Reading Vol 10 now and holy shit I'm done. The MC is just so thickheaded when it comes to his love life even now at this volume that I want to punch him. So many times his girls are emotionally hurting and he does jack shit to even ATTEMPT to try and work out the problem. All he does is sulk that he is not good at understanding women and the values of this world because he still has Japanese values blah blah like f*cks sake man do SOMETHING. If that is really how Japanese males think then no wonder the country has a declining birthrate.

... Last updated on November 26th, 2022, 6:21am

Marie path 6

It's got a silly premise and comes off as really generic. Yet in the end it was more entertaining than I expected.
I started with the manga, and I switched to the LNs after catching up to chapter 40.

Note: The LNs end with an afterword where the author notes down the notable changes he made from the web novel version. Usually these aren't that major, just some extra character development or refined scenes. But some changes are significant like an entirely new secondary character introduced in book 4 that is relevant for the rest of that arc and I expect onwards, too. ALSO the Japanese version (not official english version) has bonus chapters about the 'Marie path' or something, whatever that means.

Back to review:
The way that the story goes off the rails is interesting and his tactics are usually entertaining. The 5 noble romance targets are pretty much annoying af throughout, They're only a little redeemed in the 5th LN (the latest english one out atm). So if you're expecting them to shape up, they don't, they pretty much become flanderised. But the main characters are interesting.

I appreciate that efforts are taken to try and rationalise an in-universe reason for the game's whacky setting and events, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Why does a cheat item exist in-universe? Why are there so 'called 'sub-human' races? Why is there a tree as tall as a mountain and what's the background for magic? Why are the middling nobles beaten down by the structure so much? Why are men so disadvantaged? (this last one I felt wasn't as satisfactory of an answer. Didn't really make sense or maybe I just had problems understanding it)

There's some nice humour sprinkled throughout. You can notice after the first couple books, and the author also explicitly says this in an afterword, that the author realised the audience especially enjoyed when the MC goes on his put-down rants with a big grin on his face, so these are usually in every book. A bit repetitive, but enjoyable.
Unfortunately the MC getting a cheat-item means that problems can so easily be solved by a fight-scene. In the Alzer arc (book4-5) the author approaches this problem in a pretty good way, though Idk how long he can keep this up..

The romance is handled in a way I didn't expect and was refreshing and entertaining. I was actually impressed by one particular development in book but then was later disappointed when it appeared not to be how it was originally portrayed? Or....well thinking about it I guess what's happening is Though by end of book >.>

That said there's apparently this expectation in this world's setting that men will cheat, no matter what the man in question says, and it's mostly something to just move on from, which is a bit off-putting. Oh also the portrayal of homosexuality in book 4 is a bit weird. But it wasn't expanded on much so...idk.

... Last updated on March 20th, 2022, 2:02am