- #1
Edit: Don't pick this up. It's not worth slogging through the bad parts just to get a taste of what the novel could have been, before watching it promptly douse itself in gasoline and set itself on fire. Details below.So, a couple points. Overall my impression of this novel had largely improved. It's still got all the problems outlined below, but many of them faded into the background a bit - like the idiotic and inconsistent skill thing. The personal relationships had been developing nicely, and it was very nice. My overall impression of the series had really improved recently.However, all of that gets thrown away. The author decided it would be a great idea to throw the MC back in time all by himself. So... all the good bits of this story just got thrown into the tr*sh. I'm told the back-in-time arc is 50+ chapters and still on-going. I'm done.As for rating... I don't know. First hundred chapters, barely 3 stars if I'm being a little nice. Next hundred chapters, maybe barely 4 stars if I'm again being a little nice. And after that... just no. No stars. I guess I could average that out as 2.3 and then round down to 2 stars. But really, that's just a token recognition for the section that was kinda good.But I also want to give a 1 to help ensure people don't waste their time with this. At least a "proper" 1-star would be such a mess that it would be obvious halfway through chapter 1. Instead this novel will tease you along and waste your time, which is arguably worse.I can't decide. Coin flip says to give it a 2.Original review below:This is kind of an odd novel. There's honestly a lot of things that are just somewhere between subpar and just bad about it. At the same time, it does one thing pretty well though certainly far from perfectly. So I'm a little surprised the opinions here don't seem to be more split. Anyway, details!... Actually details in a second. First, translation quality. It's pretty rough. If it was any worse I don't know that I would actually be reading this still. The grammar is alright or even pretty good, but I'd say more sentences than not are awkward as hell. There will probably be no point in your reading that you will ever think you might be reading something from a native speaker. Despite the occasional word that is either misused entirely or just used in a way that a native speaker never would, almost all of it is very understandable. It is fairly rare that a sentence is just unintelligible and I can't make heads or tails of it no matter what I try.So, details! The good thing is the relationships between the characters. If that's enough for you in a novel, this might be worth checking out. Yeah the MC is a dense little bastard, but he's not inhumanely so. More than a few hints are dropped that also indicate the MC is pretending to be a little denser than he actually is - he's just awkward and feigning ignorance is a good way to avoid things. But don't get me wrong - he's still a Japanese MC. The characters around him are likable enough, and you actually get a decent number of fluffier moments with them. If that's enough to float your boat, then give it a shot. Though sometimes the author is lazy even in this aspect. He'll set up some s*upid cliche situation and then leave it was "and then he explained" before moving to the next scene. The situation itself might be mildly amusing, but actually seeing the explanation would both be funnier and more meaningful to the relationships - which is the only reason to read this.Because everything else is pretty subpar. The world is almost as cookie-cutter as you get for this sort of novel. Some of the Gods bit are the closest thing to actually being interesting. It's not even that consistent, in two ways. First, things just change to fit the plot better. It's "the Four Great Nations" until plot demands that one "Great" nation is actually not even qualified to be a top-ranked noble house in the top nation. Secondly, in the sense that the author never seemed to think about how all the things he set up worked together. He basically just grabbed some real-world culture and smacked that down as the inspiration for some nation and then threw on some basic ideas for the current situations and histories and called it a day. No questions were asked if the histories would actually lead to the current situation. While the author does get into this kind of stuff a bit, it's usually over pretty quickly and you can just move on without worrying about it too much.The worst thing by far is the skills system. It does the standard thing of just grabbing all the worst aspects of a video game skill system without taking any of the good parts. Just about whatever might be a skill. There's really no limits. Some of them can be taught. This is also probably the area where the s*upidity of the MC shines brightest - he intentionally learns a skill (maybe two?) but mostly just ignores learning anything more for no good reason. Anyway, they are pretty standard dull video-game-esque skills for the most part - though not entirely. The magic part is super weird. Skills seem to determine what magic can be accessed and mana amounts, but nothing else. However magic spells seem to be highly standardized and well known. But no explanation is ever given for why that is. The MC will just go off doing his usual practice routine for awhile and then suddenly bust out some new spell somehow that everybody knows and is amazed by. How did he learn it? Who knows. It's not part of his skills. It's not something he learned through any method mentioned. It just showed up and everybody else knows what it is. I think at the start of the novel this was actually better to some degree, but at any rate it quickly devolved to the above. But the fighting doesn't take over too much of the time, so again, you can kind of just bear with it and move it.So... yeah. If you want or don't mind a side of forgettable plot and a spoonful of pitiful worldbuilding with your slightly dense yet overall nice fluffy main course, this might be worth a shot. At least providing you can also deal with the translation.