Throwaway Person Z" call him a "devil", well you get the point.Additionally, in the way of criticizing the actual foundation of the novel, I didn't particularly enjoy the fact that, without fail, the majority of people the protagonist encountered were just rude, egotistical, and violent. The reason why this is a foundational issue is because the reason for this is because it drives the story forward. Someone has an ego, MC knocks them down, turns out person who is knocked down has an uncle who is an elder. Elder shows up, gets knocked down, repeat until you reach the end of the line and in which case, reward the MC or kill off the line. And to add onto this, most non-chinese people in this story were depicted as racists. And while I don't believe that it's unrealistic for there to be racist people, the ratio of racist people to non racists were essentially 10 to 1 at minimum. For similar reasons to the previous, the purpose of this is to drive the story forward and create conflict. Maybe I'm jaded and this is how the world truly is, take it with a grain of salt I suppose. Also, it's not like this issue is unique to this story, it's common in a lot of stories for foreigners to be racists but just seems like such a strange methodology to create conflict or to represent other entities besides yourself. As I write this I recall that someone mentioned that it's a Nationalism story so of course this will happen, and I suppose the fault lies with me for not seeing that. Although I would argue that you can just as easily accomplish this by celebrating your own nation or even putting your nation leagues ahead of everyone else without vilification. But then again, maybe this complaint is nullified due to the tag. I think that I honestly just had a fundamental issue with how the characters in the story interacted with each other. There were so many characters whose only personality was either an obsession with the main character or they wanted to genuinely harass people because the other person doesn't treat them like God.In terms of power dynamics and how the character scales along with the story, I think that collectively it's fine. The central focus of the story is using conflict to drive and as a result of that, every conflict introduces a new skill which eventually builds depth. I didn't have much of an issue with it, additionally it was meant to be a story about an overpowered character so in that perspective I think it accomplishes that well. The power design around the story was something I enjoyed a lot.The story is a harem with a focus on the relationship between primary female lead and primary male lead which actually takes around 400 chapters before the two even meet. Admittedly, the relationship is introduced faster than it takes for the female lead to be introduced but that's fine with me. Personally I don't have much preference when it comes to romance in stories although I did think that this was done well.The plot is fine, I don't have any issues with it. It admittedly goes off the rails from where I expected it to go but nonetheless, if I had to summarize all of what I just wrote into a more compact paragraph. The story, whether it be romance or power dynamics, was fine. I enjoyed it for what it was and that was that. The only issue I had was that the author had created countless characters whose only personality trait was the belief that they were above everyone else and they sought conflict if the opposing person didn't adhere to that belief. I harped on that issue more than anything because it is an outstanding enough issue and is constant enough for me to harp on it.
