Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu
Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-

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NO PLOT SPOILERS

While I’ve read the Manga, my review will be based primarily on the Web Novel, which I consider to be the most enjoyable way to consume the Re:Zero story due to the more intimate understanding you receive of the characters' internal thoughts and feelings as the plot progresses.
Thus, art will be excluded from the rating.

Story - 10

Anyone hoping for something quickly gratifying will not find it with Re:Zero. The story is very slow to progress. In fact, 15 volumes in, and questions we’ve been asking since chapter 1 have yet to be answered. On the contrary, it is at a faster pace that ... more questions are added than answered. However, that’s not to say that it wastes time or fails to provide information. In fact, it does a marvelous job of ensuring that every chapter is a necessary inclusion. (Mayo on the side) This story is one to be savored, and I dread the day that it wraps itself up.


Character - 9

Natsuki Subaru is a flawed character; and that is intentional. You may get impatient, and you may facepalm in disgust, but there are real consequences for his personality failures, and like anyone who grapples with their own shortcomings, he will struggle and adjust in order continue on for himself and the people he cares for. Be ready to suffer and struggle with him. He very much progresses from the person he starts out being.

The other characters naturally endure their own faults. However, that does not necessarily mean you won’t find them charming or enjoyable. Re:Zero does a very good job with showing how changes in environment or knowledge can alter a character’s reactions and priorities. It fleshes out the supporting characters’ dispositions, and allows the reader to truly understand who they are and why.
There are exceptions to this, but for the most part, every character introduced in the story is cherished by the author, and breathed life into.

Enjoyment - 10

Personally, I very much prefer concise stories with dissimilar arcs and zero fluff. So it’s a testament to Re:Zero’s ability to maintain the flow of itself over its many volumes that I find such a slow progressing story to be the #1 most enjoyable in my collection.
I’ve chuckled, I’ve cringed, I’ve cried many times, I’ve had my perceptions changed, and Re:Zero constantly reminds me that it’s not afraid to rob me of what I expected to be a happy ending.
It is addictingly refreshing, and I’ve yet to find anything which can satisfy me in the same way.

Review covers arcs 1-6, the first 3 arcs I read official light novel translations and arcs 4-6 were community (Witch Cult) translations in the single pdf download format.
TL;DR – Re:Zero has the core of an interesting story, but too much baggage for me to recommend it to most people.


The Bad and Mid:

The dialogue is probably the weakest part of Re:Zero. Way too much of it is flirting or banter and jokes, even during fights or strategic meetings. It’s frequently cringeworthy and generally takes up lot of time and deflates the tension the series already struggles to build. The conflict between these bantery lines and ... the attempts to establish a serious atmosphere make it hard to remain immersed or take the story seriously at many points. Maybe I’m just not the target audience, but almost none of the jokes landed and the flirting was more annoying than cute.

The prose, in both the official and community translations, is just average. As a whole the writing feels sort of rigid/formal – the prose is straightforward and lacks interesting wordplay and deep descriptions, and the structure of the writing very rarely changes. I don’t ever remember reading a description and feeling like I got a vivid mental image of a location, person, etc. There’s an annoying habit of repeating something implicit or even explicit in what a character said right afterwards, e.g. Subaru will say something like “That guy is way too strong! No way we can dodge that attack!”, immediately followed by a line from the author like “Truly, his attack was too much, fast enough that avoiding it would be difficult”. This gets tedious after a while, and frequently interrupts the flow of fights. It also feels like the worldbuilding only really comes in when the story requires it – if the characters need to cross a desert, we learn there’s a breed of land dragon meant for deserts, but there’s not really much information given that isn’t relevant to the story. It makes the world feel a bit shallow.

The fights themselves begin to struggle as power creep sets in. Towards arcs 5 and 6 some of the characters fighting are strong enough that the fights almost feel like treading water, the characters will exchange blows for pages without any injury or progress. A lot of the opponents also have some kind of speech gimmick that, to me, was usually annoying or tedious – they repeat the same phrases over and over, e.g. ‘Hey ya prick, what’cha looking at ya prick, come here ya prick, let’s do it ya prick’. The series is long enough without spending time on this kind of thing.

One of the largest problems besides the dialogue is the lack of tension, which partly seems intrinsic to the premise of the series. This is mostly felt in the action scenes – I think as a reader, even though it’s implicitly understood that the main character won’t die, being able to insert yourself into the shoes of a character who could potentially die lets you empathize with their situation and gives an element of tension that doesn’t (and maybe can’t) exist in Re:Zero. Subaru knows, just as we do, that he can’t really fail. This strips so much of the stakes from every fight.

The characters themselves are, unfortunately, not very interesting. Subaru has some interesting emotional struggles and transformations in the story, but his main motivation of just wanting to support Emilia is weak and surface level. It’s hard to understand what he likes so much about her to risk his life repeatedly. Emilia isn’t that interesting either, she has a fine backstory but her character has a fairly basic motivation in the present day and she doesn’t have a lot of complexity, at least that we see. A lot of the side characters have more interesting and complex backstories, motivations, and conflicts than the main characters – their stories are usually pretty good, and the series works better when it leans into these.

The actions the characters take cease to have any impact on or connection to the broader world after arc 3 or so. By arc 6 they partially cease even impacting the characters. Ostensibly the whole story is being motivated by a royal selection process, and the first 3 arcs are fairly grounded by this. By arc 4 the characters go around on adventures which are theoretically tied to the selection, but in practice their effect on it is never really explored. This feeds into the broader problem, which is that I don’t really have any sense of the stakes of most of the story. Fights that the main characters are forced into obviously affect them, but the impact on the broader world is rarely discussed, and even from the perspective of Subaru, it’s hard to see why any of what’s happening really matters, or why it’s happening in the first place. Presumably this is supposed to be part of the overall mystery of the series, but it’s unfolding so slowly that it’s hard to stay interested.


The Good (even if flawed):

The series and Subaru’s ability works pretty well when the story leans into mystery more. Using his return ability to explore the same set of mysterious events from different angles and perspectives keeps the story interesting and affords a lot of opportunities to write intersecting storylines. Arc 4 and the middle of arc 6 lean into this and they’re probably the best parts of the series. These are the parts where tension also works: Subaru trying to discover something important before being reset actually sets a deadline and gives stake to fights.

The narrative structure itself is fine throughout basically the whole series. It gets a bit rough in arc 6 but overall the writing is competent and even compelling, events unfold naturally and all the pieces in any loop fit together well. The dialogue and the way information in the story is conveyed is often boring or slow, but the story itself is fairly well paced and doesn’t really have any boring slumps (at least, past arc 2). Every arc takes a while to get going, but once it starts up it doesn’t really slow down.

Though their implementation is often a bit awkward or sudden, there are some interesting and well written moments of reflection or emotional clarity, from main characters and side characters. Some of the best parts in arcs 4 and 5 involved characters coming to terms with their emotions or something they had been struggling with.

Verdict:

There are good moments in Re:Zero, but it’s hard to recommend because of how buried they are under filler. I would recommend it to someone who likes isekai, likes ‘anime humor’/banter, and wants an easier read, but I don’t think I could recommend it to someone just looking for general fantasy. It’s just too long. The good moments just don’t justify the number of pages here: the 6 arcs that have been translated and bundled so far add up to nearly 10,000 pages, almost twice as long as the sum of all five Game of Thrones books currently published. Put another way: if you read Re:Zero at 3 pages per minute and One Piece at 3 minutes per chapter, Re:Zero is about as long as One Piece. During my reading a 7th arc was apparently published at nearly 2500 pages in length, and 11 arcs are planned total, with each arc from ~4 onwards being 2-3 times as long as the first 3 (ie, with 6 arcs read, I’m only ~40% of the way done). If you really have nothing to read Re:Zero is a good option, but there’s a lot of fantasy out there that says a lot more, in more interesting ways, and in way less pages.

[Spoiler Warning]

Go to another world stories are easy to write, it is an undead horse that will keep having people ride it, hit it, mock it, praise it. At this point even "subversions" have become its own cliche.

So anyway, Re:zero, a show that is pretty bad, which was basically torture porn for 2-cour. A lot of people already shat on the anime so I may as well do it for the source.

At the time of writing, I have finished all the LN and gotten into the next arc of the WN, and ohhhhhhhhhh god is it horrible.

Plot - 3

First of all, the writing is ... terrible and no it is not the translation's fault, the actual writing is bad, as it is hard to keep track of what the scenario the author is describing. It is very bland, descriptions lack the whimsical charm of LN but are not artistic enough to be taken seriously. In addition the pacing is atrocious. Three arcs in and around 10 theoretical vols, we still have no idea what's the story behind this world or get any progress in the king election. In fact the story introduce a bunch of witches who explains...roughly nothing important, and serves only to provide more mystery.

And that is what Re:zero is, it is a dumb mystery that is really generic if they just explain it straight to you. In fact 3 arcs in, the main plot could be explained pretty much as "yandere girl (probably Emilia as a twist) likes scum, so fuck up world for scum, probably due to time travel or something."

And there is no funny plot or hijinks or anything interesting besides the shitty mystery and torture porn.

Character - 2

Oh boy Subaru, fan boys defend him for being "super realistic teen" and all that garbage. But then you find out he is the chosen one, oh yes, turns out the book that the witch cult have prophesies his action or something like that. And he have high compatibility with witch powers, what ever that is.

Did I also mention the witch did all the crap for him to make him feel better about himself?

Yeah, excuse me for not sympathizing with a scummy whiner whose the source of the problem!

Oh yeah, and his whining never get better, in arc 3, he had a talk with his father in a dream illusion. And you would think he is now a changed man as his father says he is proud of him. Nope, next few chapters he is sprouting hate speech at the twin tail loli from the mansion for saving him, being a vile scum once more. This isn't realism, this is an edgy teen with bipolar disorder. And you know what the author rubs it in by saying, he meant to create such a scummy character and it was quote on quote a deconstruction and criticism. I don't think making a straw man counts as criticism, as much as I hate these go to another world story, few of them sink to the despicable low of Subaru, at this point you are no longer making a deconstruction but a hate fic. Not helped that Subaru suffers or succeeds on a whim, when he fails it is because a random bullshit pop up, like the rabbit monsters in arc 3, when he succeeds it is through luck because a character suddenly does exposition for him telling him literally what he needs to do next.

Yeah fuck Subaru, as for the other characters, they don't get much spotlight cause this is Subaru's story so we are stuck with this asshole forever.

Overall - 3

This novel is garbage, whether in WN or LN format. There are ways to have a scum MC, if you are tongue in cheek about it and satirizes it. But that is not what this is doing, this is having torture porn and scum MC while being 100% serious, resulting in everything being unlikable and characters acting like they are complete morons.