I have a confession to make: a couple of years ago, I read the first volume of My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom, and wholly disliked it. Maybe it improves, but all I saw was a typical, slow-paced, “grounded and realistic” slice-of-life fantasy that tried to hide that fact with an interesting premise. “Now what does that have to do with the topic at hand?” you ask. Well, you’ll see when I describe the premise of Deathbound Duke’s Daughter, published in English by J-Novel Club.
Deathbound Duke’s Daughter is a blatant clone of My Next Life as a Villainess. An unnamed character, who was apparently murdered at her workplace, is reincarnated as Erika Aurelia, the antagonist of her favorite otome game, Liber Monstrorum. Erika has a red shirt on, and is destined to die at the very beginning of the game. With her wits, the new Erika might be able to reverse her fate.
The immediate difference with Deathbound and Villainess is the world that the “games” are set in. In Villainess, Katarina is harassed by the student body, or accosted by bandits or something (I actually forgot because, to reiterate, I didn’t exactly like that series). On the flipside, Liber Monstrum proves to be the Dark Souls of visual novels; there’s vampyres, werewolves, and all kinds of Lovecraftian horrors that await.
This gives Deathbound a much more adventurous vibe than Villainess, which automatically makes it a great light novel for me (even though “objectively” it’s bad because it doesn’t involve solving personal, human issues *sarcasm*). It wastes no time diving into the titular Seafarer’s Ruins, where Erika must save some kids from being King Midas’d to death, and more importantly, saving herself by having their hypothetical dead spirits not curse her.
However, the characters- like many-an isekai- leave much to be desired. Erika, despite supposedly being evil, is just about as un-evil and plain ordinary as Katarina from Villainess. The other major characters include Claus and Anne Hafan. The former is a typical overpowered self-insert protagonist (but he’s not the MAIN protagonist, which makes him subversive! *sarcasm*), and Anne is just a boring moe blob.
The art for this novel series is great, especially the cover art. It has a very whimsical look. However, the interior illustrations look kind of weird to me. It’s probably because it’s shoujo-looking, and I find that artstyle to be weird in general.
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Verdict: 7.5/10
Deathbound Duke’s Daughter is definitely a better version of My Next Life as a Villainess. However, it’s not perfect. If it doesn’t grow some personality soon, then I’ll end up dropping it just as hard as I did its clone. For now, I recommend it to fans of Villainess, as well as Ascendance of a Bookworm and Mushoku Tensei.
When I’m writing these blogs, I try to stray from the hyperbole that both fans and critics commonly use, and instead tell you exactly what you’re getting into. But sometimes, a work is just so spectacularly bad, and makes you so livid, that it’s almost impossible to not mudsling in a review. I will try my hardest to describe one of my least favorite light novels on the market, Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation (published in English by Seven Seas), as honestly as possible. But I cannot make any promises.
Mushoku Tensei starts out like any isekai: a NEET gets killed in the real world, awakens in a new one, and becomes insanely powerful with absolutely no effort. This one’s model is a thirty-odd-year-old man who gets reborn as a baby and grows up in real time. But even at a single-digit age, he- with his new name of Rudeus Greyrat- already has absurd levels of power.
This is one of the absolute worst instances of the isekai formula that I have ever seen in my life. I don’t inherently hate the formula; after all, almost all of my favorite light novels are isekai. What makes Mushoku Tensei so bad is that it exaggerates the overpowered protagonist aspect to galactic proportions, and does it with a completely straight face. It’s something that would work fine if handled as a parody or satire, but the execution feels like every decision that was made was made thinking it was a genuinely good one.
I’d jump into a paragraph saying that the characters are the biggest problem in this light novel. But although the characters are a big issue, the real problem is how everything is presented. First off, for some reason Seven Seas light novels seem to be typeset in the weirdest way possible, which is basically this: all paragraphs left aligned, with normal line spacing within paragraphs, but a double space in between each paragraph itself. Bizarrely, the fourth volume started to look normal, so it could be an issue with reading them on nook versus Bookwalker. Whatever the reason, I think it looks terrible when it does occur, and for some reason, it definitely seems to affect the reading experience. The other issue is the words themselves. Other than a few satirical remarks, the story is written in the emptiest, most bare-bone basic way. This feels like a rough draft, and not a final publication (especially not of something this popular). “Oh, how do YOU know what’s a rough draft?!” you snap. Look, I’ve written several web novels before starting this blog, and they all sucked just as badly as this. The only difference is that I didn’t publish them. Sure, Mushoku Tensei has some blips of neat lore here and there, but it’s not presented in a way that piques my interest. Keep in mind that this could be a translation issue.
In addition to the typesetting and potential translation issues, the story and characters are just about as bad. The reason why I didn’t mention an actual goal for Rudeus in the outline of the premise is because he doesn’t have one. Sure, he wants to learn magic and become powerful (which he practically already accomplished), but there’s no real point. This is a slice-of-life isekai, which isn’t bad (heck, Konosuba’s one as well), but it’s done poorly in Mushoku Tensei. While it admittedly lays the groundwork for an interesting overarching story by the end of volume 2, the aforementioned bad writing makes it so that I have no interest in said story whatsoever.
As for the characters, they are walking tropes. Rudeus is a perfect prodigy, and everyone else in the world is at his mercy. The only character who seems remotely interesting is a loli named Eris, but that’s just relatively speaking; she’s still boring. Technically, there’s still development, but it feels empty and stiff. The only interesting thing about any character is that Rudeus seems to gradually come to terms with his NEETness and tries to be a better person, but it’s offset when his reward is just the continued perpetuance of his old fetishes. I don’t care about this cast, and I don’t see myself caring about them down the line. One thing I never understood is that people seem to think that any character development at all automatically makes them better characters, but that’s personally not how I roll. If you feel that way, then you’re more likely to enjoy the characters than I did.
The art is also one of the weakest I’ve seen. While it has more flourishes than, say, SAO, it’s still very bland. Eris is also the only interesting-looking character, but that’s- again- relatively speaking.
So, why did I read as much as I did? There is one reason alone: controversy. The anime for Mushoku Tensei is going to come out later this year, and it’s going to be a brouhaha. One thing that has been consistent in this series is questionable decisions. Series of minor spoilers ahead (skip to next paragraph if you want to avoid them): Rudeus falls in love with two different girls of single-digit age. “That’s not so bad, because he’s also eight, you idiot.” But recall… developmentally, HE’S STILL AND ADULT. So, essentially, a thirty-odd-year-old man grows sexually attracted to eight-year-old girls. There are also some cases of child abuse, children being naked (both of which include Rudeus), and adultery. Plus, he even gropes Eris’ breasts at one point, and she forgives him because it was his birthday.
People are gonna be livid when the anime airs, but I think it’s better being someone who gets to laugh and watch the community engage in heated debates than to engage with them. The potential for how far down the rabbit hole this can go is what’s driven me to read as many volumes as I have. In fact, I might read even more (but I really should just drop it).
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Verdict: 5/10
Mushoku Tensei is bafflingly bad. I cannot recommend it to anyone with a straight face. I suppose that if you love the wish fulfillment aspect of isekai, along with the ideas it presents over the execution of said ideas, then you could enjoy this. But why would you when there’s so much better (and cheaper) on the market? Why read this when you could read Konosuba, No Game No Life, Torture Princess, Cautious Hero, or Otherside Picnic? The only way I could recommend Mushoku Tensei is to cringe at all the controversial stuff.
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