- #1
Has real issues at the start but gets sharply better around the 350ish (?) mark. I'd give it 3.75 ish up until that point, which is to say passable time killer but meh.Spoiler
about the time of the rebellion in the north arc
[collapse]The first two major throne rivals are kind of paper thin villains and the author relies on the main character's secret superpowers too much so the intrigue and military tactics doesn't really pick up until later. Also the author doesn't really seem to have anything to do with Finne.The story has some strong points, like the MC is a fairly well balanced character that avoids being a naive cliche shounen MC without turning into an unlikable Arifureta-esque edgelord. Some of the politics scheming is also pretty fun, it's just the ratio of that versus the general fantasy action is off. Side characters other than Finne aren't the worst either, but they aren't exceptional.All of this said, eventually the MC is forced to stop using Silver as a crutch to solve all his problems and start doing military commander stuff. At this point, he's given up on the pretense that the MC is playing incompetent and moves the novel to focus more on continent-level diplomacy and less on the succession war. This improves the novel a lot as the author doesn't really do a lot of interesting things with the MC's mock incompetence and also the succession war suffers from fairly underwhelming antagonists; the latter arcs start to pit the MC against better written and more competent opponents which allows him to display the author's strengths which lay more in writing good battles and political drama. In particular, the Second Albatro story line is probably the best war arc I've seen in a JP novel: MC manages to be extremely competent without being omniscient and getting everything exactly correct. I'd give the novel a full five stars basically after that with the sole bad moment so far beingSpoilerwhen it's revealed that his mask which he uses to conceal his voice being weighted training clothing a power limiter created to hide the user's ancient magic, which both the MC, a tactical and magical genius, and his ghost granddaddy master somehow do not realize; in general the author seems to have no idea how to make Al get a power up without giving him an OP item
