- #1
A refreshingly harsh variation of the standard 'summoned to another world' formula.Kuro No Maou features a fairly standard japanese light novel Protagonist, Kurono Mao who gets summoned to a different world in the middle of being confessed to. What he sees when he wakes up however, is not a mission to save the world from disaster, a Goddess with cheat abilities for sale or a benevolent kingdom, but a kind of cruelty unique to humanity... The story follows Kurono as he tries to deal with that cruelty in an attempt to live comfortably.As a result, this story has a more or less 6:4 split between slice-of-life-ish arcs and more threatening war and survival-related arcs.Without spoiling anything, outside of the characters directly surrounding Kurono, the world makes a surprising amount of sense for a japanese LN/WN. Be it the glimpses we get from country politics, religious actions and especially personal motivations and actions of the side characters, everyone is simply following their own world-view without too much needless ill-intent or good-natured support... The only sort-of exception to this is that Kurono seems to have a Yandere-attracting or creating aura to the point that even his equipment is yandere, and that when a girl falls for him their dedication to him immediately maxes out.On the negative side of the WN, the actual writing and story flow is less than great; There is a lot of needless switching of perspective even in the middle of chapters, and there are quite a few strangely placed or even unneccessary chapters that tell the story of side characters. Sometimes it's used well - To explain the disposition and actions of the enemy commander for example... But most of the time these chapters just seem to be thrown in randomly and break up the flow of the main story... It also doesn't help that the story flow itself is on the slow side.All in all though, this is still a head above the general 'Isekai' harem stories simply by virtue of allowing for a world where the line between good and evil really should just be considered a question of perspective.
