The Death Mage Who Doesn’t Want a Fourth Time Chapter Completed Discussion

Enjoyable take on the reincarnation genre. While a lot of the power fantasy, wish fulfillment elements standard to the genre exist, there's also lots of great thematics you don't find in many other works too. Horror and Lovecraftian elements, politics, economics, racism, reconciliation after wartime, the subjectiveness of morality, a bit of philosophy, references to philosophical and religious texts, some outright quotes here and there, and so on.

I also rather like this novel for the amount of time the author gives to the antagonists. While there are some ridiculous canon-fodder types among the monsters and whatnot, antagonists like Alda, Heinz, the Amid Emperor and so forth get a ton of text focused on their thought processes, motivations, and lives, making them more than just one-dimensional threats and instead providing foils and context to the main character's own place in this world. I would've liked a little more attention on at least Heinz in the finale, but maybe Densuke will circle back in a post-finale side story.

As a note, since this seems to show up in a lot of negative reviews of this: the prologue chapter is just a sort of proof of concept, so don't expect much of a revenge tale against the other reincarnators / the Bravers. There is a revenge subplot, and the Bravers remain secondary characters in the story, but the targets of revenge are actually people in the main character's third life, not his previous ones.

Anyway, if you're interested in a reincarnation story with some additional flavor, give Death Mage a try.