Nov 11, 2022
I was very on board with this story at first. I thought it would basically be Overlord, but it's a 4X game instead of an MMO and that's a lot of what we got in the first volume. I will say that the characters and world building leave quite a bit to be desired though.
Takuto, the MC, is not a very deep character. He was hospitalized by a terminal illness in his world and because of that he has a communication disorder so he's only able to talk to his one always-present companion, the video game character Atou. Other than that he's mostly just
...
a generic shut-in isekai protag. The best part of his character imo is when he's talking about the game he got isekai'd into, Eternal Nations. He was a total fanatic of this game and was the #1 rank player for the Mynoghra civ. Hearing him reminisce about his exploits in-game while planning and strategizing for his current kingdom is also similar to Ainz and it's most of what he does. But Takuto isn't really that important because a large part of these novels put the focus on other characters (once again, much like Overlord). I won't go through all of the inhabitants of Mynoghra but I'd say they're mostly decent, good but not great. Atou is pretty cool and the twins were interesting, but the rest were sorta forgettable and all the characters are pretty shallow.
For the most part I started reading this because I was looking forward to seeing how Mynoghra would develop their cities and technology, and how combat would play out between the different kingdoms with the systems from the game. Then the end of volume 2 came along and that kinda went out the window.
------------SPOILERS------------
So, the twist at the end of volume 2 and throughout volume 3 is that there are a bunch of other games and people that got isekai'd into this world (though not all games have an isekai'd person and not every person was isekai'd into a game). Honestly, I thought that premise sounded as good or potentially better than the original. The first example we see, JRPG characters fighting Eternal Nations characters, is a pretty good proof of concept for the idea and gave me hope that we'd see more of these interesting and intelligent confrontations between different game genres. However, after finishing volume 3 I'm less hopeful about this series future. There's this big, kinda gratuitous event in the middle of the novel that I won't spoil; basically I just think it was really poorly written, I don't hate the development from a story standpoint but hopefully whenever it gets adapted to manga (it's like 2 or 3 chapters away as of writing) I hope they make it easier to follow and less cringe. In general I think these novels would benefit a lot from better translations, idk what term the younger twin uses to address the older twin (I think it's ne-sama) but someone thought it was a good idea to translate it as "Big Sista" which is some incredible, probably unintentional, comedy since they're Dark Elves. Well, that wasn't really so bad, my main gripe with the story was the ending. All this talk of gods, then Takuto makes a glock (I hate this trope in isekai), and then there's that Kirito lookin dude with his slave girl. Just a bunch of red flags coming at you rapid-fire. At least the succubi were entertaining, I'm looking forward to seeing them again.
---------END OF SPOILERS---------
My rating after the end of volume 2 would've probably been an 8 or 9, but with the way the story is going now there's a lot of elements I'm uncertain about and I hope future volumes don't mess it up like I can easily imagine them doing. At least I can say that now the story has differentiated itself from Overlord and is doing something (afaik) pretty unique. Overall I'd recommend this series to fans of isekai and 4X games. I'm just hoping there's a good payoff to all this buildup and the series doesn't finish with me saying "It would've been better if they stuck with being an Overlord clone".
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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