- #1
This is a fairly standard misunderstanding comedy, with a strong hook, a fairly lame payoff, and some pretty weak and inconsistent world-building.Premise:The MC dies after having a miserable life on earth, even though he tried to be an upstanding citizen. However, on his deathbeat, bootleg Nyarlathotep shows up to grant him a second chance in a science-fantasy universe. Unbeknownst to him, this seemingly almighty entity actually feeds on the negative emotions of select people, and he is only setting the MC up for a fall into despair, but due to a spanner in the works in the form of (what I presume to be a sort of) guardian spirit, the MC avoids all the misfortune sent his way, and instead sets out to become an evil overlord, only to fail at it so spectacularly he becomes a beloved nobleman instead.Setting:The story is set in a woefully underdeveloped and under-explained science-fantasy world, with an actual inter-galactic empire, and the MC's new family being counts who rule over an entire galaxy. Despite of this, the actual scale of the world is incredibly narrow, both in terms of time, numbers, and things like economics and warfare. One interesting, if equally mistreated setting element is the fact that humans in this universe age very slowly, and because of that, at age fifty the MC not only looks like a thirteen years old, but he is also treated as one by society, to the point they send him to elementary school after he had been ruling a whole galaxy for forty-five years and personally destroyed a notorious pirate fleet. In other words, the setting is undefined and often willfully incoherent, most likely on purpose so that the author can set up weird misunderstandings and contrived situations at their convenience.Characters:The MC, along with a few other characters, show some promise (especially early on), but at the end of the day, this is a typical misunderstanding comedy gag story, so all character-traits and motivations are subject to change on a dime; if the author wants to push through a misunderstanding or a gag, nothing is going to get in the way, established characterization be damned. Unfortunately this also means it's pretty hard to get invested in the characters, as all of them are prone to suddenly turn into idiots when the plot demands it.Plot:The overarching plot is about the MC trying to become a selfish, evil overlord in order to define himself as someone different than the man who died in the prologue, but because this is misunderstanding comedy (and bootleg Nyarlathotep's unwitting influence), he always ends up earning the admiration of everyone around him instead. Other than that, it follows a slice-of-life format with lots of decades long time-jumps where little if anything changes at all, and even that's mostly off-screen.Final Verdict:As far as misunderstanding comedies are concerned, you can do much worse than this. The writing and the prose is great on a technical level, and as far as comedy is concerned, the gags are not terribly illogical (a pitfall a lot of misunderstanding comedies fail to avoid and ending up as cringy, loliamsorandom borefests), but the haphazard world-building and the flashes of character depths that get buried under comedic convenience still drag it down quite a bit. Overall, if your suspension of disbelief can handle the scarcely defined yet still idiotic setting and the misunderstandings, then this is going to be an enjoyable read, and you can add another star to my rating. However, if you have little tolerance for such things, I simply cannot recommend this novel for you.P.S.: I'm going to keep reading the series, so the score and final verdict is liable to change later.[Edit:] After reading two more volumes, I would firmly place this into the "guilty pleasure" category. The MC becomes slightly less likeable over time, the humor gets a little repetitive at times, and the world building is haphazard and nonsensical as ever, but overall it's still an enjoyable read. Overall, I would say that this is an objectively flawed work that is a pretty fun read despite of that, and how much you will enjoy it is going to be entirely predicated on your suspension of disbelief and tolerance for predictable, slightly repetitive writing.