The Villain Only Wants To Live a Buddhist Life Chapter 600 Discussion

I liked the first 140 chapters enough that I started MTL'ing it. Pretty good stuff.

As others have mentioned, this is slow. It takes 540 chapters to finish the first year and the 3 months of vacation following that and get back to school for the second year. Although that doesn't mean nothing is happening - there's at least 3 Harry-Potter-major-plotlines' worth in that time interval on top of many smaller side quests here and there. The flipside is that when you start looking forward to something that will be happening one year later, you realize it's going to be 500+ chapters in the future.

What makes it work despite its slow pace is how it makes the world feel magical. It takes the setting of Harry Potter and fixes some things - for instance, teachers are competent professionals but also fallible, so no Snapes. A lot of attention is paid to how the MC learns about the world, experiments, and makes discoveries. If you can accept the slower pace, this story will satisfy your exploration itch.

As for its ugly side? Well, this story ends up feeling a lot like Xianxia. The protagonist starts off with a golden finger (the sins that threaten to corrupt him quickly turn into an exploitable resource, and the demon god bloodline gives him a boost to all of his stats). He explores dangerous realms and discovers treasure. He fights other arrogant young masters and when he beats one, it summons a bigger fish. He constantly fights above his tier. But the biggest problem overall, common in xianxia, is

Spoiler

that he never loses. And once you go through 500 chapters and realize that, it drains all the tension out of any fight that he participates in.

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One other slight annoyance is that the Harry and Ron expies, while treated moderately well, lose 100% of the time when it would benefit the MC, even indirectly, and lose 80% of the time in other situations. They get a lot of attention but are also treated as punching bags; combined with the MC's Xianxia treatment, it just makes you roll your eyes.

There are other parts I like and a few other parts I don't like, but overall it's been a pretty positive reading experience (beyond the annoyance of copy/pasting into DeepL, which I chose for a better reading experience over Google Translate or novelmtl).