Overlord

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Premise: I decided to write this review to give the perspective from someone who did not enjoy this novel, since I have only seen overly positive reviews thus far. To note, I dropped this novel around early volume 7, since I just ran out of patience for it, but 6-7 volumes seem like enough to write a review for a 9 volume story.

To start with the good! Art (10): The art is quite cool and I like it a lot. But like all novels, not much art. Regardless, this bumped my overall rating up from a 3 to a 4.

Story (5): The overarching premise of ... the story is actually quite good: The main character starts in an RPG styled world as the most powerful character in existence, with an army of elite AI's that have absolute servitude programmed into them, which he knows. The main character is actually just a regular guy from Earth, so he needs to adapt to this new environment.

Based on the premise alone, it feels like the story has a lot of potential, but unfortunately, not much actually happens with this interesting world and setting that has been built up. Instead, we learn about the main character…but, there is not much to learn other than his internal struggle of "oh noz, if I don't act evil, the AI's won't like me. boo hoo. Whatever shall I do? I know! I'll just have this dilemma for 6 volumes straight of how I don't want to be evil, but I can't help it since I want to be liked by my AI's which have already been programmed to love me forever.” Life is just so hard for our overpowered protagonist. I tend to find his ranting to be a bit cringe-worthy.

Seguing from that thought, I also find Ainz to be *incredibly* unintelligent. While it is absolutely fine and sometimes even encouraged to have a dumb main character, it does not work in this story as he just does not have the capability to be a leader. Due to the overpowered main character's lack of leadership over his battalion of subservient AI's, they go around advancing the story on their own. While again this sounds good and has potential at first glance, there really is no cohesive goal in sight, and this lack of coordination between the respective AI's leaves all that they do to feel very empty. :(

Character (2): The story is mainly about the characters, but I personally find them to be dull overall.

- Ainz (main character)
Like previously mentioned: dumb / cringeworthy / lack-luster leader / insecure / overpowered

I find his the internal struggle, "how to get his AI's which have already been programmed to love him forever, to love him." tiring to read about. He wonders why the AI's get confused what his goal is; of course it is because he's been putting up a facade up and confusing everyone instead of getting it together, taking charge and saying things directly.

I am not against flaws. In fact I have read manga where the main character has a facade contrary to their true thoughts and abilities, such as Angel Densetsu and Transfer Student Storm Bringer, where the juxtaposition between the truth and perceived reality in these stories is done extremely well. So it definitely is possible to have a main character where the perceived reality and the truth do not match up. Alas, this is one where all has gone wrong.

- Other characters (AI's)
The AI's initially seem to have distinctive personalities, but we quickly see that all have the trait of being over-confident. So while it is a mix-mash of different characters, they all have the same vibe. Other than perhaps Albedo, it's more like generic villain A and generic villain B. etc. All in all, the AI's did not add much to the story for me. Nor did I come to love any of them.

The main character is really like the only character for most of the story tbh. No one else is fleshed out as much.

Enjoyment (2): I personally did not enjoy this novel for reasons already stated. Everyone enjoys things differently, so perhaps the faults that I have pointed out, you will not mind. I hope that is the case, as reading this novel was a long journey for me.

Conclusion/tldr;: Due to the lack of leadership of the overpowered main character in this story, events unfold contrary to how he plans, as his minions stew up their own plans. The main character's unintelligence limits the abilities of his army, which also proceed to be stupid as well, and ultimately causes strife throughout the story when there should be none. *This large fault is particularly unfortunate as this novel seemed to desperately want to be tactics/strategy based.*

While reading this story that is a play of idiots, one gets accompanied by the internal struggle of the insecure main character, "how to get his AI's which have already been programmed to love him forever, to love him."

All in all, Overlord felt overrated for me.

You can describe this light novel with one word: a power-trip.
The story is based on what I like to call the pyramid of power-trips. Its only goal is to create as many of them as possible.
Every character has a set place in this hierarchy and on top of it is our main character Ainz.
It goes something like this: a new character is introduced. This new character then goes on to have a power-trip destroying the good (or bad) guys until he is met with a similar fate.
Now repeat this over and over again with different characters and minor variations and you can see how it ... quickly becomes dull.

Just like in many works with an overpowered main character, the focus shifts away from the MC.
There is almost no character development and ironically the antagonists get most of it.

The MC goes against his traits and does irrational things just to have more power-trips (a.k.a. the Lizardmen arc).

The MC simply starts at the top and stays there.

The main character is described as acting only with his own interests in mind and that is a trait that can really make a character deep.
But does the author really need to fill prologues/epilogues with these words over and over again in order for the reader to get it?

I'd say the world building and the character design itself is good and if you are a fan of power-trips, this light novel is definitely for you.