Saijaku Muhai no Bahamut, also known as Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle, is harem fantasy mech action light novel series that starts off heavy on battle academy elements though it outgrows them eventually. The general setting is one that is standard medieval fantasy, with the critical exception of there existing excavated suit type mechs that were left behind by a prior civilization and that serve as the cornerstone for pretty much all combat. The plot is centered around Lux Arcadia, a prince of the former Arcadian Empire which fell five years before when the series properly starts leaving Lux in a pretty complicated situation with regards to how he’s dealt with by the new rulers.
Lux is the type of character that is overtly kind and heroic, the type that wants to save everyone, even his enemies, regardless of how difficult or foolish that may be. His character arc isn’t really centered around him changing these convictions. Rather he starts off feeling very shaky about these convictions due to how they pretty much fail him completely in a pretty major way before the beginning of the series. However, over the course of the series he becomes more steadfast on them and becomes a more confident character, which is fleshed out decently enough. He’s the type of protagonist that is a complete pushover outside of serious moments though, so despite his growth in how he reacts to serious situations, he remains pretty flimsy in regards to less serious situations throughout, by which I primarily mean those relating to relationship development and such, which is a mixed bag in that it can be amusing at times but can also get kind of annoying.
Lux is a part of both Syvalles and the Seven Dragon Paladins, which are the two groups that make of the rest of the main cast. Syvalles is essentially the main combat unit of a what was an all-girls school dedicated to training Drag-Knights, which are what the mech users in this universe are called. As is often the case in harem battle academy series, various story circumstances occur and Lux ends up the only male there, which results in him interacting with a number of girls whom all end up harboring affection for him, and in this case all of those girls are members of Syvalles, with five of them essentially serving as the harem. The rest of Syvalles include a trio of girls that are incredibly interested in Lux but aren’t as much in the focus, as well as Lux’s sister who is very strongly affectionate towards Lux but with a very different dynamic from romantic love… mostly. Still, while these are side characters comparatively, overall I’d still say they’re handled pretty well.
The cast here isn’t particularly original, but they’re a pretty solid implementation of solid tropes, with each getting well defined personalities, fleshed out backgrounds, and both solid character arcs and ability growth. There’s also a good variety to them so their interactions with Lux and the dynamics between all of them independent of Lux are also really interesting and amusing. There’s a lot of good romantic fluff and comedy as is standard for such series. These characters are the focus for the first five volumes, the portion the anime adapts, where the story for the most part is pretty standard battle academy for the most part with some events that branch out of that and hint at shifting out quite a bit more.
That shift occurs during volume 6 wherein it pretty much stops being a battle academy series and gets quite a bit more complicated due to the addition and focus on the Seven Dragon Paladins, a group composed of the strongest Drag-Knight of each nation. The plot stops being as heavily driven by character and relationship dynamics and comes to depend a lot more on politics, with various nations having different goals and objectives with secret plots to push those goals further and a mysterious mercenary organization called Dragon Marauder in the background trying to push themselves into the middle of everything. This portion also opens up a lot more world building, in that in order to have politics and such affect the plot its necessary to explain what the political situation is and how it came to be. In addition, the plot eventually brings in elements that essentially relate to the history of the Arcadian Empire, explaining how it came to be, and how it relates to various other core mechanics of the world which involves a lot of sci-fi elements, which add another layer of complexity to the world building, and overall result in a pretty interesting world overall.
The Seven Dragon Paladins are a really interesting group of characters in that they’re all pretty original and unlike with the members of Syvalles where it was pretty clear that they would all turn out to be Lux’s allies eventually, with the Seven Dragon Paladins it isn’t so simple, and thus there’s a much stronger sense of danger that significantly adds to the suspense. A negative on the Seven Dragon Paladins though, is that other than Lux only three of them have proper character development, and even with those three their development is constrained to only the volume focusing on them with absolutely no further growth beyond that. Lux and the members of Syvalles are still very much present though and have solid progress on their character and relationship arcs, and thus the addition of a lot more outside of that even if lacking in some ways still makes the series overall a lot more interesting.
There’s another narrative shift in volume 15, which is where the true and final villain is revealed, with the rest of the series barring the final volume being dedicated to fleshing them out and building up to the final battle against them. The focus in volume 6-15 felt like it was equally split between Syvalles and the Seven Dragon Paladins, but here it switches to being much more focused on Syvalles, though the Seven Dragon Paladins are still present. The focus on the members of Syvalles is in a very different direction from before though, which is a really interesting twist and allows for major character and relationship development in all of them which helps reach the end of all their arcs in a pretty satisfying manner.
I found the final villain pretty disappointing though. The themes centered around him are much more abstract and nebulous than those centered around the rest of the cast. This is essentially intentional in that the themes chosen for him inherently have to be that way, but writing centered around such themes is kind of difficult and it didn’t really feel like the narrative really pulled it off here. Thus, while I do appreciate how the narrative advanced things in terms of characters, the plot itself I felt was rather weak. I do think that the author made a good choice in that there’s a full volume dedicated only to the epilogue beyond the main story which is solely focused on Lux and Syvalles which helps distance the final ending from the disappointing ending of the main plot. This volume is pure romantic fluff and nothing but, but its good romantic fluff, and the ending overall is pretty satisfying, though I think it would have been better if it had gone even further with what it was doing.
Next, I’ll finally talk about something that I’ve essentially been avoiding, the action. This is a mech action series so the action is a core aspect of the series so it likely did seem strange that I barely mentioned it so far. The reason for that to put it simply is that I found it the weakest aspect of the series and just overall didn’t like it much. I like the how it pushed the plot forward as well as how it was well integrated with all the world building. I also felt that the larger context resulted in some really hype moments. But in and of itself I found the action pretty dull.
The biggest reason for that is that it felt way too slow. As the series went on battles started getting longer and longer, eventually they became unbearable long. There’s a lot of descriptions of exchanging of blows that ultimately doesn’t do anything. This is fine in anime and even in manga I’d say because the art and animation can still make it exciting, but in purely written form it just didn’t do anything for me. For similar reasons, it also felt like it was getting repetitive. There’s some growth in Lux, and each of the members of Syvalles get a single major ability upgrade, but in the grand scheme of things considering how long the series is and how much action there was, that’s not all that much. Further taking into account how there is essentially no ability growth in the Seven Dragon Paladins, and how there is a lot of reuse of abilities in the antagonists results in the action feeling like it’s just going through the same motions again and again in a new context. The context is great, but that just had me wishing it would move on and just get to someone winning so the plot could advance.
The other main issue is that the plot uses the “not fighting at full strength” card way too much. In other battle oriented series characters after ending a fight characters are at 100% and ready for another one, which is strange in one way. This has the opposite problem, in that its constantly bringing up how characters can’t fight at their full strength due to fatigue from previous battles, at times even ones from over a week ago. I suppose that is kind of realistic, but it results in power levels fluctuating wildly which makes the action seem much more random and harder to get invested in. This is especially true for Lux, who at times is downright overpowered, especially during the beginning, but at others is completely outclassed by people he’d beaten before, which just feels kind of awkward and lame.
In terms of art, the series is excellent for most of it, with great character, mech, and world designs and high-quality art with a pretty great style and a good amount of images per volume. The number of images per volume starts drying up at some point, and then near the end it switches to an artist that simply isn’t as good. The cover art still looks good but the images inside, especially the black and white ones, are clearly lower quality. This happens near the end so the art for the majority of the series is still good, but it’s somewhat disappointing that the art for the ending was lacking as I felt it would definitely have helped it a lot.
Also, this isn’t factored into the score, but I thought I should make some notes about the fan translation. I don’t know Japanese so I can’t discuss the quality of it as a translation, but in terms of the quality of the English text in and of itself, it was really lacking. The vast majority of it simply hasn’t been edited at all. There are parts that are a clear improvement over the rest that have been, but those just make the issues with the rest stand out more. The language is often a mess that’s difficult to parse and just in general doesn’t flow at all. It’s not like it’s not understandable, but it takes considerably more effort than decently written, or even semi-decently written prose would, which makes it harder to enjoy.
