- #1
This work deconstructs? Subverts? Lampshades? Sword Art Online and does a pretty good job with it. There's only about 37 chapters out so far so it's early in the story, and the first 20 chapters are used just to set up the premise that you read in the story summary, but they're not wasted chapters.The MC gets told about an SAO lookalike and before he gets the chance to read it, he meets truck-kun and is reborn within the setting. Eventually becoming the stepsister of Kayaba Akihiko, she manages to avert the upcoming tragedy only for interference from some higher dimension beings to flip the table. If you've seen any tower climbing manwha with 'constellations' and a malicious tower master, you'll be familiar with this trope.The gimmick is that the being who hijacks the game is about half as competent as your average vtuber so despite her supreme cosmic technology, there's a pathway for the MC to turn things around.And the path for this lies in taking the gimmick parts of the setting more seriously. This is partially why the first 20 chapters of setup are there, to establish the MC's personality, see the backstory of the original death game creator, and justify all the things about SAO that don't make sense (even if the explanations aren't that much better).Why does SAO only have 10k victims? Because in this setting they couldn't get massive multiplayer to work before the MC's brother created an AI, VR, and developed functional net code. Plus now there's way more people involved than that. How the hell can a publisher allow a game to release with unique skills that only a single player can get? Yeah, MC tries to shoot that down too, and only partially succeeds.Anyway, what makes this story fun is the cracks in the system that the MC ab*ses to find a way to fight back against the interloper.Abusing her knowledge of the game as a developer, abusing the NPCs, abusing flaws in the interloper's poor understanding of the system, abusing the relationship between the interloper and the constellations, this is a fun story about a cunning, manipulative David fighting against Goliath.The gender bender aspect of the story is the weakest I've seen so far, since the MC could have been originally female or reincarnated as a male with nearly no changes. But maybe it'll come into play later, though I'm not holding my breath.