TL;DR: Strong Recommendation for its interesting characters. Story picks up full steam by ~c20, but if the opening chapters put you off, the rest won't change your mind, probably.
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This novel suffers from the tragedy of having the worst advertising I have ever seen, the title attracting many readers that will hate it and repelling many readers who would actually enjoy it.
Prospective readers probably pick this up expecting some spicy harem adventure, but in reality, the eponymous gimmick is basically only important insofar as it makes every character other than our MC, Faust, into a female.
Well—it's not entirely meaningless. It's more accurate to say that if Faust were a female protagonist and the rest of the world were male, you could trot out roughly the exact same plot beats and personalities (other than the recurring joke about Faust) and not much would change. From my perspective, this makes the "Gender-Switch" trope somewhat meaningless—after all, the most explicit it gets (as of c100) is, for example, Astarte slapping the protagonist's posterior, and privately making comments about how much they want to sleep with him.
Right, about the aforementioned recurring joke—the controversial opening line, "My [loins] hurts." The joke is that Faust is nicknamed the "Knight of Wrath" because of his flushed face and outbursts of emotions, but in reality his expression is from the pain from his c*astity belt, which he keeps on to hide his erections and preserve his chaste knightly image in the face of many shamelessly half-naked women.
A lot of people find this too immature to continue reading, but honestly its frequency dissipates once all the major plot points are in place. Furthermore, Faust himself is much more interesting than this, but I'll let his actions in the novel speak for itself.
If there is a driving criticism I have of the novel, it's that the pacing of the overarching plot can be somewhat meandering. Is Faust really the protagonist? You might question that, because the novel only takes his perspective for about half the time. The novel plays out in something like character episodes, zooming in on one character and playing out a mini-story to its conclusion, sometimes only tangentially related to Faust. It frequently switches first-person perspectives, too.
Despite this, it's still a very entertaining read because the gem of this novel is the character roster. These characters are simply way above web novel standards. The characters have meaningfully distinct perspectives, and they proactively try to act on their unique expectations and knowledge. Their actions succeed or fail in ways that make sense due to their own flaws and strengths. A frequent occurrence is that characters will be
almost correct about the viewpoint of another character, and resultantly only accidentally succeed (or just fail) in their scheming.
I'll try to briefly describe one character I really like in as spoiler-free a manner I can, but if you don't care just skip the spoiler.
Spoiler
Sabine, for example, is unironically my favorite character of any web novel. We are introduced to her from several other characters perspectives without getting to see her own. We're told she is a chimpanzee—pe*verted, shameless and s*upid. Well, she's shameless, at any rate, but she's unusually good at talking. Almost every time she talks to someone, they think "this girl is an idiot", but then... somehow they end up getting convinced by her without realizing it. It isn't until much later that we finally see events from Sabine's perspective, and we learn properly that her moral code is "whatever happens to you is your problem, I have the people I care about and that's all I'll care about". From here, all of her actions fall into place—she's not the smartest character, but she's extremely clever and has a good intuition in reading other people. She's still a pe*vert and shameless, but she understands the lines she shouldn't cross to avoid danger. The reader gets to understand her better than her companions in the novel do, because we have the unique vantage of seeing her from various perspectives, each giving a different piece of information about Sabine.
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Anyways, the cast is notable for just about every character having depth.
Now, a question. If the focus is a sincere plot about lords and knights, and if my earlier claim that this could have been written in an 'un-reversed' way is true, why all this "gender-switched world" nonsense? I might speculate that the brutal realism of medieval feudalism (like gathering a bunch of villagers to be a cannon-fodder militia, or executing a child for their parent's treason) gets softened a bit when using a comic backdrop of sexy ladies who sexually harass men.
Alternatively, it could simply be a trick to make all the characters into sexy ladies to avoid having an all-male cast, in other words, just for fun. Who knows?
After all, it's
kind of a harem. All the girls like Faust, although what follows is NOT a bunch of explicit chapters, but rather various schemes by the girls to, well, get in bed with him. The key, though, is that they also have their own interesting backstories going on. It's not apparent immediately, but despite the girls all adoring Faust (perhaps to a frustratingly excessive level at times), there is no girl whose personality becomes subverted by liking Faust. Rather, the girls like Faust, and their personality comes through in how they go about scheming and approaching him, in, I think, a good way.
In conclusion, I think the novel has merit outside of its proclaimed harem theme; in fact, I believe it has more merit outside of its harem themes than within them. That's all, I guess.
