[Review of the WN. I have been told the LN is significantly better.]
TL;DR: Starts great, but after a hundred or so chapters turns into complete trash, then gets better, but the author has a very bad habit of forgetting important details that were previously written which leads to out of character moments and other major plot holes. Still kind of a fun read if you turn off your brain and leave it off once it gets bad.
—Full Review—
I'll start with the parts of the story I consider a 9 or 10: the plot, world building and characters—at least for the first hundred chapters—until the "Dareinwald" arc finishes. There is so much that I like about those elements during this period. It's honestly a must read, and there's a lot of stuff that scratches that fantasy sci-fi itch.
The characters are dramatic, but in a very grounded, believable way. They feel real, and each have their own flaws that help sell the idea they could actually exist.
The plot is very good and will keep you interested in what happens next. And the world building is fantastic, with a lot of details that make it feel like it actually is a living and breathing universe.
But the arc after the Dareinwald arc is horrendous in terms of the plot and spotty for characterization: Hiro, the main character, then decides to get his state of the art ship overhauled for no good reason. The story even says everything is in good condition, the ship is barely a couple months old, and nothing has gone wrong with it.
It almost feels like someone else decided the plot instead of the original author at this point. It's like seeing a professional chef fail to plan a single meal.
At first I wondered if it was a translation issue, but it eventually became clear it wasn't. Worse yet, a huge portion of this arc is spent discussing how important it is not to let the company he's working with get the data of his ship, and one of the super smart characters says it could be dangerous if the information is released but....
THEY ALREADY HAVE YOUR SHIP, IN THEIR MAINTENANCE BAY, IN PIECES, WITHOUT YOUR OVERSIGHT.
And that super smart person? They encouraged this and betrayed their personal mission to do so. The strange company has your data, you gave it to them. The oxymoron of the situation is so blatant and obnoxious I wouldn't blame anyone for dropping the story here due to the break in suspension of disbelief.
Worse yet, the main goals of this arc (the one after the Dareinwald arc), which seems to be getting reliable mechanics to work on the ship (as well as other things that have nothing to do with his main ship) could all be achieved without literally having some questionable group even touch it.
And why was security having trouble dealing with a bunch of engineers trying to get their hands on the ship? Security just needed to set their laser guns to stun and start blasting.
Actually, that's something the author starts doing over and over and over and over: they forget they wrote something important in the world building or characterization, then write an objectively worse replacement when something related to that aspect comes up.
For example: Nobles are allowed to cut down commoners with very little evidence of their lives being threatened. Cockpits have recording capabilities. And ships have flight and combat data that's recorded. Pirates and those that help them are known to kidnap people and "process" them into illegal experiments or unusual/grotesque fetish fulfillments for evil people.
So what happens when another mercenary, who works with pirates, uses an illegal
item to call space monsters, and fires 10 ship-killing shots at the main character,
and the main character is ready to kill her?
Nothing worth noting other than the author's incompetence. The common sense thing to do would be the main character uses his special noble status to have the mercenary who attempted to murder him and his crew arrested, brought before him, and then let him summarily execute that mercenary.
Or at least get that mercenary removed from the mercenary guild and put on the pirates list for them to be branded as criminals for the rest of their lives.
But neither of those things happen; this atrocious kind of writing hurts the story so much.
Actually, Hiro's characterization also takes a dive, as he starts justifying things hypocritically (saying potential love interests look too much like children, but then over and over going into how "cute" they look in a suggestive context).
And the known possessiveness of one of the other characters, Mimi, just disappears for some odd reason.
The quality of the characterization really did take a huge dip after the Dareinwald arc ended. The quality of the plot stepped off a sheer cliff a couple of kilometers down.
Now we get to the actual writing structure, which I'm unable to tell who's at fault for the biggest failures in the narration and flow of the story: was it the author, translator, or nature of light novels? Again, I'm unsure.
Because the narration is never woven into the dialogue. You get dialogue, then the descriptive text, narration and context. It's clunky to read, quite backwards, and I often don't know who's talking at first.
The part I know is the author's fault is the amount of repetition in the story. 25% could be cut out and nothing lost. Things are repeated often, either from narration repeating the dialogue, or from saying the same thing twice using different words. There's a lot of filler in that regard.
Interestingly, I think a rewrite of this arc, to check all the boxes and goals without breaking suspension of disbelief, could be done with far less trouble than it would be for other stories.
So I definitely recommend checking out the first few arcs (around 100 short chapters, give or take a few)... but once you get past the Dareinwald arc, you might find yourself extremely hard-pressed to continue.
It's not too hard to just imagine the story ends there.
That said, once the next arc begins, the quality raises once more. It's a hiccup that could put you in hospital, so to speak, but it seems to be just that: a hiccup.
Alas, while the story is a 9, it then dips to a 2, and then climbs back up to a 6, then climbs and drops to an average of 5 as a fun space romp, not as a serious story.
Too many times the author retroactively changes important details because they forgot what they wrote previously. A few too many times characters just don't use common sense. But the plot becomes really fun as long as you don't think too hard.
(-27)
