- #1
Kuro No Mao starts off with a good, dark premise. A high school is warped to another world and forced into experimentation to develop decent, disposable foot soldiers. Not amazingly original, but we've had dozens of light and airy isekai novels, so it's good to see such a dark start to one. It picks good elements to base the story around, but the execution is lacking. The author just CANNOT write in a serious tone, and it's incredibly jarring. The MC does not feel any different between the first time he is subjected to brutal experimentation and the time he escapes. His dialogues feel naive and boyish and reflect none of the agony that he went through nor any sense of vengeance. We slip into a daily routine of slice-of-life follow his escape, and it's as if we were reading another isekai novel where the MC had not experienced any hardship yet!! Similarly, all the notable characters lack depth. They all experience enough events. We know their past. It's just that they aren't characterized very well. The other thing is that naming and world conventions breaks the immersion. It's very awkward that this novel takes random parts of the this world and tosses it into the fantasy world while completely ignoring most of the elements of this world. Examples:The people of this new world (in the Arc continent) speak Arabic or at least the novel uses Arabic letters. MC, as a modern teenage boy from at least the 2000s, can't recognize Arabic and is bewildered by it. It would've been less jarring if they replaced the Arabic letters with X's or something. virg*nia is a colony in the Pandora Continent. It is a port city located on the EAST coast of the Pandora Continent. The Arc Continent sent an expedition to the West on the Pandora Continent in order to establish control and take over the Pandora Continent.........