Michael

A fairly decent misunderstanding comedy. The romance is your typical dense protagonist, but the main source of comedy comes from the MC having to deal with his cursed weapon. Volume 2 just came out in Japan, but I'm hoping this doesn't go on for too long since it seems like this might get old quick. The author seems to be trying to move on to a VTuber career, so who knows if [s?]he'll even finish this series. The author hasn't written a web novel chapter since February, so I guess he's busy with writing this.

This is where I ended up dropping this series. It was decent overall, but it's becoming more and more of a slog to read through as it stagnates. The author took too much influence from JP light novels, so there are pages and pages of fluff that do nothing but advance the pagecount. I do not want a 2-page detailed review of how Boxxy going from level 24 ditch digging to level 25 ditch digging is incredible. For every tangent the author goes on, he then goes on another sub-tangent, as the need to explain every little detail about everything seemingly compels him to do. Whenever skills, leveling up, or other insignificant details come up, my eyes just glaze over and I skip forward until the author finally decides to talk about the plot again. This problem has been here since book 1, but I was hoping it would get better instead of getting worse.

A fairly bland volume. 95% of it is your usual isekai adventurer filler, and he doesn't even start his titular journey until the last chapter. It feels like this entire volume was the prologue for volume 2, when the story would actually start.

A fairly bland wish fulfillment isekai starring the author's self-insert. The first chunk of the book is him leveling up and explaining in excruciating detail how awesome all his gear is, and how he went from level 1 ditch digging to level 100 ditch digging or whatever. The middle is him back in the real world, where anyone he talks to can only say “wow you're so awesome I love you”, and the very end of the book peeks a bit at the fantasy world he stepped into. The MC is dumb as a bag of rocks like your usual dense protagonist, and completely merciful to even those who are actively trying to kill him. The other isekai world seems like it might be more interesting, as the Japan-focused part is just the author jerking off to his own wish fulfillment fantasy. There's also zero conflict.

If you have absolutely nothing else to read, I guess this might scratch that itch.

A surprisingly fun read. The MC is ruthless towards his enemies, and the interactions between Charlotte and the MC are cute and entertaining.

Another fun volume. I expected to get tired of this by now, as misunderstanding comedies tend to wear their welcome out pretty fast, but I'm still enjoying it. Charlotte and the gang ramp up their antics to support Haru in the background, hijinks ensue. A school arc that I don't hate, which is surprising. Then again there's barely any actual “school” in this volume.

The MC is an extreme Mary Sue who, despite being a mere tax worker from Japan, knows how to make chocolate, start a banking industry, make cosmetics, revolutionize agriculture, blah blah. She and her companions are all good and virtuous and the best of the best (as usual, there's nothing “villainous” here), and everyone who opposes them is stupid and evil. Zero conflict.

This is a classic case of the premise and setting being much more interesting than the final product. These two books total about 1, 000 pages, and there is absolutely zero plot development until like the last couple hundred pages when the Big Bad is shoved into the story.

You know how in other standard fantasy settings, with the Adventurer's Guild, a Labyrinth, etc., there'll be a few chapters where the protagonist and his party go dungeon diving, kill some bad guys, be recognized as the cool upstart heroic figure, etc.? This series is nothing but that meandering for the first 700 pages. Some whatever bad guys get killed, yadda yadda. It feels like the author didn't have a clear direction of where he wanted to take the plot and just wrote whatever came to mind. There's potential here, but the writer didn't capitalize on it and instead just wastes your time up until about halfway through the second volume. On the plus side, you get to like the characters during those chapters. There are a few cool moments, which just makes it even more bitter as you realize what could have been. What place is there for a Hero after the Demon King has been defeated? Interesting themes like that are here but barely touched upon. Overall this is an amateur product that could've used some extensive reworkings.
If you're being charitable, you could call it a slow-burning slice of life of an amnesiac Hero who wanders into town, and hijinks ensue.

Fan translation (HoboTL) : A rough read. I don't think English is his native language, because he made a lot of weird grammar mistakes that no native speaker would make. Typos, incomplete sentences, awkward grammar, overall a rough read. Look for the SpicyEPUBs release if you want a more readable version of his release.

This volume finally made me drop the series, which is a shame because I enjoyed v1-v3 for the most part. v3 ended on a dramatic note, and set the stage for a larger plot with our lead “Loner” MC (who isn't actually a loner, and hasn't been one since midway through v1 when he acquired a harem consisting of damn near the entire female class body) basically becoming the benefactor of a large fortified duchy. So what does v4 follow with?

Dungeon grinding. And boy, is there a lot of it. As I turned the page, only to find another god damn chapter where our MC takes the gaggle of useless female classmates down to the dungeon, I found myself asking "how long has this filler been going on for?" When I checked the e-reader's progress %, I was already halfway through the book. Half the book gone, and not a single thing of consequence has happened. Oh, our MC got a new mascot party member in the form of a cute slime, but the rest of what I read is the same situations playing out over and over again. The harem that follows him around berates and demands things of him (in a humorous tone of course), MC is a complete doormat who can't say no to anyone, the classmates are apparently lvl 90 and are still useless in combat, the same jokes as usual being beaten to death, and the MC works late into the night basically inventing civilization for the small remote duchy he occupies. Is it finally over?Nope, gotta go to the dungeon again to do some more filler combat. You can skip over half of this book and not miss a single thing (probably even more than that), and that tells me that the author has pacing issues. Most likely, he hit this roadblock and didn't know how to continue the story, so he just wrote whatever until he was able to cobble together whatever half-assed plot comes after 200+ pages of filler grinding. I no longer care to find out. This kind of fluff should've been left in the WN where it belongs, not taking up over 50% of a book.

I had originally marked volume 9 as where I dropped this series, but I couldn't remember why. After finishing this dreadful volume, I remembered. Nearly this entire volume is nothing but filler, with a tiny thread of a plot near the end. You can read the first chapter, then skip straight to the epilogue and still have a decent understanding of what you skipped, because one of the characters introduced in this volume explains the entire plot as if you didn't just read the volume. Surprise, the mysterious gold-ranked mercenaries are agents from another nation, and they're up to evil schemes because something-something war, but none of that matters until the epilogue kinda sorta maybe. Also, for some reason Arc is basically a pacifist against human enemies despite his very first incident in the series involving him cutting a bunch of bandits in half and then remarking how he doesn't feel anything about it. His insistence on capturing instead of killing comes back to bite him in the ass almost immediately, obviously, but I doubt he'll change his methods from hereon

This series really went downhill after Thanatos got merc'd, which is natural since that's where the original web novel ended. Everything after is the author writing by the seat of his pants. Oh well, time to find something else to read.

This series is a decent, funny idea held back by poor execution due to the writer's amateur ability. The concept and humorous moments itself hit pretty well, but the problem with this novel is that the author insists on long, drawn-out, repetitive explanations of the titular game's buggy mechanics. The Golden Zlime chapter is a good example of this, because he explains how the Extermination Fest works multiple times in a row, repeating the exact same sentence but worded differently, for almost an entire page. This is fine the first few times, but eventually it becomes overbearing to the point where 70% of each chapter is explaining a bug, and how he's going to exploit it. I don't know if this is the author trying to pad out the novel, or just his lack of experience, but the novel really suffers for it. I had to drop it. Whoever the editor was that got hired for this LN needs to be fired, because they're supposed to trim the this kind of fat off the WNs during their LN publication.

There's a manga that's being scanlated (albeit with a mediocre translation, possibly machine translated, don't remember) that I recommend reading instead if the idea here interests you. It has a much better pacing, and the comedy hits better due to it.

An absolute slog to get through.

An absolute slog to get through.