Reviews

The Mercenary & The Novelist is a story that tries very hard both to stand out in a crowd and follow the same pattern as the majority. The result was a fairly fun read, though it was a bit more generic than i would have preferred. The world is an interesting mashup of the American West with a medieval European theocracy. I will confess that my interest in the series dropped several notches when i saw it was based on the same “guilds and all-powerful church” theme that appears all too often in anime, manga, and light novels lately. Although that element is hardly original, blending the concept into a western was a unique enough take to keep me reading. The papacy provides a good villain, disbanding the mercenary’s guild in the first chapter and censoring the novelist’s works. Just what you’d expect from a theocratic government.

Although MAL lists this manga as “ongoing,” every other site and the manga itself seem certain it ended around twenty chapters. (Due to the way they’ve been posted online, it’s hard to determine an exact number.)

The story itself is pretty good, full of political intrigue over secret experiments meant to cause immortality. Again, the bad guy’s goals were too easily predicted by the novelist. Keeping the question of /why/ the priest wanted this information, why the mercenary guild was forced to disband, and what connection there is to a fallen tyrannical empire up in the air would have held reader interest better. The last-minute reveal that there’s something bigger going on didn’t help, and should have been elaborated on more. The political and science fiction aspects of this series are fantastic. Unfortunately, the characters feel like they were cut from a template and don’t carry the story as far as they should have. The story not going far enough will be a running theme in this review.

The novelist, Verda, started out as a fun charactera fun character. She’s haughty and eager to push people’s buttons, but her enthusiasm for storytelling and insistence on accurate information are strong. Her certainty that Sword should be lusting after her is kind of off-putting, but allos are allos i guess. It makes more sense knowing that she learned how to perceive the world through fiction – that’s always romo-centric. If a male and female character spend any time together, the expectation is that they will fall in love. She did begin to wear on me as the series continued, mainly because of how easily everything goes her way; though she wasn’t prepared to camp out, everything else plays out exactly according to her plan. It would be more interesting if things went wrong. Sword the mercenary is more bland; i can’t help but wish Verda had managed to hire one of his friends from the beginning instead. He could be the protagonist of any guild manga and brings very little to the story. The “twist” regarding his character was disappointingly predictable. His rival mercenary, Gordo, was far more entertaining, and i can’t help but wish the series was focused on him instead.

I also wish they’d gone into more depth of the scifi elements, the immortality experiments and the parallel worlds. The politics are likewise treated as background details, though the theocracy’s control of society, their censorship of Verda’s books, and even the underground LGBT rights movement could have driven the series a lot farther. Even the theocracy as a major player having a negative impact on the country is forgotten about as time goes on. To me, the author neglected the primary aspects of this story to make it unique and interesting.

That about sums up my feelings on The Mercenary And The Novelist. It had a lot of potential, but the author didn’t do nearly enough with it. If you like fantasy guild -type stories, you’ll probably get more out of this than i did.