This one starts with a twist, and it's actually a pretty good twist founded in the vain goddess' twisted personality. And better yet, her personality isn't cast into a bubble: it has affected the laws, societies and wars fought by the various peoples and races in the world she's supposed to protect, for both good and bad. It feels plausible and grounded.
Thus, when the MC manages to survive and aim to advance his goals within this new world, we often see the world as an extension of how messed up the goddess is. Even the replacement heroes, and what happens to them, is an extension of this.
So why am I emphasizing this so much? Because most things are layers deep in this way.
The MC is partially traumatized and insecure, all while trying to figure out how to exist. The monsters who support him have depth to their personalities, as they genuinely want him to live well. But not everyone gets it right and bad things do happen.
Every character, from side ones to main ones, have their own personal motivations and reasons for doing things. Sometimes they're good reasons, sometimes not, but they exist and, like in reality, aren't perfect.
The biggest drawback so far is pacing: the story does suffer when the world building becomes too extensive as this slice of life section has been going on for a long time and all we're still seeing is connections being built.
Don't get me wrong, the slice of life part is solid—and I'm enjoying it—it's just not as entertaining as when the plot gets moving, and there's already so much ready to go.
And the politics on all sides of the war have their own complications, and that's not even mentioning a lot of the non-political motivations that are affecting the war, too.
As a result of all this, the world feels like a moving thing where stuff happens in the background.
It's definitely worth a look.
Edit: Slothal and LucyReading, the above reviewers, have not read more than a couple of chapters, and I can tell because they are objectively wrong on the following:
- There is no reincarnation, it's a transfer. The details found in that scene become relevant to the future plot.
- Finding Japanese culture means the isekai has affected the world (well, it does in this story, but saying any more gets into spoiler territory).
- Consequences do happen later on (but not that much later on), ones that traumatize the MC and give him further character flaws.
Is it perfect? No. But there's not enjoying the story, there's disagreeing on the quality of the execution, and then there's making stuff up because one can't be bothered to pay attention when reading the first few chapters of something.
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