Alright, so here is my list of “another world” translated web novels. If you liked Arifureta enough to make it to my website, chances are you might like some of these other ones. If you have others you think should be added to my list, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to add and update from time to time.

To be on my list, I’d need to have some exposure to it, either having read the web novels myself or read the manga/ watched the anime that derived from those web novels. Most of these I’ve read and enjoyed, or if I didn’t enjoy, I’ll tell you why. So enjoy the synopsis and critique on every “another world” web novel I could find. These are not put in any particular order, either by preference or alphabet or anything.

In order to be on this list, it must:

  1. Involve someone being transported or reincarnated in another world from the one they started in (I also made exceptions for traveling back in time to relive the same world with more information).
  2. An English version is available online for free.
  3. Have 20 or more chapter released in English (at least 1-2 finished volumes)
  4. Finished or still releasing new chapters as of 2016.

The stories I’m avoiding are:

  1. Stories where someone is just playing a game, even if it’s a deathmatch. Sorry, no sword art online, etc… etc…
  2. Stories you’d have to buy the LNs for. If it’s not online for free and translated, I’m not including it. (Now I’m not saying it’s online legally, just that it’s online and I was able to find it without illegal torrents)
  3. Mature rated content. I’m trying to avoid sex novels here.

Also, if you’re just looking for a few recommendations, this is the list of my Top Ten.

To Deprive a Deprived Person: (Continuing)

Bereave or Bereaved
Deprived by a Deprived Person
The Deprivers and the Deprived
Ubau Mono Ubawareru Mono

A young abused child ends up reincarnated into a new world with the same damaged body. Continues to be abused until he gets an ability that allows him to steal other people’s abilities. He quickly forms a harem with three women and steadily grows more and more powerful. The harem gets pretty dependent on him for no reason and the story quickly loses a lot of steam near the more recent chapters. It depends on the “everyone is an evil dickhole who wants something from the protagonist” cliché quite a bit. Plus, one of his harem has probably the grossest power ever, which makes it impossible to acknowledge anything she does as anything less than horrifying. Translation is still ongoing.

Rise of the Shield Hero: (Finished)

Tate no Yusha no Nariagari
The Rising of the Shield Hero

Four heroes are summoned, each with a cheat-like weapon. Despite being gaming Otakus, they all suddenly forget how tanking works and decide that the non-combatant “shield” holder is the weakest and deserves the least resources. Fast forward a day, and the one person who joined his team robs him blind and accuses him of raping her. Spurned by his allies and the country that summoned him, the shield hero must depend on tricks, slaves, and mercantile tactics in order to survive in the world he was dragged in. That’s the story for the first 100 chapters, then all that kind of gets put behind, and in the grand scheme of the story, his “betrayal” was a mere footnote in his life and hardly worth the earth shattering trust issues he has for the remainder of the story. It goes on kind of long near the end, but this is still probably one of the best “other world” stories out there, in my opinion. It’s actually finished with a decent ending, and also includes probably one of the largest harems in any story I’ve read. Also… I hope you like lesbian Chocobo rape… because you’re getting lesbian Chocobo rape.

Zero no Tsukaima: (Finished)

Zero’s Familiar
Zero no Tsukaima Side Story

The familiar of zero is probably one of the definitive stories that brought me into this genre. However, with the story already having 4 complete anime seasons which conclude the story arc, and being a fairly highly received anime to boot, I completely forgot this was a web novel too. In a world were magicians obtain noble status over the non-magic commoners, a young girl known for being unable to cast any spells without blowing things up (Louise the Zero, they call her) attempts to summon her familiar. That familiar turns out to be a Japanese “commoner”, causing her much embarrassment. As she tries to treat him like a loyal pet, he has to cope with being trapped in an unknown world while being treated like a servant by a pretentious noble. The world takes after western “history” with knights, princesses, kingdoms, and dragons. The story takes a lot of turns as it progresses. Most of it takes place out of a magical school, with them occasionally going off to other countries to fulfill diplomatic missions and participate in wars. The MC gains the knowledge to use any weapon he holds and steadily becomes pretty reliable. His multiple achievements end up earning him noble status too.  I found the story to actually be pretty long winded and political, and the harem is one of those “the mc obviously likes one girl and only her, but because he’s a pervert we’ll pretend all these other girls have a chance” set ups. This was all experience with anime, I might add, so I can’t tell you how the novels run. However, it was a decent anime and it might be a decent read.

Daybreak on Hyperion:

This story is the same as Familiar of Zero, but it flips the gender roles and adds gender bender in there too. In this, a pretentious wizard genius who doesn’t get along with anyone sets up to summon someone equal to his genius, but completely unlike himself. Every genius needs someone to challenge them to get the best out of them, to help them think outside the box. Therefore, he ends up summoning a beautiful and petite half-Japanese/half-german history student. The problem was, she was original a guy. Not only having to cope with being trapped in a new world, he also has to cope with being the opposite sex. Like Zero no Tsukaima, it sets up a LOT of political background and will have many long conversations dedicated to fleshing out the world and its characters. The entire world, by the way, is heavily influenced by german lore and terminology. In this case, he’s the genius, and she’s mostly just a stubborn, but a clever person who has to cope with his eccentrics. Kind of like the Doctor and his companion, if you will. I lost interest once they tried to ham in a romantic relationship between the two MCs (the summoner and the summoned). That wasn’t exactly why I quit reading… it’s pretty dry and long winded either way, but it broke the camels back for me.

Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka?: (Continuing)

I’m A Spider, So What?

The final battle between a hero and a demon king ends up spreading across dimensions and killing an entire classroom of students/teachers. They all end up reincarnating into a game-like world, born with their memories intact, but at the age of infants. One such introvert girl ends up reincarnating in the body of a lower spider monster lost in an oversized labyrinth. The story kind of goes from there. It’s a lot like RE: Monster. It’s all about skill acquisition and steady growth. She eats other monsters, gains levels, gains skills, and eats more monsters. Her levels keep climbing, and she keeps evolving. It’s a very slow progressing story, and unlike most “reincarnate as a monster” web novels, she doesn’t gain a sexy humanoid form in the first 50 chapters. She starts out as a spider, and as she goes, she just becomes a stronger and stronger spider. The story lacks human interaction. Every 10 chapters or so they jump to other people who were reincarnated and kind of give a run down of what they were doing while the protagonist is struggling in the labyrinth, but for the most part, at least for quite some time, it’s just her and her inner monologue for at least a good 40-50 chapters. Still, there is a certain kind of adorable almost Monty Pythonesque way to her interactions. So if you want something easy going, it’s as cute as you’ll get from a story about a spider monster.

Konjiki no Wordmaster:

Konjiki no Moji Tsukai (Golden Word Master)
Konjiki no Word Master

Four heroes are summoned to stop a demon lord, but a fifth person gets sucked along for the ride. When they open their status screens, the four of them have the title hero, while the other has the title, innocent bystander. He decides to take off on his own, not being friends with the others, and not trusting the kingdom. His power ends up being pretty phenomenal, the ability to actualize any word he writes. He also is a giant book nerd, putting books above people. Although he’s a jerk, he always ends up doing the “hero” things, even though he does them in the guise of someone who is most definitely not a hero. I lost interest in it a fair way in, and I can’t say I noticed any real romance/harem for as far as I got into it, but you can check it out.

Shinka no Mi:

Shinka no Mi ~Shiranai Uchi ni Kachigumi Jinsei~
The Seed of Evolution ~Before I knew it I was one of the champions~
The Evolution Fruit – Conquering Life Unknowingly

The seed of evolution is one I really like and would recommend it for fans of Arifureta. It’s about a boy who is fat, ugly, and smells, but he has a heart of gold. When the voice of god suddenly pops up over the loud speaker, he declares Earth is overpopulated and thus he wants to deport the entire school to another fantasy-like RPG world. Giving them an hour to prepare, he informs them they need to make parties to be able to be transferred safely to the same place. No one will party with the icky protagonist, and he ends up getting teleported to a high-level dungeon. As a gift for being such an optimistic guy, the god leaves him with an extra ability, absolute disassembly, which allows him to acquire every aspect of a defeated foe, not just their item drops, meat, and skin, but their abilities, stats, and collective knowledge! On top of that, he consumes something called the seeds of evolution in order to survive. After each evolution, he becomes more handsome and more op’d. Eventually, he runs into other inhabitants of the world, including a gorilla who wants him as her husband (no worries, she has a hot demi-human form). Thus begins the story of an OP guy who doesn’t have a chip on his shoulder for once… a generally nice guy with the powers of a monster. This one has the literal opposite message of Arifureta, as it preaches that people “ought to get along”, and even tries to promote understanding between monsters and humans.

Invincible Saint: Salaryman, the path I walk to survive in this other world:

Seija Musou ~Sarariiman, Isekai de Ikinokoru Tame ni Ayumu Michi~

Ten unfortunate souls get sent to another fantasy-like world on a bet, and this is the story of one of those ten. A salaryman who had a strong desire to stay alive was the most promising and thus got a special blessing from god. He was given the opportunity to distribute his starting skill points and choose his job. Despite being a salaryman, rather than a merchant, he for some reason learns holy magic and becomes a healer. Upon reaching the new world, he finds the entire magical healthcare system (healing guild) is corrupt, and the world more brutal and scarier than he expected. As a result, he starts training so that he can stay alive while creating enemies out of those resentful of his willingness to heal people without charging exorbitant prices. This is one of those stories I’ve genuinely enjoyed reading. It’s less wish fulfillment and more commentary. Whether intentional or not, it makes a pretty scathing commentary on American Healthcare and the “charging people exorbitant prices without telling them how much first”. It also makes some commentary on the mentality of a salaryman. Although he has god’s blessing, it turns out to not be much of a cheat skill. As a result, his strongest ability in this new world is his mentality as a Japanese salaryman, ie… someone willing to work hard for little to no pay or appreciation all for the incremental gains it gives him. My big annoyance with this one is that it starts out a lot like Shinka no Mi. He becomes stuck at level 1 while his stats get boosted from a hard to swallow concoction called Object X. The story leads you into thinking each level will drastically make him more powerful, but when he finally does level, it doesn’t do anything but leave him as an abnormally powerful low leveled character. Plus, even though he does accomplish incredible things, and is promoted accordingly, no one is ever impressed with anything he does, only making more demands on him later… which might actually be more commentary on being a salaryman. There are a few girls, but no romance and the few antagonists are so far removed from his life that they might as well not exist in the story. I’d say it’s a good read, with quality writing, but perhaps not the most exciting or engaging web novel I’ve ever read. It starts out great… but the longer it goes, the longer you realize that the payoff you were hoping for will never come… much like being a salaryman, so I guess you could say this web novel is a success?

Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken:

In Regards to My Reincarnation as a Slime
Regarding Reincarnated to Slime

A man who is stabbed saving his young co-worker and her fiancée is reborn in a new world as a slime. Using the slime ability to digest and a sage ability to analyze, he quickly grows into a menacing monster. Slowly, he gathers all the monsters in the forest he found himself in, naming them and providing them with incredible powers. He keeps evolving until he becomes a demon king. Most of the monsters evolve into a human or demi-human forms, and several of them develop crushes on him, so you can probably call it a harem too, even though his humanoid forum has no distinguishable sex. A lot of the story follows between his interactions with the increasingly antagonistic human world lead by a cult-like church and greedy nobles and the grouping of demon kings who control the dark lands. It’s not a bad story and has its funny moments.

In A Different World With a Smartphone:

Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomoni

A boy is accidentally killed by god. Thus, he agrees to resurrect the boy in another world (as per the rules) with an assortment of powers and his Smartphone modified to work in the magic world. I’ll admit, I didn’t give this story much of a chance. After reading through the initial arc, it lacked humor, cool fights, skill acquisition, or RPG elements, basically, any reason I’d ever want to read the story in the first place. What I was left with was a very generic another world story with nothing going for it. I mean, with a name like “Smartphone”. you’d expect the story to focus on the hero’s ability to use his smartphone. Yes, it’s fully working and connect to the internet of Earth. So you think the story would be a fun exploration of all the crazy things he can do with a smartphone which would make him OP. Get “lost” in a labyrinth, only to be able to use GPS mapping and get out instantly. Store and manage your inventory (like an item box) and handle skill acquisition through it like “My Childhood friend is a hero in another world.” In fact, that web novel handles using smartphones in another world many times better than this one, and its name isn’t even about smartphones. In this novel, all he does is look up a recipe or two and keep a journal. That’s it. No bringing recipes and techniques from an advanced civilization. No combining magic with technology. No tricking idiots into thinking you’ve trapped their soul with a picture. No recording someone’s voice and revealing their evil plans at the right moment. No using it to generate sound distractions to help fight in battle. There are some moderate levels of GPS usage, but not in situations where he’s likely to get lost. Instead, he gets a random grab bag of enhanced stats that supposedly make him better than everyone else, yet still, he remarkably fights no better than everyone else in his party of girls. I’m hesitant to call this harem too because although he is in a party with girls, the author fails to write any chemistry between them, although as I understand it he does end up in a harem with them. They sort of just meet, then say, hey, let’s party, and then party. It’s so platonic that the girls might as well be lifeless background noise. I’ll admit, I only gave this book 15 chapters, but there are plenty of novels out there that can tell a very gripping story in 15 chapters, and this one doesn’t do it. Maybe by chapter 60 he’s used his smartphone for something more than ‘let’s keep a journal.’, but so far it hasn’t happened. On that note, who the crap keeps a journal on a cellphone? Is this seriously something someone would do in Japan? I’m looking at you, Future Diary. With tablets, laptops, and good old desktops, someone would actually type a journal on a little bitty cellphone screen? Really? Anyway, I recently found out an anime of this was made… and I tried to watch it thinking maybe the anime added something the webnovel lacked, but it was the most boring 2 hours of my life. Why is this popular? Why do people like this? It’s sooooo freaking boring. There is NO chemistry between him and the girls. Watching paint dry is more interesting than this story.

Return of the Former Hero:

Kaette Kita Motoyuusha

A boy summoned to another world at the age of 12 spends the next 3 years training to battle the demon king. Unfortunately, his hero’s party was full of a bunch of men, and by the time he’s old enough to start having an interest in girls, he defeats the demon king and is sent back to his old world with barely a thank you. Desperate to return and use his hero powers to gain the women and comfortable life he was promised, he creates a magic circle and sends himself back to the fantasy world. However, he may have ended up in the wrong world, landing himself in a unique world that has a different hero who has yet to defeat their demon king. However, that’s just fine for him. The MC still sets out to meet ladies, fall in love and live comfortably. I haven’t read too much of this one, but it’s not bad. I can’t say it’s done anything to set itself out or get me all that excited. This MC falls in the ‘perverted thoughts’ category of MCs, who looks cool until he starts thinking indecent things, and then he has a face that disgusts the women around him and makes it harder for him to get girls. It’s very readable, as my only criticism so far is that it doesn’t really set itself out. At least the pacing is good so far. Give it a try.

Suterareta Yuusha:

Suterareta Yuusha no Eiyuutan

The Epic Tale of the Forsaken Hero

A class is summoned to another world. The bullied weakling gets left behind in a dungeon. It’s very similar to Arifureta, although the abuse is way more advanced and there is no one in class on his side. In the end, they literally toss him at some monsters to slow them down while everyone else escapes. However, rather than eating demon meat, he re-pops after dying with increased powers. Also, everyone in his party is dead and brought back using an ability that makes them his slaves. It’s kind of like shield-hero in that respect, as he doesn’t trust anyone who isn’t his slave. Also, he decides to systematically murder everyone in his class, so there is that. I heard the most recent volume went off the wall and the author rewrote it, I didn’t get much further than volume 2.

Death March kara Hajimaru Isekai Kyousoukyoku:

Death Marching to the Parallel World Rhapsody
Desumachi

A software developer/debugger ends up in another world. Using his admin level cheats, he inadvertently clears the hardest area in the world, including wiping out the Dragon God, jumping him to level 300+ and providing him with a dragon’s horde of rare and magical items. He only gets more OP’d from there. It’s a web novel about loli’s, food, and taking a casual vacation that includes defeating demon lords and stopping world breaking space Kaiju. The harem is massive but composed of almost entirely loli’s. Don’t worry, he isn’t interested in them that way, it’s almost entirely one-sided. I’d say the story didn’t really get interesting until demon lords started showing up, which actually takes quite a while. It’s never a novel that’ll leave you concerned. It’s never a matter of if, just a question of how quickly the protagonist will break common sense and stop city breaking cataclysms as easily as cooking some flying whale. If you go into it looking to relax and have a good time, you’ll have fun. If you’re in it for a complex story… it’s very slow and almost non-existent. It’s basically about a demi-god who worked himself to death in his previous life deciding to take a vacation in this one.

I was Reincarnated as a Magic Academy!:

This one isn’t Japanese or Chinese, but Romanian. Like Fimbulwinter, it was written in English, so technically it doesn’t count as “translated”, but I’m including it anyway. While playing video games with headphones on, a Romanian guy is shot in the back of the head by a criminal who broke into his home. He wakes up possessing the form of a powerful dungeon core class called dungeon lord. He was pieced together by several other dungeon cores and created by a powerful magician in order to handle the management, protection, and building of a magical school. Kind of like Hogwarts if Hogwarts was given sentience. There, he has an awareness of everything in his territory. He can create monsters, build rooms, cast spells, and have overall mastery over his abilities. He can feel everything in his territory, but he can also hover around like an invisible ghost. He was also given the ability to select his race, from easy dungeon core to god-like. Of course, he picks god-like, unaware that god-like is an extinct form of a dungeon, giving him a massive bank of mana and increasingly more powerful dominion over his realm. He quickly starts to build a harem of girls through various circumstances who start out being the only ones aware of his true power. The story changes once he gains a body. He stops being a magic academy (making the name pointless) and starts traveling the world with his harem. The story forgets about levels, ranks, and for the most part, the building of his dungeon, and focuses on his sexual relationship with his harem and his ongoing battle with his inner dungeon nature. Some may love the way the story radically changes tones, others might be a little disappointed. I was on the disappointed side. After 40 some chapters of being a magic academy, the author seemingly throws that out and starts a different story using the same characters, although not really because even the characters themselves have radically different personalities than they did and the setting completely changes. So if you don’t like the first half of this web novel, you might like the second and vice versa. Personally, I keep reading hoping at some point it returns to its roots, following the story of a magic academy. To me, this was underexplored and got dropped way too easily in exchange for a rather generic and uninteresting harem fantasy. However, if you like harems or stories that drastically twist in tone and feel, this might be for you.

Isekai Mahou wa Okureteru!:

Isekai Mahou
Isekai Mahou ha Okureteru!
The Different World Magic Is Too Far Behind!

A kingdom summons the hero, dragging along two of his childhood friends with him. One childhood friend is a girl who is in love with him and immediately decides to help him fight the demon lord. The second refuses to help, concerned only about returning home. Aggravated by the second childhood friend, the haughty court mage (thought to be an unparalleled genius with magic) decided to teach him a lesson, only to discover he is a magician that far exceeds her abilities. On Earth, he’s a magician unbeknownst to his friends, a secret group hidden from the normal humans. Furthermore, their magical theory far exceeds the fantasy world. Even though he was only moderately powerful on Earth, in this world he is an unbridled genius that probably could defeat the demon lord even without the hero’s help. Not that he’s willing to…  He’s kind of haughty and selfish himself, and his reasoning for not helping his friends seems flimsy. Like wordmaster, he sort of just goes off on his own while the hero’s go fight the demon lord. In this case, he’s looking to help them go home, but so far his character has seemed unrelatable to me, so I’ve struggled to get into this one. Give it a shot if their story sounds interesting to you.

Yuusha Party no Kawaii Ko ga ita no de, Kokuhaku Shite Mita:

There was a Cute Girl in the Hero’s Party so I tried Confessing
Yuusha Party

Guy reincarnated to a magical world. He is a demon though with no aspirations to become the demon lord. As 4 heroes are trying to defeat the demon king, he stands in their way and inadvertently wipes them out, only to fall in love with one of the members. Things get interesting from there. Well, no, not really. The story is more romance than anything. It’s basically about a guy trying to date a girl. He’s a demon with the power of a demon king masquerading as a human. (kind of like parts of overlord) She’s a noble who just became famous for defeating the previous demon king. It gets pretty underutilized and I found myself quickly losing interest. It’s quite funny at the start and introduces a lot of amusing and notable characters… but then it fails to really do anything with them. To me, it felt more like a slice of life story with a fantasy background. It’s technically got less than 20 chapters released, although it’s more than 20 releases if you include the fact many of them are cut in two-four pieces. Give it a shot if you’re looking for something light.

Against the Gods:

ATG
Heaven Defying Evil God
Ni Tian Xie Shen

A man with extreme medical skills and a special treasure known as the sky poison pearl lives a life of vengeance and regret. Forced to the end of the world by those chasing his artifact, he swallows the poison pearl and leaps from a cliff, taking his own life. Only to resurrect in his own 15-year-old body, on an unknown continent, with a different name and the memories from another life. In that life, he was a boy with crippled profound veins, hated by his own clan, and set to marry a beautiful woman far above his station. Thus begins his long journey towards becoming strong enough to protect all the ones he loves. It’s a Xianxia if you know what those are. So it’s all about a steady leveling towards god-like power, usually through “contemplating” techniques and “absorbing” profound power. The guys a bit of womanizer, and even though he’s married, continually woes other women too. The story recycles the same scenes over and over again. First, he pisses someone off. Then he disappears, presumed dead. Then he survives a trial, gaining some kind of new power. He owns all the bad guys, then pisses someone new off, rinse and repeat. You’d think by the third time he’s pronounced “dead” someone would go… “you know? I don’t think he’s dead.”, but whatever. If you like seeing pompous people getting knocked on their butts and everyone being continuously surprised at how powerful the op protagonist is, then you’ll like this novel.

Mondaiji-tachi ga isekai kara kuru soudesu yo:

Problem Children Seem to be Coming from Another World?

My only experience with this novel comes from the anime. Basically, it follows the “many worlds” theory that all these novels follow. In this case, there is a world that welcomes people from other worlds, allowing them to bring their unique talents in order to compete in games. A guild on the verge of being destroyed summons three individuals from three different worlds, each with a unique ability that left them feeling detached from the rest of the world they lived in. This new world is a world of games, where people compete and make bets, winning and losing for just about everything. These three summons each bring certain abilities, and using their overpowered skills they recover the guild and protect the children living in it. I didn’t hate it. I still haven’t gone out of my way to read the novel and see how it differs, though.

Isekai Canceller:

Isekai no Kyansera – Fuguu Shoku Demo Kyanseru Sukiru de Musou Suru
Other World Canceller ~The Worst Job But With the Cancel Skill I’ll Become the Strongest~

With a meteor about to strike the earth, a gaming otaku is suddenly teleported to the world of his game inside the avatar of his character. That character has the job class of canceller, a brand new and strangely bugged job system that might have been fixed, had the world not been about to end. Thus begins the story of a mellow guy who doesn’t even have an Earth to return to, so he might as well get along in the new one. Unfortunately, the world he’s in is full of corruption and evil. After saving a slave girl from being raped, he sets out to try to free her while making a living too. The stories actually pretty good. There is a growing sense that things aren’t okay and that the nobility is corrupt. Rather than shove corrupt nobles in your face, it hints and describes the actions, rather than flat out just throwing it at you. I actually find this way better writing than a lot of stories I’ve read, and many times in it I’ve actually felt like I was reading a video game story. He makes acquaintances, from armor shops to brokers, to corrupt guards he can bribe for information, and I swear the scene feels like it was ripped straight from Dragon Age. The story builds like this, quite successfully, and that tension always feels like it’s building too. The story really has only one problem. There are WAY too many arseholes. Basically, everyone who isn’t the MC and his slave girl are just the worst people ever. The story has some pretty brutal and horrifying scenes, and even ignoring those scenes, everyone in this story is brutal and violent. It’s kind of like deprive the depriver in that respect, although in this story, his OP isn’t particularly OP’d. You always feel like he’s barely able to scrap by, whether it’s a fight with thieves or gathering the money to pay for the slave girl before the deadline. In some ways, the story is nail-biting and intense, and in other ways, it feels almost like NTR, never quite giving you satisfaction. I’ll leave it up to you whether that’s good or bad, but truth be known, this has been one of the more thrilling web novels I’ve read in a while.

No Game, No Life:

An otaku brother and his little sister with a rather unhealthy relationship and lifestyle are summoned to another world after being that world’s god at a game of chess. Together, the pair form the team [] “blank”, which has said to never have been beaten. This world turns out to be a world created by the god of games after being the only living god after untold eons of war. Thus, he created a world where all conflict is resolved by games and competition. They find themselves in the declining lands of Imanity (humanity). Since humans lack magic, they can’t see if they are being tricked with magic, and have thus spent years losing territory. The brother and his little sister then proceed to start recovering what imanity has lost using their genius intuition and skills to defeat opponents that can cheat them with magic any time they want. It’s got some stupid parts. For example, games come in all shapes and sizes. Let’s see Blank win against a relay race. But forgetting the giant pink elephant, it was an enjoyable story so far, and actually has a direction it’s going, which is more than most “another world” books.

Ryuugoroshi no Sugosuhibi:

A Dragon Slayer’s Everyday Life

A girl is about to be sacrificed to the evil black dragon that has terrorized the land for generations. Suddenly, a boy is summoned crashing directly into the dragon’s one and only mysterious “weak spot” and killing him instantly. This world apparently goes by the “you keep what you kill” rules and he absorbs the abilities of a OP’d black dragon, causing him to be OP’d himself. This one… did not appeal to me for some reason. I read about 10 chapters, then gave up on it. Can’t even really give you much of a reason why. He travels with the girl he saved, both hiding until they figure out what to do, ince she’s supposed to be good and sacrificed and he’s dangerously OP’d. Try it out if you want. The release schedule is sporadic and slow. Like 3 chapters a year.

The New Gate:

Ever wondered what would happen if after Kirito beat Sword Art Online,  he pulls an Overlord and the game ends up turning into reality 500 years later? Well, this story had you covered. The lone player, after finally defeating the death game, ends up waking up 500 years later in the game turned reality. All the powerful NPC companions he had created, having become sentient, moved on to become legendary figures that helped shape history. With that, he enters this world, an overpowered and god-like existence, the last living high human since the end of the time of legends. The story hasn’t progressed that far. He mostly just does whatever he can, every action he takes pressing against the realm of common sense. Oh, you’re sick? Here’s a rare and exotic potion from a mystical era than can never be seen again. You need a mount? Here’s a mystical demi-god, you can ride him. That kind of thing. He connects back with his old NPCs, who idealize him as a god… and that’s really as far as the story got when I last checked. Not bad. It’s not harem, but there’s quite a few girls who meet the protagonist with adoration.

Tsuki ga Michibiku:

Moon-led Journey Across Another World
Tsukiga Michibiku Isekai Dochu

This is one I initially skipped for the simple reason that the summary makes no darn sense. The protagonist is the son of two people who originally came from a fantasy world. They cut a deal with the gods to be sent to Earth, a notoriously harsh place to live with few gods and no magic. In exchange, something they cherish will one day be taken from them. That turns out to be the protagonist himself, who is summoned back to the fantasy realm of his parents in order to fight demons and re-establish the human order. As the kindly god of earth is preparing to send him to his new world, the flippant goddess of the fantasy world pulls him over ahead of schedule. Being an arrogant misandrist, she immediately dislikes him, declaring she doesn’t want someone as un-cute as him becoming her world’s hero. As it turns out, everyone in her world has supermodel good looks and he’s slightly below average. She declares she summoned a backup (someone he probably knows), gives him an incomplete ability to talk to orcs and other demihumans, and then abandons him in a desert at the end the world, forbidding him from interfering with her precious hyumanity (humanity), or even allowing him to get married or have kids. Meanwhile, she bestows a ton of divinity on her “backup”, and put them right in a castle, ready to be heroes. Spurned by this world’s goddess, he sets out to live the best way he can now that he is stuck on this world. This leads him into meeting monsters, whom after forming a contract with him gain cute, female forms. He’s super powerful for “some reason”, and it’s not really explained why he can easily fight S class monsters. His first monster can also creates an artificial world, and he starts recruiting people away from the god’s world (who treats monsters harshly) and putting them in his artificial world, effectively creating his own kingdom. The novel is very scatterbrained and hard to follow, with a translation that is difficult to understand. There are some who like this novel, but I find it impossible to get into.

Gate – Thus the JSDF Fought There:

Japan suddenly finds itself connected to a fantasy world. After the fantasy world suddenly attacks them, killing citizens of Japan and kidnapping others, they send in the cavalry. Ever wonder how modern warfare and technology would fair against dragons and magic? Turns out pretty well. The army sets up a base right on top of the holy land for the location, and thus have to repel numerous attacks… but the Japanese war machine is strong, and every army breaks under Japanese artillery and training. The main protagonist is quite interesting. He’s an otaku who only joined the army to fund his buying habits. Always in the right place at the wrong time, he actually is a war hero with a ridiculous amount of prestige, despite being fairly lazy, obstinate, and least deserving of his awards. He meets up with locals, including a magician, an elf, a dark elf, and a loli deathgod, who follow him, curious about Japan. Every time you think the story is going to pull a one over on the Japanese, you’re reminded about just how far we’ve come from the ages of monarchy and kingdoms. At one point, someone tries to instigate a war by forging some documents. Then the CSI breaks out, they match fingerprints, and a day later they’re bringing in the real culprit. It’s pretty satisfying. The world they’re in is brutal, filled with death, rape, and moronic ambition. However, none of this stands up against the JSDF. Now… I only read a chapter of the webcomic. Most of my knowledge comes from the anime…. But it’d probably be worth reading.

Isekai Maou to Shoukan Shoujo Dorei Majutsu:

The King of Darkness Another World Story
The Other World Demon King and the Summoning Girl’s Slave Magic

An MMORPG fan, boasting an overwhelming overpowered character dubbed by others as the Demon King, suddenly gets teleported to another world inside the avatar of his MMORPG character. Two pretty girls were simultaneously trying to summon a slave, and declare he is their slave… however, when the magic settles, it rebounds and they both end up becoming his slave. There, he declares himself a Demon King, and the story goes on from there. The story wasn’t bad, although not a whole lot happened from what I can remember. It’s got harems and master/slaves and all that rot. It’s got a guy acting all evil and tough, while showing you his hilarious inner commentary as a panicky and insecure otaku. So kind of like Overlord, at least in that respect. Might be worth a look.

Ore no Osananajimi wa Joshikousei de Yuusha:

My Childhood Friend is a High School Girl and a Hero of Another World but It Looks Like There’s More To Her Than That

A guy has a childhood friend, who ends up being designated as the hero who must go to another world to stop evil from happening. However, she always appears to him as self-deprecating and just a little bit useless, so he’s convinced to tag along to this new world. However, in reality, she’s actually brilliant… and also a certified psychopath who only wants the rest of the world to love the protagonist as much as she does. That’s right, she’s a Yandere… and not the cute kind. She is quite brutal, and terrifying. It tries to address the “what if the hero from another world was a yandere”, kind of like My Super Ex-girlfriend but with hero in another world themes instead of superhero ones. However, it fails at that completely, because no one ever recognizes her as a hero. She’s just some crazy arsed overpowered girl. She spends the majority of her time behind the scenes being responsible for basically everything that happens in his life, as she engineers situations for him to become a hero and save the day. She also drags other girls into it, and then immediately turns them into yandere too. Yup, it’s contagious, apparently. So yeah, she messes with people’s minds until they’re convinced they’re in love with him as much as she is. It’s kind of sick… and terrifying… but if you like Yanderes, this is the story for you.

Master of Monsters:

Monster Tamer

Entire school gets teleported to the middle of a monster-infested forest in a parallel world. Some have super powers so the school survives and establishes a new society. There is a rebellion, lots of people die, the mc is powerless so he runs for his life. That’s where the story starts. Then he realizes he has the power to control certain unique and special monsters. Controlling them gives them sentience and self-awareness too. He slowly assembles a harem of girls. (Turns out, only female monsters become unique monsters, so there is actually a legitimate reason in this one) Like shield-hero and Yuusha, the protagonist has major trust issues. Unlike those, he really has very little reason to have trust issues. Everyone seemed to go crazy and he got kicked around a little before managing to escape. The ones who were kicking him died horribly. Yeah… that’s his horror story. Humans can’t be trusted… so violently in fact that he has a panic attack just thinking about trusting a high school girl who literally risked her life to save his. Yeah… really stupid. His first girl is a slime who eats one of his dead classmates and takes on her form/memories. His second girl is a wood puppet. His third girl is half spider. It’s kind of like Monster Musume mixed with RPG survival horror. It’s another one of those ultra-pessimistic all humans are trash kind of stories. It also doesn’t progress very fast, and to the point that’s translated they’re still sitting in the forest they started out in.

Slave harem in the labyrinth of the other world:

A Harem in the Fantasy World Dungeon
Isekai Meikyuu De Dorei Harem wo
Isekai Meikyuu de Harem o

Guy contemplating suicide registers for a game on some obscure website, and then he wakes up in a different world with the abilities he selected. After getting introduced to the concept of slaves, he starts to slowly build an adventuring team made up entirely of attractive women. He gets special points which he can allocate in any ability he wants, including a skill reset option, so he can invest points in anything he wants, generating OP’d swords, giving himself faster experience, filling up magic crystals faster, and using cheat-like magic spells. It’s a very very slow slog of a story. It’s a very slice of life story, with very little payoff. It takes nearly 16 chapters just to get the first slave, and every new one gets added every 20 some chapters. He makes money, buys stuff to enhance his harem (from bath  and soap so he can wash them, to cliched outfits that he puts them in). It very thoroughly has him trouble shooting everything in this world. No books, no help menus, no hp or mp bars, he basically has to figure everything out on his own, including how much each item does damage. The author spends an insane amount of time detailing every little experiment he runs. He also spends a lot of time on food, the acquiring and cooking for such. To me, the story has little life to it. No one has any personality and everything in the story proceeds with an almost foggy lack of feeling. The story is really just a repetitive slog (we killed three monsters, I used this skill, then we went and ate breakfast, then we went and killed more monsters, I leveled up to this, then we…) The protagonist is a disgusting creep (he’ll condemn anyone who looks at his harem, while feeling like any pretty girl who passes his way should immediately sleep with him). There is no story and minimal characterization. After spending more time reading this story, I’ve come to hate it with a passion. The protagonist is an awful person, most of the slaves are awful people, and the story is nonexistent. I’ve read 200 chapters of this crap, I can assure you nothing ever happens. At this point, I’m only leaving it on my list to advise you not to read it, because it’s seriously an awful story with awful people. It was probably when he basically rapes his fifth slave (whom the other girls threaten and indoctrinate) that I threw this web novel away in disgust.

Evil God Average:

Cthulhu Average
Jashin Average

A beautiful girl with one tiny problem, she has evil looking eyes, has lived a life without too many friends or opportunities for happiness. Then, a god-like being with similarly evil looking eyes takes a liking to her (he likes the look of her eyes), and decides to summon her to his world with the typical item box/ magic / enhanced stats as standard fair. In good faith, he offers her one extra wish, to which she responds that she wants “average” eyes and she want’s to give off an “average” aura. Thus, he grants her wish, and she ends up in a new world completely normal… to the standard of an Evil God, which turns out to be pants crapping terrifying. Thus begins her path to get by in a new world as the most terrifying presence alive. Furthermore, anything she touches gains divine protection from the evil god, turning common items into evil and cursed items of darkness. Humans can’t see her aura, so mostly it’s only if she looks at someone that they become terrified. Plus her clothing, bed, room, and weapons all turn into monstrously powerful evil artifacts. Thus she starts gathering friends: slaves, demon lords, basically anyone she can keep from running away in terror. It’s a very funny story and one I genuinely like. Reminds me a lot of Kumo Desu ga, but faster pacing and a bit more interaction with other people.

I’ve Became Able to Do Anything with My Growth Cheat, but I Can’t Seem to Get out of Being Jobless:

Growth Cheat
Seich? ch?to de nandemo dekiru y? ni natta ga, mushoku dake wa yamerare nai y? desu

This lump of a title follows the story of a man who became a high school dropout after his parents died. Although his suspiciously clever little sister used the inheritance money to make them millionaire’s, the boy still desired to support her and not be a lump the rest of his life. Regrettably, he seemed to be cursed to be forever jobless, leading all the way up to his death. Confronted by a goddess, he is offered to pick a cheat-like blessing, and he picks 20X experience points. Only to find himself confronted by another goddess before he could resurrect which bestows a second blessing, 1/20th experience needed to level. Thus, he ends up with 400x leveling speed. Because of that ability, he stumbles on another cheat that even the gods didn’t know about. If you don’t choose a job immediately and level up joblessly (you can only be jobless once), you gain numerous perks, including the ability to equip 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and even 5th jobs and swap those jobs at will. Thus, you have a guy that levels up insanely fast while accumulating the benefits of numerous jobs all at once. It’s a LOT like Slave Harem in the labyrinth, following a very similar job system, the slow accumulation of a slave-based party, and of course, he sleeps with them. However, the characters have more personality and backstory, there actually is a progressing story, and the protagonist genuinely wants to help, rather than coming off like a disgusting creep. The pacing is better, and overall… yeah, this is just a better web novel. If you like Slave Harem, try this one on. If you like the concept of Slave Harem, but hated the same things I hated about it, then this is a better option.

Takami No Kago:

Divine Protection of Many Gods

This story also resembled Slave Harem in the Labyrinth in some respects. A guy suddenly finds himself in a fantasy world. No resurrection, no summoning, just pop, now he’s in a new world. Certain people have “Divine Protection”, which are god-made cheat skills. They’re rare, but anyone who gets them is treated with a certain level of respect. While the story tries to make these powers seem really rare, no one seems all that excited when he reveals he has divine protection, so while they make him op, they aren’t game breaking. No… what makes this protagonist game breaking is that he ended up with the divine protection of many numerous gods, giving him a giant grab bag of abilities and powers. He then proceeds to buy slave girls, although he typically does it under the pretense of rescuing them. In these cases, these girls were “cursed” (opposite of divine protection), and thus no one wanted to buy them. He does, frees their curse with his op-ness… turning them op in the process, and the story goes on from there. The story moves way faster than Slave harem, and the character is a lot more likable, coming off more like a laid back hero than a scuzzy pervert looking to molest girls.

Hai to Gensou no Grimgar:

Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash
Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion

This one takes the summoned to a fantasy world and cranks up the realism. No special cheats. No incredible powers. Just people being tossed in a kill or be killed world in which they must murder monsters who also want to survive in order to pay for their food and board. My only exposure to this was the anime, and to be honest, I couldn’t watch it. It moved too slowly and I quickly lost interest in melodramatic people screaming over the pain of killing a goblin. It seems to stick itself on the assumption that the only way someone could survive is by killing monsters… because apparently farming, hunting, smithing, and herb collecting are all things they can’t do? I admit I didn’t pay much attention to this one, so maybe it comes up with reasons, but it seems odd to me that killing a goblin is their only choice to survive in this world. Hunt some bunnies. Even if they were bunny “monsters”, at least you wouldn’t have the psychological mind screw of killing something that “thinks” and “looks” human-like. Hunters have been managing to get over the psychological mind screw of killing animals for food since well… the beginning of time.

Spirit Migration:

A sentient spirit ends up in a fantasy world. He’s likely reincarnated so I’m including it. He learns to inhabit creatures, and immediately decides to start helping humans. I lost interest after he leaves the dungeon. It kind of comes off like a version of Quantum Leap. He jumps into an animal, helps some random humans out with their life, jumps into a new animal, then helps a different group of humans. I didn’t get much farther than that, and it didn’t seem worth reading anymore. It’s sort of interesting, but if you’re looking for a deeper story and more RPG elements, you won’t find it here.

Log Horizon:

Log Horizon took what sword art online did, and asked the exact opposite question. Rather than ask what would you do if your game became a real life or death struggle, he instead asks, what would happen if your life became a real game, complete with infinite respawns. After a certain update on a certain MMORPG, suddenly, everyone who patched their game that day end up in the game, inhabiting the body of their avatars. After the “apocalypse”, a formerly guild-less strategist who used to be part of an impromptu gathering of people who’d perform raids on the strongest and most unbeatable dungeons starts his own guild in hopes of improving the condition for all the adventurers brought from his world. Bringing law, order, and control to the city, he uses strategies that often make him look like the bad guy to give the adventurers a reason to keep fighting. After all, when you’re immortal and can easily slaughter 2-3 monsters to get all the money you’d need to survive, what’s the point of even getting up in the morning. The story gets tedious at times. It has a lot of characters which it gives more than necessary characterization to. It also gets very political at times, and will spend a great amount of time discussing the inner workings of that world. Still, it’s the best story to answer the question, what if real life is like a video game?

Tsuyokute New Saga:

After a brutal war against the demon lord, the hero manages to finally defeat him.  Near death and having lost all his friends, family, and party members along the way, he sees some weird crystal the demon lord had and touches it. This causes him to wake up several years earlier in his younger body, before the war started. He decides to do things differently and goes off to acquire the resources necessary (money and fame) to be able to change the course of events. It has some harem aspects in it as he gets into contact with a lot of his past lovers whom he lost over the years. It also has some subtle undertones in, causing you and the protagonist to question the difference between good and bad. He finds many of the people he looked up to in his former life have dark histories before he met them. His own actions, in fact, start to make you question whether he’s even the good guy. It’s actually a pretty cool story. Might be worth checking out. It’s not too far into it though.

Word Customize Creator:

Another guy is summoned to a parallel world. He has a unique power that lets him modify the world around him, doing things like creating forts in a single day. I honestly read the manga, but don’t actually have a whole lot of memories about it. It was pretty generic and run of the mill. His power was interesting, I guess. There was no harem that I recall, and most of his actions were small scale, just helping a struggling nation retain their foothold on their territory, I think.You might get more out of it than I did.

Sendai Yuusha wa Inkyou Shitai:

Five heroes are summoned to save the world from the demon lord. The hero, his 3 girl harem, and a fifth guy. Unknown to everyone else, that fifth guy was the previously summoned hero from 3 years ago, who already defeated the demon lord and sealed him up. Without magical ability, he was determined useless and kicked out of the castle, where he goes on to try to live a simple life as an adventurer, despite having overwhelming ability. It starts off a lot like Death March, with an op guy just casually doing missions, his main desire being to meet an attractive big sister and fall in love. If quests don’t meet his expectations and instead of a den of goblins he meets a den of orcs and has to battle the orc king? So be it. However, around 15 chapters in the tone suddenly changes and a story that started out light starts taking itself a little too seriously. Along with flips to the “hero’s party” to compare his struggle with the main character, the story just complete changes at the end of volume 1. I ended up losing interest and dropping this one after the tone shift.

Law of the Devil:

Guy reincarnates, hates the world, but everyone treats him like he’s stupid and useless. Sells his soul in exchange for the power to get vengeance.  It’s labeled as harem. It also appears to be another XianXia… although I don’t know much about it.Lot of chapters out, almost 200.

Kill No More:

The greatest assassin vowed never to kill again before being transported to a futuristic world which has magic. Did not appeal to me at all. I dropped it only a few chapters in. Not sure how it continues on, but so far it feels kind of like a fish out of water story. They live in a world with flying, self-driving cars and super advanced technology, where it’s commonplace for people to randomly get transported from other worlds. The assassin has incredible powers that allow him to even rival magic users, and gets entered into some school. That’s as far as I got.

Gunota ga Mahou Sekai ni Tensei Shitara, Gendai Heiki de Guntai Harem o Tsukucchaimashita!?:

In this story, the protagonist has a history of regret as a shut-in who cowered from bullies. After being forced to get a job as a metal-worker, one cold night walking home from said job his past catches up to him and he finds himself being stabbed to death by the very childhood bully that made him a shut-in in the first place. Thus, he wakes up in a fantasy world reincarnated in the body of an abandoned orphan. Raised in an orphanarium by a rabbit eared girl alongside a dog-eared orphan girl, he sets himself apart with his adult brain. The story is a LOT like Mushoku Tensei, except this guy turns out to have little to no magic ability in a world seemingly governed by magic. As a result, he uses his gun-obsession to his advantage and uses the little magic he has to develop guns based on schematics he memorized in the previous world. Unlike the protagonist of Mushoku, who becomes op’d by working hard at the right time, this guy soley uses his knowledge from out world to give him an edge, whether it be creating popular games he can sell, developing guns, or creating desserts. Like Mushoku, it’s in it for the long hall, introducing harem characters only to have them leave and come back again later.Years pass by at a time and he’s always getting older, learning and growing as he does. The story throws a few wrenches in the story for you too, so the story never gets boring. If you liked Mushoku Tensei, you’ll probably like this one too.

Doulou Dalu:

A thief of martial arts techniques kills himself and is reincarnated to a different world where everyone has a spirit that embodies their personality / power. The protagonists ends up with two, the one he shows that everyone universally considers the weakest, and the one he doesn’t show which is shocking and legendary. He forms a group of friends. They all grow more powerful. To be honest, I’ve followed a few manga (mangwha?) chapters of this one and it just didn’t spark my interest. Maybe the web novel is better… *shrug*

Overlord:

A gamer started a monster only guild in his favorite virtual reality MMO, reached the max level, and built an undefeatable dungeon filled with extremely powerful NPCs. The game declines and most of the other guild members quit to deal with their lives. Finally, the games servers will be shut down, so he waits until server forces him out. However, right after the time passes, the npcs suddenly become sentient and he along with his whole guild are transported to a parallel world where they are overwhelmingly more powerful than everyone else. He’s an undead lich, and the NPCs in his guild all revere him as a god, even when he’s embarrassed by the Chuunibyo leveled speeches and characters he deals with. I only watched the anime. Liked it, but not a lot of story has happened so far. Maybe the novelization differs.

My Disciple died, yet again:

A middle-aged woman who works on debugging games suddenly finds herself in a Xianxia world. It starts out really slowly, but once you’re 2 volumes in you kind of get where this is going. It’s a parody of other Xianxia’s. So clans, cultivations levels, profound energy, ever climbing powers that rival the gods… ect… ect… She becomes the mentor of one of the most feared masters in the land because of the quality of her profound veins. Her mentor is a man who was avoiding ascending to a higher realm for 10,000 years because he was waiting for a replacement. Just as she’s about to reach the level in which he can leave in peace, she dies. Then comes back. Then dies again. Each time she comes back in a crazier and crazier form, from a boy, to a baby, to a sentient rock. On top of that, her job is to stop bugs, which are other Xianxia protagonists/antagonists, whose actions and supernatural luck inadvertently lead to the world ending. If you’ve ever wanted to read about some spurned boy growing op’ed and forming his harem of girls from the point of view of a sarcastic third party source, this one is for you. It’s a really funny novel, yet like certain futurama episodes, it has the power to bring you to tears too.

Re:Lovely:

A sinful woman is given a chance to redeem her soul and reconnect with her lost daughter by becoming a hero in another world. She is re-born as a lizard monster, but quickly gains a human form though. She has to level up and learn powers while helping people. She basically gets with every girl she comes across, repeatedly. The harem stuff seems to decrease greatly in later chapters, but there is still more than is usual. I haven’t read too many chapters so far, but it’s actually quite funny. She’s got a very charming wit, which reminds me a lot of My disciple died, yet again.

Re:Monster:

Guy gets murdered by yandere best friend and gets reincarnated as a goblin. He previously had the ability to gain skills from anything he eats. Taking advantage of that skill, he starts killing and eating animals, quickly growing in power. He ends up evolving into a more human-like ogre form, and takes over his tribe. Continuing to grow along with the friends in his liter, he also takes in female humans and elves and incorporates them into his clan. Although he uses pheromones to break the female elves into sex slaves first. He also sleeps… with like every girl, in some cases all at once. It’s a story as much about skill acquisition and growth as anything. Naturally, as they grow bigger in power, they find themselves dealing with more of the outside world. A lot like Tensei Shitara Slime in that respect, but with more sex.

KonoSuba: God’s Blessing on This Wonderful World!:

Another Otaku, this guy dies trying to save a high school girl from being hit by a tractor. Oh, she never would have been hit, and he actually broke her arm, causing more harm than good. Also, he died from shock, not from actually being struck. He gets offered by a goddess the chance to reincarnate in a new world. He’ll be granted one ‘cheat’ in the new world, whether it be a power or artifact, but on the other hand he needs to defeat the demon lord. Annoyed at the goddess’s flippant behavior, he chooses her as his cheat, and both of them get pulled into the new world. There, he finds out the goddess is basically useless. Forming a party with three incredibly powerful and beautiful girls, he quickly realizes they’re all dysfunctional to the point that his party is fundamentally broken. Whether it’s a powerful chuni witch who sinks all of her points into mastering the explosion spell, the conceited leach that only knows healing spells and party tricks, or the masochistic knight that sunk all of her skillpoints into defense and none into attack… the protagonist has to use his wits and commoner level abilities to keep control of this destructive party. The web novel was tough to read, if only for the reason that all 4 of them are awful people who are pretty frequently awful to each other… but it’s also a pretty fun ride too. The story is not finished, but I’m caught up to where the translation leave off. That’d be a yes on harem. P.S. The posted link is only a fan fiction of Konosuba. 😉 😉 ;).

Boku wa Isekai de Fuyo Mahou to Shoukan Mahou wo Tenbin ni Kakeru:

While trying to murder the bully who made the protagonist’s life a living hell, his entire school and everyone in it is suddenly transported to another world. A moment later he catches and kills someone who gets caught in his trap, only to find out it’s an orc and he’s now gone up to level 1 and can acquire special skills to help him fight more orcs. Shortly after, he saves a middle school girl from being raped by another orc, and the pair start leveling together. They find out that the entire school was mysteriously teleported into an RPG fantasy world, and is now under the attack of orcs and other monsters, which have ravaged, tortured, raped, and murdered the majority of the school populus (this is apparently a boarding school spread out over an entire mountain). The remaining survivors who managed to make it to level 1 and beyond form factions, where the protagonist heads the middle school faction and protects all the surviving girls he can find. (All girls because the orcs rape the girls to death, rather than just killing them, so they run into more female survivors than males) The entire story honestly plays like an RPG fantasy version of a zombie outbreak scenario, which is really awesome. They gather supplies, find survivors, create weapons, clear buildings one at a time… plus leveling and such. The protagonist is a bit whiny and despicable, 3 volumes only takes place over the course of 3 days, which makes the extreme character development that occur really hard to swallow. The story also declares he’s the most important person there many times, claiming all the girls are disposable and there just to protect him, as he’s set up as the pillar of their group… immediately before being sent on incredibly dangerous missions. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the mind boggling choices they make when leveling characters, or the ridiculous amounts of rape, or… or… who am I kidding, this is a guilty pleasure. If you liked High School of the Dead, you’d probably like this. Definitely harem… just shut off your brain when you read this one.

Modern Weapons Cheat in Another World:

If I had to describe this webnovel in a word, I’d call it “abrupt”. The protagonist dies from “sickness”, and gets three “special skills”. For reasons that are never given, he chooses the ability to create military units and weapons, command military units and weapons, and provide all the necessary ammunition and supplies to maintain that army. And just like that, he becomes a god, capable of literally creating life, generating any weapon, and also food, buildings, and anything else his army needs. He’s given the limitation of only being able to use war stuff from 1945 and earlier, sticking him to WWII level equipment… but that weakness is gone by the end of the depressingly small first volume (only six chapters long!). In fact, his limitations last so shortly that you’re left wondering why they even bothered with the limitation in the first place. As his levels increase, so does his army, until he has an army of over 10,000 men and women. Who are these people made literally from thin air? It’s never explored, but the majority are women and the commander is obsessively in love with him to the point of being a Yandere. As he meets new women, most of them are just as obsessed with him, from a cursed princess, to a duke he accidentally violated, to a religious zealot. While the story tries to make them all Yandere, it’s hard to say they really fit the Yandere mold, coming off more like just really possessive and a tad rapey, rather than insane and murderous. Oh, you caught rapey? Yeah, some of those girls rape him when they get the chance. The story can be a bit fun, but the pacing is frantic, the story is kind of all over the place, and there is very little room for things to develop. The author goes to the extent of retconning events into the story just to introduce characters by claiming he totally met them earlier in that scene the author didn’t feel like writing. And dare I say, the protagonist is, for once in a story, actually TOO overpowered. He has nothing like mana. He can build an entire base and summon a fleet of 100,000 soldiers in a single day. Every time he struggles, it seems almost self inflicted just to cause drama. This story feels very basic. The author wanted to present you with something, and he doesn’t waste a single second before slapping you in the face with it. As a result, it feels less like a story and more like a wish fulfillment fantasy that forgot the story.

Tales of Demon’s and Gods:

Killed by the Sage Emperor, a man goes back in time to when he was 13, giving himself the chance to save his home that was destroyed and the stop the death of the woman he loved. It’s basically a Xianxia version of Tsuyokute New Saga. It’s not bad. I lost interest a hundred chapters in, but I might go back to it on a boring night. It’s like a less serious version of Against the Gods. He’s less savage and more teasing. Quite a few scenes that made me laugh. Yes, there is a harem.

No Fatigue:

After stopping a crazy slasher from attacking a high school girl, he is confused for the slasher and shot to death by police. A beautiful goddess reveals that the “evil god” reincarnated the slasher, and that he can be reincarnated as well under the condition that he stops the slasher in this new world as well. He is resurrected in the body of a baby, and unlike the other “another world” titles on this list, the story doesn’t jump for 10 years just to get him to the age where the story gets good. Yeah, that’s right, up to the point the story has been translated, he’s still a 10 month old baby, although a loophole with leveling gave him the body of a 3 year old… so better? His cheat-like ability is “No Fatigue”. This doesn’t just mean he never sleeps, but also that he never gets mentally tired either. Like the web novel “I Became a Living Cheat“, his capacity to repeat inane tasks a thousand times in order to gain a level don’t bother him. Although with that guy it was a character quirk, this guy it’s a cheat skill. I really liked this story. So far there isn’t much of a harem (he is three, after all), but it has elements that remind me of Mushoku Tensei (it focuses on his time with his parents, for starters), but it’s got a great story, great pacing, and great understanding on what having a cheat-skill ability actually means (as opposed to uncreative stories that just give the guy generic massive stats). Definitely give this one a try!

Yobidasa Reta Satsuriku-sha:

A 17 yo average boy with some martial arts skills is summoned to another world. Some gods stop by and offer him some blessings before he goes, even though they can’t stop his summoning. Suddenly, he murders one of the gods and reveals that he welcomes the opportunity to be thrown into a world where he can kill unreservedly. In the new world, he kills the King who summoned him and takes 1/3 of the treasury as recompense before taking off on his own adventure. He also buys 2 female slaves right away. Despite having formed a bunch of enemies right away, he only kills those that attack him. Even though the story makes him sound sort of serial killerish, in reality, he’s only a little worse than Hajime from Arifureta, only killing brutally when threatened himself. The story didn’t really keep my interest, but give it a shot if you want to try something with an anti-hero.

My House Is a Magic Power Spot ~Just by Living There I Become the Strongest in the World:

As the title states, rather than just a person, his entire house gets teleported to a fantasy world. Even though our world doesn’t manifest magic, it didn’t stop the house from accumulating enough magic for it to be coveted and thus summoned to another world. However, the guy living in the house has also lived in the house his entire life and has thus also accumulated leagues of power. The house forms a cute female spirit form that serves the guy (the master of the house). He mostly just becomes a NEET, fending off anyone who invades the property by using the massive reserves of magic that even make Dragon Kings look like nothing. Meanwhile, he steadily grows a reputation as a god-like sage and gets visited by princesses, wolfman worshipers, and dragons alike.It was somewhat unique… but I’ve found I rarely like stories with a “lazy” protagonists and this story doesn’t really do much to make it it exciting.

Riot Grasper:

Like To Deprive the Depriver, a boy who dies (this time by being hit by a car) ends up in a fantasy world with the ability to analyze people/items and the ability to steal skills. He mostly uses the skill on monsters, but occasionally targets less favorable people. It’s not a depressing everyone is scum story like deprive, and the main character is given a few limits. For example, he can only equip 10 skills in all, although stealing the same skill will allow him to gain experience in that skill. He can also give skills back to the people he got them from. While there are hints of harem, it’s majorly downplayed, and 20 some chapters in he only has one girl with basically no romantic interest. The story hasn’t done much, and the skill acquisition is way more restrained than you see in stories like Arifureta and Deprive. While nothing from the story is a red flag, it also doesn’t do much entirely new or interesting. The fight scenes are decent, but the characterization just doesn’t feel properly built. The characters introduce so far are flat and uncompelling, and the story really isn’t going anywhere, so the only thing the story has going for it is skill acquisition. If you felt Deprive the Depriver was too emo, this one would be a good substitute.

Maken no daydreamer:

After dying in a plane crash, a guy is reborn to a fantasy world. He grows up under the exclusive care of his adoptive mother, who turns out to be a succubus. As a baby, he was discarded by his parents, so to save his life, the succubus took him inside her and allowed him to grow anew. Yeah, it’s kind of weird. It gets even weirder when she sleeps with him at the ripe age of ten. Stuck in a forest surrounded by dangerous monsters, and absorbing the powers of a succubus, he grows up with only the care of his mother, who happens to be a world-class adventurer that teaches him all the tricks to the trade. He takes that a step further with his knowledge and understanding of his previous life to create even more powerful spells. After he turns sixteen, she takes off, leaving him a great armor, a ton of money, and a note telling him to go see the world. She also mentions the 20-some other siblings he has somewhere out there that he may meet along the way. You think from that beginning, it’d be a pretty sex-fueled story. With a guy raised by a succubus, he should be quite knowledgeable about the other sex… but alas, the story throws a very generic Japanese DT at you. Having spent 16 years literally growing up in the wild, he only comes to learn about the world now, after having grown fairly OP’d. The succubus is known as a “Daydreamer”, named after her tendency to see the world like a story with her filling a roll… or in his case, like a video game. He has a detachment from reality, what with being an OP guy from another world literally growing up in a fantasy. It tries to make some commentary on the difference between real life and filling in a part as though you’re the actor in a play, but I’m not so impressed with what it’s offered so far. The main protagonist is the a-typical good guy virgin (he’s not, but he certainly acts like one) who helps the girl, the girl is the typical tough girl “maiden in distress” with trust issues, and the story didn’t do anything unique to give it any flare. I’ve only given it one volume so far. It’s worth a read if you’re bored, but that’s the best I can say for it.

Re:Zero Kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu:

A guy suddenly finds himself in another world. There, he finds out he doesn’t have any abilities and only the shirt on his back and the stuff in his grocery bag. He meets a beautiful girl who saves him from some thieves, and then the pair go search for her lost property…. only to wind up killed by an unseen force. Then the guy’s eyes open once again, right where he started. Thus begin a continuous cycle of death and rebirth. He has to figure out how he died and why and then prevent it. Each death results in him resetting to a set point. After he passes a scenario, the story continues and he ends up with a new “save point”. If there is any criticism to this story, it’s that he dies a lot. He never seems to go for more than a week or two without finding a new excuse to die. However, that aside, it’s a really cool. It has no superpowers and no op. It’s just a guy redoing the same thing over and over again until he gets it right through perseverance. He also suffers the PTSD of dying a lot too, so it’s probably one of the more realistic versions of the death and rebirth stories.

Skeleton Knight, in Another World:

A guy wakes up in a fantasy world with only the high-grade equipment his avatar was wearing on his back, and the unfortunate skeleton skin which transferred over into the game, making him a monster who can’t take off his armor. He’s maxed level character with maxed level equipment and various spells and sword abilities. He comes to save a princess from being raped, then goes on as a wandering knight just trying to get by. Despite his extremely high level, he doesn’t try to do anything too impressive, instead opting to take on low-level quests, help elves, and other things to keep a low profile and avoid having to show his skeletal features. There is no skill acquisition, since he is already op, and there is no harem in the 20-some chapters I’ve read. The story has some overarching story about an attempt to overtake the throne, but it hasn’t gone anywhere, instead focusing on a few smaller mini stories with little payoff.

The Slime Dungeon:

A person is reborn in the body of a dungeon core. Unlike most of these, he actually does not retain the memory of his previous life. Instead, he only has a vague idea of his previous life. Like “I was reincarnated as a magic academy!”, he’s not like other dungeon cores in the fact that he has vague echoes of his last life, but the author is oddly vague about what he remembers. He remembers enough to have a sense of morality and respect for human life, but not enough that he knows what boobs are or why it’s improper to see a woman naked. That kind of stuff. Anyway, he picks slimes as his starting creature, which I guess is weird for this world, and he follows the advice of a dungeon pixie who helps him set up and manage his dungeon. The dungeon pixie actually makes no darn sense in the context of this world, since in her own words most dungeon’s function on instinct and only gain sentience after a really long time… so what is the point of a pixie explaining everything to them?… it works in this case, but it makes no sense when you think about. Sorry… I digress. I actually liked this one. I love dungeon building and progression and the story wasn’t too bad for the first book/volume. I struggled to read the second volume, which takes the focus away from every character we care about and introduces a ton of politics and some random group of adventurers that are neither enduring nor worth my time. The first book is okay. I can’t believe he actually turned it into a book with 4.5 stars on amazon for sale with the brief story he’s telling, but hey, good for him. For free at least, I’d say it’s worth reading, although I think “I was reincarnated as a Magic Academy!” was better, but also lost my interest for the same reason. As did Evil God Average. Huh… I’m seeing a pattern with these dungeon building web novels, every single one of them starts out good but radically changes the tone in the second volume. Makes me want to write my own. Maybe after Requiem to the Stars.

The Man Picked up by the Gods:

To keep a world that uses mana working, gods tap into Earth’s mana. Earth doesn’t use it’s magic and contains no magic creatures, so they create a conduit which allows them to send earth’s magic to the other world. Let’s not talk about the sustainability of this other world that has to constantly steal resources to survive, and let’s talk about the conduit, who takes the form of a reincarnated person. He’s a man who lived a pitiable life of brutality and mental torture that would break another man. With incredibly crappy luck likely caused by the deliberate curse of a god, he only survived as long as he did by pure determination. After dying from hitting his head in his sleep, his calm attitude, high resistance, and ridiculous sets of skills caused the gods to take more than a little favor in him, all three giving him their blessing. This story is interesting because the gods aren’t a one shot pony, but a continuous presence, always watching and praising his success. He resurrects in a forest as a young kid and continues to live for 3 years on his own. There, he increases his skills and experiments with slimes. Like slime dungeon, he uses slave magic (monster tamer) and controls generally unpopular slimes, experimenting with creating new types and evolutions. Eventually, he makes his debut and tries to reenter the society that he tried to avoid. He’s incredibly anti-social and has anxiety around humans, which makes him a more interesting character from the classic Japanese MC. Of course, being in the body of a pitiable 11-year old who grew up the last three years in the forest goes well to smooth over his poor character traits. Check it out if it sounds interesting to you.

Lazy Dungeon Master:

This story starts with a really stupid dungeon who has spent her life one room large while continuously summoning goblins. Her cave is taken over by thieves, and hoping to remove them, she uses a slot-machine-like summoning hoping to get a monster large enough to remove her menace. What she ends up with instead is a human summoned from Earth. Unlike other humans though, he is exceptionally lazy, and rather than do her bidding, he does the bare minimum necessary to live a comfortable life, which involves sleeping most of the time. After naming her shortly after being summoned, he becomes designated as her master. With that kind of story, a stupid and flawed dungeon being run by a smart yet lazy master, you’re probably thinking something funny like Kono-suba. It never really reaches the level of being more than mildly amusing, unfortunately, and even that get’s destroyed with the first few chapters after he introduces a little girl that the MC lets a bandit rape for a week straight. Yeah… I basically lost all interest and respect for this one after that. The MC is so lazy he won’t lift a finger to save a little girl from being raped. Seriously, screw him… and screw this web novel. I read a little farther just to see if things got better. He takes over the little girl slave, and no, he doesn’t rape her, but he does use her as an object, make her do manual labor for him, and the author uses her for sexual exploitation. If you can get over that tough hurdle, the story actually opens up and becomes a little amusing later on. The main character is inconsistent. Supposedly, he is lazy. That’s literally his character… but more often than not, he’s stingy, not lazy. His main advantage is that he goes out of his way to avoid using dungeon points, often by replacing it with manual labor. It completely defies his main character, a supposedly lazy character, who would rather painfully dig out new rooms rather than insta-make them with dungeon points. Rather than make golems, he learns the golem spell and then makes them himself. These are not the actions of a lazy person. Anyway, I had mixed feelings about this one. It’s sometimes funny, sometimes boring. He’s sometimes lazy, sometimes ridiculously hard working. He walks around more like a narcoleptic than a lazy person. I’d say it’s neither bad or good, but before you get to that point you have to deal with a few rather uncomfortable chapters with careless child exploitation.

Destruction Flag Otome: 

A spoiled princess hits her head, only to regain the memories of a previous life as a 17 yo “commoner” from Earth. However, she quickly realizes she recognizes the people and events going on in her life. They all match up perfectly with a reverse-harem game she was playing in her former life. However, instead of being the main character, she’s in the body of the villainess who tried to get in the heroine’s way. Worst, every ending involving the villainess leads to her death or exile. Desperate to change the course of events, she wages war on the destruction flags. This is a very nice, neat web novel that unlike most on this list, is follows a girl’s reverse harem. It’s often described as “sweet” and the entire web novel is so cute and harmless your head could explode. This isn’t a deep nor a complex novel, and the MC aka the villainess is hilarious and as dumb as a brick. As the story goes, in her desperate attempt to change the lives of the main character’s love interests, she tries to intercept and change their starting situations, which inadvertently causes them to fall in love with her instead. In fact, everyone, male or female, fall in love with her. Most of the novel so far takes place “before” the game starts while she’s growing up, finally culminating with the arrival of the heroine in the final 1/4 of the novel. I highly recommend this if you want something light, fun, and sweet. If dense MC’s annoy you, you may want to avoid this, but her denseness is mostly played for laughs, rather than an attempt to bypass bad writing. Check it out!

Doll Dungeon:

Another dungeon building web novel involving a protagonist who doesn’t quite remember anything about his previously life. He was sent to another world with his memory wiped because of his cool demeanor that can wave off stressful situations. There, he’s set as the new dungeon master with allegedly a month to build his new dungeon before it opens. In this world, you collect dungeon points (dp) by either killing or repelling humans, making a system where humans come and leave ideal for the dungeon’s success. He proceeds to start building his dungeon, but the novel is pretty vague about what he builds nor what it looks like, so if you like dungeon building novels because of the dungeon building, don’t expect to get too much from this one. He summons dolls, golems, and any hominid like beings, making “doll” pretty vague for this novel. He gives the dolls the ability to learn, which I guess is an ability, and they all become OP’d almost instantly and evolve more human-like appearances. They function as his maids, butlers, and shinobi. He uses the other puppets to quickly build a mansion and do other labors, kind of like Lazy Dungeon. I say quickly, but time in this novel isn’t really well defined, and so you never really know how long in between scenes time has passed. Some high-level humans come in and force him into an agreement, which leads to him building an auction house in his dungeon in order to sell/exchange goods. He… acts just like his dolls, completely devoid of emotion, and almost stand-offish and aggressive with his behavior. It’s never explained why, and it can make his character pretty inaccessible. However, if you’re sick of the generic good guy MC, this might be a nice touch. Overall, I can’t say it’s a good web novel, but it’s an easy read at least, going down smoothly and not giving you anything to hate/love about it.

Cheat Skill: “Sleep Learning” ~Heartwarmingly Living the Other World Life:

This one has been releasing really rapidly since the most recent translator took over. A boy notorious for his love of sleep dies doing what he loves, falling asleep while riding a bicycle. He asks the god to give him an ability that makes him powerful by sleeping, and somehow that’s exactly what he gets. He wakes up in another world only to go back to sleep. There, he’s accosted by horrifying monsters. His ability then takes effect and he learns every ability used on him while taking no damage. Furthermore, his ability also seems to include a counterattack that insta-KOs anything that tries to interrupt his sleep. Thus, after two naps, he wakes up having defeated all the worst things the forest had to offer and power leveling over level 100. I had a tough time getting into this one. Unlike Lazy Dungeon Master, this guy is completely unrelatable. Despite being called “heartwarming”, the MC is anything but. When he isn’t whining and complaining about wanting to eat or sleep, he’s savagely murdering anyone who gets in the way of that eat or sleep. As the novel says, he doesn’t even see people as people, just obstacles to his sleep. Yeah, this isn’t a guy I can get behind. So far the story just has him going around slaughtering monsters while the town he happens to be in faces multiple “armageddon” level attacks from monsters. This isn’t Fimbulwinter or Tales of Demons and Gods… I just don’t get why massive waves of monsters keep coming at him… right… so that he can become OP without lifting a finger. But yeah, hard to love character in a hard to love plot, but give it a try if you really need another OP novel to read. At least the updates are coming out quickly.

Skill Taker’s World Domination ~ Building a Slave Harem from Scratch:

Skill Taker was an interesting experience for me, because upon reading it, I came to a horrifying realization… I had already read it! Yet… remarkably… I didn’t remember a single thing about it, other than the vague realization I had read it before. The story follows an MC who is summoned from Japan to a world that typically summons and enslaves other-worlders and their lottery bag special ability for their own personal gain. His would-be master would be a local Orc warlord. However, before the Orc can decide what to do with him, he kills the orc and all his followers. As it turns out, this MC is a martial arts master that is good at everything. And I mean it, freaking everything. He’s a perfect mary sue protagonist who is basically great at everything he does without reserve… and this is completely without his special gift power. His gift power, of course, is his Skill taking ability which allows him to take the skills of anyone he kills. Most times, the web novel has the guy take the skills before the kill, thus making it easier to kill, but that isn’t a problem with this MC, who had apparently achieved the power of a demon lord on his own back on Earth. Now, he decides to build a Harem of a hundred girls using his op’dness that only grows more OP with each additional skill he steals. The story isn’t awful. He’s certainly more likable than “slave harem in a dungeon”. He’s a very basic Japanese MC: shy, polite, ect… except when he’s with his girls. Then he turns into a sadist pervert, dedicating time to sexual harassing them and developing magic to further sexually assault them. Don’t worry too much, the story makes it abundantly clear they want his perverted sexual advances, which typically involve him manipulating the girls with magic, rather than any actual sex. The chapters in this book are short… like the shortest I’ve ever read. I wish I only had chapters this long translating arifureta. As a result, the story goes by pretty quick, and 130 some chapters that are out really isn’t that much. The stories not that bad, but as I just pointed out, I didn’t remember a single thing about this story only a few months after reading it. Literally every scene I’d get to, read, and then go, “oh yeah, I remember that happening now” as I read it. Take that however you want as to how good this web novel is, but at the very least this story was not offensive like a certain slave harem story.

Netooku Otoko no Tanoshii Isekai Bouek:

NetAuc Otoko no Tanoshii Isekai Boueki
Net Auction Otoko no Tanoshii Isekai Boueki
The Amusing Other World Trading Travelogue of Net Auction Guy

I thought I’d be hard pressed to find an MC as unlikable as the guy from “slave girls in the labyrinth”, yet here we are. A Neet who dabbles in selling antiques (two completely unrelatable things) ends up buying a mirror which he finds out allows him to leave his world and travel into another world. Using the power of commerce and online auctioning, he sells stuff between the two worlds and becomes a rich merchant… maybe… eventually… probably? I mean, it hasn’t happened in the first 40 some chapters that have been translated, but you can rest assure that at some point he’ll start bringing in money. It’s a very slow progressing story, which concentrates on a harem of girls that are in love with him for… well… don’t know why. I’ve read a lot of novels with harems that give vague and silly excuses for the women to be in love with the guy, and this novel tops them all by giving the girls absolutely no reason at all. None. Like… he makes this bet with this merchant, and he wins the bet, and ends up winning an elf princess slave, and an hour later he buys another slave because he finds out she’s functionally useless, and she immediately starts showing signs of jealousy when he showers his new slave (the one he actually wanted from the get go) with praise. Suddenly, every girl is fighting for the MCs attention for because that’s how the story was written. He didn’t do ANYTHING to prove his worth, cleverness, or heck, even perverseness. Now I mention he’s an awful protagonist, but that has less to do with anything he does (he’s basically a coward when it comes to everything, physical activity, talking, sexual contact, everything), and more about how he thinks… which is basically kind of rapey. He’s actually upset when he finds out he can’t rape his first slave. Plus, he spends the first 30-some chapters bumming everything off of everyone, even though he’s supposedly making very respectable profits from his sales in both worlds. If you were hoping for a clever mercantile story like spice and wolf or even something like shield hero without the angst, where he earns tons of money by establishing clever trades and providing unique technologies that are cleverly used… you’ll be dissapointed. If you want a very slow story involving a guy everyone loves despite the fact he mooches off of everyone, then this might be for you.

My Death Flags Show No Sign of Ending:

This one is just like Destruction Flag Otome but with a male. A guy suddenly finds himself inhabiting the body of his favorite games hated side antagonist without warning. No hitting his head or falling asleep here… just one second he’s a Japanese boy, the next second he’s a noble in a fantasy world. Like Destruction Flag Otome, he inhabits the boy during one of his first “flags” which will inevitably lead to his death years later, but currently is about 10, many years before the game starts. Two amusing differences are that it’s an jRPG game, not a dating sim, so the story brings in fighting systems, crafting, game lore, and sidequest knowledge which the protagonist uses to his advantage. And second, instead of having an evil looking face like Otome, every word that comes out of his mouth is modified with the arrogance and poor attitude of the body he inhabits. Thus, every conversation contains a dissonance between the rude things he says, and the actions he’s actually taking. “Hey how are you?” becomes “Oi… what do you want bastard?” and stuff like that. The story does not progress nearly as fast as Otome, and 40 chapters in he’s still only ~13-14 years old. There is a slight hint of harem, but it’s heavily downplayed, and even the girl that likes him comes off extremely awkward. I guess the author has trouble writing a girl being infatuated with a guy who only says abusive things to her. While a lot of people do see through his facade and come to like him, you never get much of a harem feel, and the payoff you may be wishing for is a long time coming. It still has some great moments that left me laughing… but the pacing is a bit too slow for my tastes and attached with some really generic foreshadowing (at least three times now we’ve been told that if he knew what he knows later then he would have changed that event). I liked it… but either a little bit faster pacing or a little more payoff would go a long way in this story.

Dominion’s End:

I really wanted to love Dominion’s End. Two chapters in this story had me more excited than any story I’ve read in recent memory. What’s Dominion’s End? It’s a mishmash of a dozen different things… the closest similarity I can bring up being Seraph of the End. Ten years after the start of the apocalypse, a 35 yo woman dies, only to resurrect in an alternate modern day world where the apocalypse hasn’t happened yet while in the body of a 17 yo boy. With only 3 days before “Judgement”, he desperately tries to prepare for the end. He’s accompanied by his brother, a natural born leader, and his little sister, the perfect housewife. Although his brother is away when the apocalypse starts, leaving him to protect his family despite his weakened state. The apocalypse takes form first by releasing a fog that makes people experience a pain worst than death. Those who aren’t strong enough to survive turn into Abhorrents, zombies that eventually evolve to take on RPG fantasy-esque forms. And just to keep things interesting, the humans themselves develop special abilities, most of which take the form of an element-based magic power. And just to keep the RPG vibe going, the zombies increase their levels by eating people… and the people increase their power by eating crystal power shards located inside the zombie’s hearts. Don’t get me wrong, I like the story, and even though it mishmashes so many different elements, that isn’t really the problem I have with it. My biggest criticism for Dominion’s End is how LAZY the writing is. Not lazy in the grammatical sense… but lazy in plot structure. It’s the dozens of contradictions this story has that shows the writer seemed to be writing one chapter at a time without any real plan. Warning some spoilers, but nothing past the first 5-6 chapters. For example, if noone knew that they had powers immediately and it took a while to figure it out, how did she know the exact date people started manifesting powers? A major theme of this story is family, and some of the trouble in this story is caused by the MC being betrayed previously, and thus being more willing to be self-serving. Except… that when he chooses his betrayal, it is literarily one chapter after he announces that he put this new family first, making his selfish decision make no damn sense one chapter later. He then proceeds to steal crystals to give himself an edge… only to then proceed to start farming crystals himself and giving them to his family, making you wonder why he stole the first ones at all. Earlier, he makes a big deal that they needed antibiotics… and while they certainly saved his life because of plot, a month and a half later he states that the “evolution” changed bodies to the point that antibiotics were basically useless because your body could take care of the infections… making all the previous statements about seeing people die from just a cut on their hand confusing. He says it took him years in his previous life before he could get his powers working, but he also said that his powers were only good at making him a sharpshooter, only to then say guns were useless after 3 years because the abherrents had become too powerful for them. So when was he a sharpshooter? I could go on, but I’ll stop there. I’ve just never read a book with so many inconsistencies. The first two chapters were the best… and each subsequent chapter seems to just insert another element until the story starts to become a convoluted mess. However, even as a convoluted mess… it’s still a decent story, just one with a lot of missed potential. I’ll throw a shout out to a friend, though… if you like this story, I’ve got another story with a zombie apocalypse plus special abilities I’ve read once before. The Chosen is actually a pretty good read. If an end of the world zombie plus sorta RPG mechanics (although no stats, levels or anything), sort of excites you, I’d still recommend Dominion’s end, even with its faults. Like I said, it’s a story I really wanted to love… and only ended up liking.

Doom Lord:

Doom Lord is another fantasy driven apocalypse world. In this one, the MC dies one year after the end of the world and reincarnates back in his own body the year before just preceding the end of the world. In only a few minutes, all the buildings of the world are leveled, and magical fantasy beasts begin to spawn, along with a voice telling humans they have to “evolve” to survive. Evolve apparently means reaching the city center, where they will gain access to the capacity to choose their game-like career, and use numerous RPGesque buildings to purchase supplies and survive. Using his in-game knowledge, the MC secures a known fort location (unlike cities, forts have to be built from scratch and need to be protected, where monsters cannot enter city centers) and brings his close and trusted roommates with him. Immediately, he acquires lordship over the fort, builds a wall, and starts the arduous process of leveling up. Being a Chinese novel, this naturally has to use “cultivation” instead of leveling. While the experience from monsters can be used to buy items and increase cultivation speed. It also has that ultra-sexist attitude that most Chinese novels have, a general distaste for women that even Japanese exploitation harem anime can’t match. He rescues people to create his own city, building and upgrading walls, conscripting his army with ranks, it’s kind of like Age of Empires mixed with an RPG end of the world. However, the story never focuses on the linguistics of managing the city, and the MC just runs around stealing all of the best resources with his foresight knowledge. This game, if it was an MMO, would be stupidest MMO ever, specifically designed to help the rich grow richer, ie… anyone who finished something first gets special long lasting benefits… not just slightly better equipment, but instrumental and long lasting advantages, OP skills, and everything to ensure that the game is completely unbalanced. The story itself is a bit boring, reading more like a laundry list: I did this, then this, then that… without sparing a word to just jumping ahead to the next interesting thing. I hear a lot of Chinese novels are written by the word, forcing the authors to reuse words and repeat things a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if I found out this was one of those novels. Do NOT expect any characterization in this story. The MC is the only one that matters, and at no point will any of his roommates have any personality, even cliched personalities, they’re complete flat. The only side character that was offered ANY characterization was Lee… and then the author ended his character arc with an “oh, and they found his family too”… that was it. But I digress… it’s actually a pretty fun story, and if you like character building and base building, this will be fun and easy read with fairly rapid updates, just don’t expect to find anything more out of it.

Hardcore OPness:

A guy in the shower suddenly finds himself in a fantasy RPG world… where he is immediately killed and eaten by a bunny, only to respawn, and be murdered by another bunny. His dream had always been to be in an RPG like world as the only “player” with no rape or slavery and basically immortal. Thus, he got what he wanted. As he tries to figure out the game rules, stuck in the middle of wilderness butt naked, he dies dozens of times. I really liked the novel initially, he’s not your typical web novel MC. He’s neither tortured no heroic. If you had to describe his nature at all, it would be “gamerlike”… full of constant cursing, practical experimentation, and a tendency to whine about everything. Of course, having to feel himself get eaten alive a few times can’t help, but rather than be tortured by it like Re: Zero… he kind of just shrugs death off. It’s a unique story, with some rather unique abilities and a leveling system involving evolution ranks and power levels mixed with magic cores. His own abilities allow him to leave his body in either third person mode or as a spirit after death. Even his body remains, so he has an inventory full of his own corpses he uses to hilarious effects. Besides being a character who does not care and will do anything, the world earns the name Hardcore, functioning more like Dark Souls than Skyrim. Even the NPCs are just brutalized by the horrific world he’s in, often dying shortly after he meets them. My problem with the novel comes when he starts interacting with more people. He’s honestly a complete arsehole, and there really is no redeemable personality. His aloofness that’s initially funny when he’s being a cocky arse to people that would do him harm quickly wears thin when he uses the same words on his companions. Plus one of his harem is a goblin, which he then mixes with a bloodworm… and while he says he still thinks she’s hot, I can’t imagine a bloodworm goblin hybrid complete with a worm tail and worm hair being anything but kind of gross. Maybe snake… I can get behind the medusa thing… but bloodworm? Ick. Almost as bad as Deprived’s bug tamer.  In the end, the character is just such an arse that he can’t be relatable to me, I had to put it away after 30 some chapters, but maybe you’ll find more out of it than that.

The Dungeon Seeker:

If you liked Arifureta, but felt Hajime became too “nice” after he left the dungeon, and instead wanted more ruthless and violent revenge, I guess this is the story for you. A fat, bullied MC gets transported to another world with his bully, his bullies three friends, and his childhood friend heroine. Both he and the heroine were summoned without any decent stats. A strange, interdimensional dungeon where every level has a boss/challenge at an SS level (the strongest in the world such as the Demon King are only S, so really tough dungeon with a survival rate of 0%) which requires a regular sacrifice for some reason, and so they decide to sacrifice either him or her… for some reason. And, for some reason, they trick the MC into sacrificing himself completely unnecessarily, and for some reason, the girl reveals *gasp*, she was the bully’s gf the whole time and the pair openly mock him for heroically sacrificing himself for her… for some reason. Yeah… people claiming this is a “better” Arifureta… um… okay, whatever. Mind you, only a week or two after he left another group of four S classes enter the dungeon willingly… so why did he need to be sacrificed? The bully also openly mocks his lack of stats… when his ability is actually really powerful (he had 10 skill slots to consume a skill from anyone who died, which you know, to anyone who isn’t written in this story is OP as crap, but sure, sacrifice him). And he manages to survive… through a combination of serendipitous luck and contrived plot, such as finding the skill necessary for the next level just in the previous level. This story did nothing for me. If you like revenge after betrayal ( I actually don’t), and hated that Arifureta didn’t give you enough of that, this is an alternative, I guess. The entire thing fell flat for me… no real characterization, noone you give a crap about because everyone but the MC is an irredeemable monster. It only starts to pick up when he leaves the dungeon… which happens at the beginning of Volume 3. The translation is up to… the beginning of Volume 3. I ended up skipping volume 2 and don’t feel like I’ve missed a single thing, take that however you want.

Nidome no Yuusha:

The hero is summoned, defeats the demon lord, and then is betrayed by everyone he trusted. Upon dying, he swears his vengeance, only to wake up 4 years earlier fresh after being summoned by the princess. It turns out that Earth’s god gave every human summoned to another world a free life… a “tutorial mode” where they could figure things out before dying, gaining all the experiences that had previously achieved in a sort of New Game +. Since the hero had been successful all the way up to his betrayal, he takes a ridiculous amount of former knowledge with him, along with a deep rooted hatred for the world and people that turned their backs on him. Thus begins his revenge story, a long stretched out torture scene where he reencounters all his former friends and makes them regret ever having known him. It’s well written and interesting, but I must admit this isn’t my cup of tea. I can get behind violent and vicious men, but to me, vengeance is hollow, and so are stories built up around it. I think another reviewer put it best, it’s just a power trip torture slasher.

Magi’s Grandson:

Take Maken no Daydreamer and mix it up a bit with Mushoku Tensei and you’d get something close to Magi’s Grandson. This fits in the reincarnated category. A Japanese guy is reincarnated as a baby and picked up by a former hero, the Magi, whom years ago defeated a devil that threatened to destroy the nation. The Magi takes on the role of his grandfather and raises him in seclusion in the woods while receiving occasional visits from influential people. And the MC receives personal lessons taught by the greatest magician, and his friend, one of the greatest swordsmen, and that mixed with his nontraditional ways of seeing magic as an otherworlder leaves him OP as heck. Fifteen years passes by in a few chapters, and on the day he’s ready to start his life as an adult, his Magi Grandpa realizes he made a mistake! He spent 15 years pushing to see how powerful his grandson could get, he forgot to teach him things like how money works, how to function in society or simple common sense. Thus they move to the big city, and he joins the magic academy while living in a mansion awarded to his grandpa and grandma (another magician and the Magi’s former wife). They’re basically celebrities, and he’s the celebrities son, having grown up calling the King of the country Uncle and the heros of the nation his grandparents. It’s actually really well written, it has endlessly witty and fun characters with personalities that stand out in a way you don’t get from most web novels. He’s a bit of a grandpa’s boy, or a fairly cliched modest Japanese MC, and the story itself isn’t all that exciting or riveting… but this story can propel you forward quite a while with just its good writing. I recommend giving it a read and deciding if it’s worth it. So far, it’s pretty straight forward, and it doesn’t throw any twists at you like Mushoku Tensei’s metastasis event, so it may not appeal to someone looking for more action,  but it never felt boring as I read it, so give it a try.

Genjitsushugisha no Oukokukaizouki:

I had some issues acquiring volume 1 which makes me hesitant to add this to the list. I was eventually able to get the whole volume, but it involved some pretty heavy searching in some pretty questionable websites. A hero is summoned to another world, only to find he was summoned to it by the weakest nation, who was bullied into it by the stronger nations looking to exploit them. To prevent himself from being turned into a commodity to be thrown at the demon king, who arose out of nowhere and conquered a third of the world with his demon/monster armies, the mc began to use his socioeconomics degree and desire to get into politics to recommend massive reforms in the kingdom. The king, realizing his advanced knowledge would make him a better king, hands over the throne as well as his daughter, a knightly princess. Thus starts a story where the hero is the leader, trying to gain power, stabilize the government, and eventually win the war with strategy and compromise, rather than by a single guy with a sword. The story is not bad, but it’s not exactly exciting. It’s more something like spice and wolf or Demon King and Hero, a story about making deals and discussing trades, where the story focuses on the how more than the what. It actually feels a bit scattered to me, with some uneven pacing and awkward jumps. If I had any critique to give the story, I’d say it needs a little bit better characterization. The characters have more depth than some web novels, true, but they fail to really pop into the realm of likable and interesting, which you really need in a novel that’s all about the characters, as this one is.

Awakening:

This one is very much stretching “another world” novels, as it’s more reincarnation than anything. A martial arts expert from the song dynasty has reached a point of immortality, where after his death he ends up reincarnating in the body of someone recently deceased. Having reincarnated countless times in men and women of all ages, this particular reincarnation puts him into the body of a bullied 17 yo Japanese boy with a family just struggling to get by. Respecting the families love for their recently deceased son, he decides immediately to protect his little sister and their mother any way possible. From this, it sounds like a fish out of water story, but his former life left him as the head of a famous gang/family who respects him as their founder, so he uses them a bit to his advantage, including acquiring the accumulated riches from that life. Mostly, he just gets vengeance on his bullies, saves his teacher from being raped and seduces her, scouts/threatens the man who is interested in his mom, and a whole list of other things to help his family out, clear old debts, and just generally be a bad ass. The cool thing often is the disconnect between his 17 year old appearance and his clearly manly and wise behavior. Whether he’s helping a girl win kendo or getting revenge on some bad people, he always does it like a boss. I read a volume, but by the time I quit the story I didn’t really feel like it was going anywhere. It’s got hundreds of chapters out, so maybe it goes somewhere eventually, just not in the first 20-30 chapters I read. Still a good fun read, but it could have used some more directed plot or long term goals.

God and Devil World:

Another one that isn’t quite another world, but I’m including it because RPG elements and “technically” God rearranges the world into something new. Don’t let the name confuse you, God and Devil World is about a modern day zombie apocalypse. If you like the RPG apocalypse genre, this would probably be the best and most recommended story out there. God suddenly declares that he is sick of humanity having it easy, and decides he wants to sort the weak from the strong, initiating a zombie apocalypse while adding RPG stats to the world. While being bit or scratched turns you into a zombie within twenty minutes, zombies immediately spring up everywhere out of nowhere and start eating people. Wild animals also become monsters too, so it’s not just zombies. The MC is a guy who has absolutely nothing special about him. He has no advantages others don’t, no unique skills, but just because he lucked out and managed to successfully kill a few zombies, and then successfully kill a few more, he quickly grows OP’d over anyone else with little rhyme or reason. I guess no one else alive figured they might as well fight for their life and did so as successfully as this particular Chinese guy. The main criticisms for this story are the same criticisms you can level at almost every Chinese Web Novel. As a story wrote pay per word, there are many many chapters, which endlessly repeat, both by explaining things that have already been explained dozens of times, and by repeating the plot in a continuous cycle of ever-growing proportions. Add to that the extreme contempt for women ( I can’t even call it sexism, it’s literally just thinking men are superior), and some pretty dumb contrivances to always leave the MC and his ilk the strongest, and you got a pretty buggy story… that is still really good and fun to read. If you can overlook stupid things like the badarse girl with combat training being quickly outpaced and dependent on some random college student MC, or how the MC expects any guy to fight for his life on his own while picking up and saving dozens of helpless maidens, or the fact that zombies inexplicably jump from lvl 1 to super mutant lvl 10s (then 20s, then 30s) with none in between, and of course random skills/equipment popping up literally paragraphs after they say they desperately need it, then you can find some enjoyment here.  It pulls you right in and takes you on a ride. If you want to lose a weekend, start reading and I bet you’ll find yourself 100 chapters in before you even realize it. I will add that although the story is 400+ chapters as of now, it may start to grate on your nerves before then. There are only so many rapist, cannibal antagonists and stuffy, conceded government officials before the whole thing gets redundant, and his near rape behavior and obsession with loli girls (and yes, this book makes it generally creepy, it definitely borders on pedophilia) quickly becomes too much. By 200 chapters in, you’ll probably wish at least once that you could punch the protagonist in the face, so much of an insufferable douche is he. I think the straw that broke the camel’s back for me is when he chooses to protect a woman with no discernible skills yet her virginity intact over a woman who could cook, clean, and help carry stuff just because she had sex before. The virgin was a former friend who turns on her, and basically throws her to the wolves showing how disgusting and unloyal she is, but because she’s a virgin the MC dotes on her while basically telling the other girl to go die. That’s the kind of stupid crap this novel endorses.

The Blessing of 118 Gods:

This is another Romanian novel that follows the MC sent to another world. In this case, the MC is transferred over because he has “hero potential”. But the summoner, unable to see his potential, rejects and sends him back to Earth. Because of his good heart and heroic qualities, this increases his hero potential, causing him to be summoned again to another world… and again… and again… Each time he is rejected and/or killed, sent back to Earth where he wakes up in a hospital after experiencing an “accident”. However, the gods of each of the 118 worlds he was summoned to also get sucked into it, receiving random updates every time he gets rejected again. Pushed to the breaking point, they end the cycle by quite literally dropping a meteor on his head. Earth’s god is pissed, and in order to reconcile their harsh decision, the gods agree to give the MC the life of his dreams. With his hero potential, he could literally be anything he wants, and thus he picks all of his stats and one of the worlds to be born in… a generic fantasy world with slavery, only slightly Op’d stats, and only slightly Op’d status. As he puts it, he just wants a life of fun with a supportive family and a little sibling to dote on or be doted on. Point being, he engineers himself to be able to become OP’d… but only through his own hard work. He is born with a twin sister under a “fallen” noble family. Since she is his twin, she ends up with most of the OPness he has, an evolved body with higher than normal stats. And they grow up together, being trained by their Adventurer Aunt. His sister likes armor and adventuring, as opposed to the frilly dresses he wanted her to like, and she ended up with 3 blessings, which makes her a national treasure and target for intrigue. So he spends most of his time worrying about her. He’s only got one blessing, written in Romanian so noone knows what it is… called “The Blessing of 118 gods”, which is generic blessing that basically says he’ll succeed in anything he does. The story is slow, 35 chapters in and he’s only just turned 10. 8 chapters dedicated to him just deciding what world he wanted. One annoying aspect of the story is he frequently complains about things like how tough it is to cast magic, which is annoying when he himself made it that tough because he didn’t want to be OP’d and bored. Like make up your mind, man. Good novel, I like it, but at 35 chapters in, nothing much has happened. Maybe start reading when there are 60+ chapters.

I’m a NEET but when I went to Hello Work I got taken to another world:

The title says it all. This is actually another one of those stories I already read, and couldn’t remember a darn thing that happened in it. A world will end in 20 years, and a NEET gets hired by god to test out the leveling/skill system over the course of those years. He has RPG stats where most of the world isn’t aware of them. As he completes journal entries and quests given to him by god, he gets extra skill points. That’s really it. He’s slightly OP’d. He eventually builds a harem he sleeps with… he’s called a NEET, but since literally in the first chapter he gets a job, his identity as a NEET is MOOT. He’s a little whiny and cowardly, about the same level as Mushuko Tensei. And when he’s not being whiny or cowardly, he’s showing the modesty that only a standard Japanese Protagonist can muster, apologizing for using his cheat skills to get everything easily while continually using his cheat skills to get everything easily. He becomes wealthy enough to buy slaves and a mansion, once again through an incredibly unbalanced questing reward system that would crash the world economy if applied to any sense of reality.  It’s not a bad web novel, but it is forgettable. If you need a generic hero who does adventures in an adventurer guild and gradually levels up, becomes rich and famous, and forms a harem, this is another typical wish-fulfillment web novel.

The Demon Lord’s building a city! ~The strongest Dungeon is a modern day city:

This is another dungeon building story, with another protagonist who has no memory of his previous life other than a general sense of humanity and understanding of technology. In this case, he’s reborn as a demon lord, although demon lord in this context is easily interchangeable with dungeon lord. In this world, a Demon Lord lives exactly 300 years. An all-powerful “creator” makes demon lords in batches. The old demon lords spend 1 year training the new demon lords, after which the new ones create their dungeons as the old pass away, leaving their dungeon cores to rot. Like always, they have DP earned by luring adventurers into their dungeon, which can take the shape of anything from a castle, to a cave, to a labyrinth, and then making them struggle to survive by either repelling or killing them. Like Doll Dungeon, the protagonist decides he wants to build a place that encourages people to come, enjoy themselves, and then leave peacefully… with this case being the form of creating his own utopian city. The 1st volume does NOT have him build his city. Instead, it spends a large amount of time introducing the harem cast of loli monsters he creates, and explain the mildly complex magic system for creating high level monsters which includes medallions, exchanges, and a slot machine style system. On the upside, the MC is OP, and his medallion allows him to basically make any monster he wants, which always turn out to be S classed loli girls: foxes, dwarves, and elves (in a world where A is the most you can get without creator intervention). Everyone loves him, including his mentor, and although all his monsters are lolis, he treats them with a fatherly mentality rather than a perverted one. Mix that with the fact that his “element” is creation which allows him to create anything from modern japan (although he doesn’t remember his life, he does remember food, weapons, ect…) and he is pretty powerful. His previous life suggested he was a gun otaku, and this novel actually gushes over gun warfare about as much as Gun-ota, so if you like the modern warfare against fantasies… this totally has it. I actually really liked this novel so far. It’s got way better pacing than a lot of other dungeon novels, and while the story changes from volume 1 to volume 2 as he goes from a demon lord protected by his senpai to a dungeon builder, the story feels very fluid, like it’s going somewhere, which is more than you can say about most dungeon building stories. Probably my favorite dungeon building story to date. Try it out!

Because Janitor-san is not a hero:

This is a story I read some time ago, and it took numerous tries to get past the prologue. I usually don’t call people out… but this has to be the crappiest, laziest translation I’ve ever read. Besides swapping from 1st to third person dozens of times a paragraph, screwing up the MCs name and rather than fixing it, just making a comment at the start that he screwed it up, only to then screw it up more… I’d say even calling it “translated” is hard to claim. I mean, in the damn prologue he wrote he didn’t “feel like” translating the rest of it, so he deliberately leaves a chunk of story untranslated. I understand you get what you pay for, but this level of care is openly making the world a worst place. My only consultation is he doesn’t have a Patreon link on the page. Anyway, a bunch of random people get summoned to a dangerous world. To help them survive, god gives them language skills and crafts a part of their soul into a magic op sword. Apparently, some freshmen high school student grasps the implications of this in mere seconds and instead of, you know… going “OMG WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON?”, he instead immediately decides to take advantage of this system in front of GOD by stealing the Janitor’s sword before immediately vanishing into the portal beyond. Something god, freaking god, can’t stop or do anything about. Meanwhile, all the teachers and students smirk, because the Janitor is the lowest form of society and they’re all apparently sociopaths who can’t even establish some goddamned priorities here. It’s stupid. It’s really stupid. I tried, I tried to read this novel. It’s first 3-4 chapters are translated horribly, and even if it was translated well, it’s such a stupid plot. I finally decided to write this just to check it off my list. I award this story 0 points, and may god have mercy on its soul.

Charging Magic with a Smile~ Infinite Magic Power After Being Reincarnated into a Different World:

A world was brought to the brink of destruction by the demon king, the hero was summoned and defeated him. However, the hero is a warrior, not a leader, and lacked the skills to rehabilitate the world. Thus, the world continued to fall into ruin as people are killed by monsters and subsequently turned into monsters themselves. Two boys on the brink of death are summoned from Earth. One is a savage, sadistic arsehat, and the other is a typical Japanese MC. Guess which one is the hero? No… no twists here, they are given the ability to make things with magic by god. Their magic is charged by an elf-like species called the eternal slave, a slave race that enjoys being dominated and commanded. Although it’s not explicitly stated, it seems like the charging comes from the emotional states of the slaves. The sadist abuses and humiliates his slave, earning points when she cries or is sad. Meanwhile, our protagonist chooses to make his slave happy, finding that her happiness earns him nearly 10-100 X the mana the other guy earns. Thus he dotes on her, attempting to make her happy, whether it be giving her gifts, commanding her, or binding her soul to his more thoroughly (eternal slaves are easy to please). Magic only does the building of items, items still need ingredients which they have to gather. Basically, he creates a magic circle to make an item in his list, the item requires X number of ingredients and creates arrows that point to the location of said ingredients. He gathers them, throws them in the circle, and the item is made. Some items come from rare item drops, some come from strong monsters, some come from random locations. As he makes more items and discovers new ingredients, he unlocks new recipes, moving from small thatch houses and simple clothing to something more complex. It’s never really explained how he’s strong enough to fight monsters. He never forms any armor, instead just updating his sword, but that aside, a reference to him being a kendo champion or something would have gone a long way to making his battle prowess make any sense. By killing certain monsters, they turn back into the humans that had been killed, and they end up becoming the population for his town. The story does not characterize any of the people he saves, but instead focuses on him and his relationship with his slaves, kind of like “My house is a magic spot”. It’s Age of Empires the web novel, so if you like gradual building and growth, it isn’t a bad story. The arsehat shows up occasionally, mostly to gloat over his discoveries, which are quickly outpaced by the MC. This is not a complex or highly engaging story. It’s written very simply with very little characterization outside of making his slaves happy. Things just happen abruptly, like the aforementioned arsehat magically showing up at random. But it’s a fun read, the translator is updating quickly, and the web novel is actually finished. I’d recommend this story for someone who wants something light. The arsehat and his pitifully abused slave puts an occasional damper on things, but otherwise it’s a surprising light and hopeful story.

Yuusha Isagi no Maou Hanashi:

After three years fighting and finally defeating the demon lord, the hero goes to confess to his white mage companion and start restoring the world, including starting an adventurer’s guild, only to suddenly be snatched away by a summon once again… to the same place 20 years in the future by the former demon lord’s daughter. He and three other boys fresh from Japan are summoned as Demon Lord Candidates in order to protect the demons and demihumans from human tyranny. Apparently, since the hero’s mysterious disappearance, his companions went on to create the Adventurer’s guild. It’s rank based rewards, the potential for fame, and skill hoarding made it so successful that humanity began to wipe out all of the other races and push the demons to the brink of destruction. Now, the former hero has to keep low as he resides in the demon lord castle he once invaded, engage with the daughter whose father he killed, and provide advice to the creation of new demon lords. The story is not greatly written. The exposition is insane, dedicating dozens of chapters to infodumping everything. The MC is scattered brain, the narratives train of thoughts jumping around so much it’s actually a really hard translation to follow. This is a shame because the story is actually really interesting to me. But it’s so poorly implemented that it really holds back something otherwise great. It’s a harem too, which provides some meager and forced scenes to have the hero loved by several girls including the demon lord’s daughter. He himself, at least as far as I’ve gotten, has NOT become a demon lord, but mostly turned into a NEET mosing around the castle while forming a close friendship with the demon king candidates (other summoned Japanese boys).The tone is mostly humorous, but a lot of the jokes stall in translation. If the author took the ideas a little more seriously, this could have been a really kick arsed story. Instead, it’s a solid ‘meh’.

100 Luck and the Dragon Tamer Skill!:

In 30 years, Earth will be invaded by an alien species. Ancient aliens asked a “god-like” being to intervene on their behalf (The author seemed very desperate to push this atheist viewpoint at you, IT’s NOT GOD… just superpowered alien that has manipulated human history for the last 2000 years). Anyway, a few days after his announcement, the not god decides to summon 10 million humans and dump them on another world with RPG stats to do whatever they want. If by the time the last human dies, they have collectively made that world a better place, they will intervene and save Earth, if not, Earth will be invaded. On top of that, the not god is a bit of a dick, and decides to leave things up to “fate”, giving humans only 10 seconds to allocate their 100 skill points, forcing them to keep the first skill they pick without being able to read the description first, and hiding future skills behind often ridiculous and unrelated skill names. One such boy, a lazy otaku Romanian (this is the same author as “I was reincarnated as a magic academy” ), panics when confronted with his choice, ending up dumping all his skill points into luck. Turns out that’s the right thing to do, as Luck cannot be changed with leveling. He then accidently gets stuck with the dragon tamer ability, which is useless for a human, since humans and dragons have been fighting an unceasing war and hate each other. And as luck would have it, instead of being summoned to the human continent like everyone else, he ends up in the extremely high-level dragon continent, giving him the very chance to use the dragon tamer skill and quickly grow OP. Basically, any dragon who befriends the protagonist gets a 2X boost to their leveling (growth), and the protagonist gains a boost equal to 25% of their stats. A harem later and he’s OP’d as heck. And since he’s got 100 luck, the new poorly-named skills he can gain every 10 levels he picks slot-machine style and ends up OP’d as well. I liked this story, it’s a lot of fun. The dialogue… is often cringeworthy. Just very cliche dialogue full of smartass remarks and “jokes” that just as often make you cringe as they make you laugh out loud. The MC… is a bit unlikeable. Kind of a creep, kind of a smart ass, kind of lazy jackass. He’s not much different from the magic academy MC of the authors other novel, but it’s more noticeable in this one because this guy is undeniably human while the other MC had memory loss and his dungeon nature to contend with. Still, not a standard Japanese MC, so if that bothers you, then you might prefer this. Although, after reading 4-5 Romanian novels, I’ll say he is a “classic Romanian MC”. Get past the cringe and you’ll have a pretty fun novel full of more sexy dragon girls than you can shake a stick at.

Release that Witch:

Most every entry on this list sits comfortably in the cliches of a light novel. The Chinese light novels tend to differ from Japanese light novels, but in the end, the general goal is still wish fulfillment. In all of these stories, you imagine yourself as the MC, fantasizing as he gets all the power and gets all the girls. This is one of the very few stories that seem to strive for something more. I’d be hard pressed to call it a light novel since it reads infinitely more like a fantasy epic akin to Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time, or the Sword of Truth. When a Chinese Engineering student collapses from overwork, he wakes up in the body and harboring the memories of the Kingdom’s 4th prince in the middle of proceeding over an execution of a witch. The King decided to pit all of his children against each other Stardust style, giving them each a plot of the kingdom to rule. After five years, whoever garnered the most success won. He gave his favorite son the best land, and his least favorite, the protagonist, the outskirted borderlands. A stark athiest, he defies the church and frees the witch and after witnessing her true powers, she gave him the plan to use her and the other witches along with his knowledge on engineering to revolutionize the world. Each Witch gets one specific power, and he uses those powers to help him realize his dreams, establishing an army, protecting the city, and creating a foothold in the kingdom, often by developing guns, steam engines, and other industrial revolution era devices using the resources at hand. Furthermore, winter is coming, and every winter results in the release of these magical fissures which infect and turn animals into monsters that attack the nearby towns. Thus, he tries to protect the witches from the church while defending the city from monster attacks and building up commerce. It’s… a really good story. The female characters are strong and independent (a surprise coming from a Chinese WN). The story is full of interesting and well-developed characters. Some people lay criticisms that the character is “too smart” or that the author pompously shows off his own intelligence with big words and explanations, and while he his intelligence does stretch the realm of believability (like his ability to write complete books explaining the basics of chemistry), it’s no worse than the 18 yo acting like a 12 yo idiot or any in a list of superpowered protagonists. This was really a good story, I can’t stress it enough. Possibly my favorite on this list to date.

Jidou Hanbaiki ni Umarekawatta ore wa Meikyuu o Samayou:

A guy who loves vending machines is reborn as a vending machine. He wakes up in a dungeon, but not your typical underground dungeon, more the kind where every level is a complete habitat on its own. In his case, he wakes up next to a lake and an open sky… which sits a few days travel from a human established village near the dungeons teleport circle. A few days later, a small girl abandoned and near death stumbles on him, and thus purchases food and water to survive. She has the divine gift of superstrength so she carries him to the village, and thus begins their adventure together. He functions much like a dungeon core in other web novels. He converts money into items to sell and upgrades to his machine. The more upgrades, the more things he sells. He works to support the nearby adventurer’s guild, being a continuous supply of food and supplies for adventurers on the go, with the super strength girl (who is considered clumsy with her strength and thus an undesirable teammate normally) carrying him on adventure missions. His limitations are one of the annoying things. For example, he can only sell things he had purchased from a vending machine at some point in his previous life… which despite being a self-proclaimed vending machine lover, is surprisingly limited. He also can only speak using one of a handful of phrases, making every conversation essentially a yes or no conversation. I hope his voice opens up in the future, but after the first volume, this has yet to happen. It’s a cute and harmless web novel, surprisingly easy to read and fun. Don’t expect much depth from it. If you like dungeon core web novels, this one provides an interesting variant of that.

Wizard with the Flower Blades:

In a word with virtual reality MMOs like Sword Art Online, a sportsy guy who kind of looks like a girl is encouraged to start a new MMO by his gaming friend. While in the middle of attempting to create his character, which through a scan error assigns him the gender female, there is a flash of light, and he ends up in a fantasy world in the body of his female avatar. This is one of those rare gender bender other world stories. The world doesn’t appear to be the game world, and the skills he would have had in the game don’t appear to be the skills he has in this world. There are no levels. It’s never really explained, but from the hints the story gives, it seems like “mana” makes the world go around, and every stat gets converted into mana. The MC and other summoned Japanese seem to possess maxed mana in the millions based on their previous job class. Although the MC never finished his character creation, which for some reason makes him special in ways that are yet to be revealed. Really, he’s just generically Op’d for no reason, even compared to other otherworlders who seem bound by the laws of whatever game they started in, thus locked into their predetermined skills and spells, while the MC can freely manipulate mana however he wants. Immediately, he stumbled on a caravan being raided by bandits… and you have your recipe for possibly the most generic cliche “other world novel” you could ever read. He also had a grandpa who liked blacksmithing (but just weapons though, this novel doesn’t even once mention blacksmithing armor for some reason). So he picks up blacksmithing and instantly becomes OP’d in that too, which somehow makes him OP in jewelry making too? Somehow? You’d probably think from what I just said I didn’t like this novel, but that’s the strange thing, I REALLY liked the novel. It’s generic as hell… the most by the numbers story you could read, yet somehow… it’s still very good. Not great, but good enough and engaging enough to be worth a read. The characters don’t pop, but they tie together and are involved enough that they at least aren’t forgettable. It really doesn’t have any harem at all, and the romance is virtually non-existent. Perhaps it’s because the story is so mellow that it’s so approachable. Love relationships don’t pop up on first meeting, s/he isn’t surrounded by everyone being in love with him, characters aren’t walking cartoon punchlines, he doesn’t get randomly attacked by gangster adventurers wanting to put him in his place for no reason. This is an interesting world, with an interesting magic system, and interesting characters. Even the bad guys exude personality. It’s probably one of the least painful and most interesting generic another world novels you could read, so give it a chance.

I Was A Sword When I Reincarnated:

Tensei Shitara Ken Deshita Tensei Shitara Ken Deshita

A guy dies and reincarnates as a sword. That’s it. That’s about as much thought as went into this web novel. The guy’s Japan life is not explored at all. For the first 10 some chapters he flies around killing things and becoming OP’d all on his own. His powers are inconsistent as hell… like he can only fly for 3-6 minutes max, yet somehow can engage in sneaking and 4 hour long battles without using up his mp. He acquires tons of skills, gets stuck in an mp dead zone, and is finally rescued by a slave whose caravan is destroyed by a monster. He immediately wants to have sex with her… and it’s revealed she’s 12 years old. Yeah… it’s exactly as gross as it sounds. Anyway, she picks him up, he decides anyone will do wielding him considering he practically wields himself (and has a skill share ability that means she instantly becomes OP too), frees her from her master, and then basically uses her as his walking dummy. Fortunately, she has the personality of dried wheat and so he commands her every motion like she’s a doll. She responds with only one word responses, and the sword narrates that “he” does things when he really means “she” does things as his proxy. And yeah… that’s it. The sword with intelligence can be a really interesting subject, but if that’s what you’re looking for, this is not the web novel for you. It is a very very generic and inconsistent novel with a dynamic that has no reason to exist. The author does nothing to cash in on the “being a sword” thing, and the story could have just as easily been told if he reincarnated as the 12 yo girl himself, or as an amulet, or as a magical buttplug… the point being, it’s just waste. Now, I’m not saying it was an awful story or offensive. Some parts are actually quite good as a generic “adventurer adventures while becoming increasingly OP”, but it felt like a pretty big missed opportunity to have something different. It’s just more of the same with a coat of paint.

Kyuuketsu Hime wa Barairo no Yume o Miru:

Vampire Princess Rose Colored Dream
Vampire Princess Sees a Rose-Colored Dream

A guy with a rather pitiful life dies and reincarnates as the character from his MMO game. He wakes up in the body of a loli vampire princess. His character was a bit of an animal hoarder, and he spent his game years building a massive collection of “pets”, Boss Level Mobs that he “collected” over the years. He puts them on display in a castle he acquired and became lord over through various hard to understand circumstances. The pets became sentient, freeing themselves from storage and finding themselves trapped in the castle, their vampire princess in a coma that lasts 100 years. His “reincarnation” signaled the awakening of their princess, and the castle pops up in a strange world which may or may not be the MMO turned reality untold millennia later. Now, all her monsters which have organized into their appropriate pecking order want to take over the world in her name, while she just wants to figure out what’s going on. So basically another Overlord. It’s… okay? The fact that it’s a guy turned girl is not really plot important, and the little girl immediately starts acting like a mature loli (think Yue). I wish the protagonist was either female or a guy who wanted to be a girl (or was at least established as a homosexual), because it would make all the constant love-dove scenes between her and guys feel a lot less like BL. It’s very odd the way it is. The story starts out with her freaking out over the monsters and desperately “pretending” to be her game avatar to survive, but that aspect of the story gets thrown out by the third chapter and from then on she IS a vampire princess and acts just like one. She plays around in the first town, checks out the adventurer guild, flirts with a young adventuring boy, and saves the town from a well timed invasion… fairly standard fair… but from the point of view of seductive loli princess. The story felt like it needed a bit more depth. The main monster characters felt like they needed more characterization and time to establish themselves (the story really does just jump to the first village without spending any time with the monsters), and while the vampire princess is brutal, nothing about her character is consistent or makes a whole lot of sense. The story was just too fast paced and abrupt and forced too much stuff to happen. It pushed the suspension of disbelief a bit too hard. Another one with good potential poorly executed and thus becoming something a tad mediocre.

Atelier Tanaka:

Atelier Tanaka – Age = Years Without a Girlfriend
Tanaka The Wizard

On the surface, Atelier Tanaka is just another ‘another world’ web novel with an intensely unlikable and borderline disgusting protagonist. However, it has just enough wit and self-awareness that it isn’t terrible. When an MC is accidently killed by god, he gets the standard fair another world with a cheat skill. He chooses his cheat skill ‘becoming a beautiful Ikeman’, but that gets rejected for “reasons”. He then wants recovery magic and is thus spawned outside of town. Instead of being the standard 15 yo pretty boy, he’s an ugly Japanese 34 yo virgin. It’s not specifically mentioned whether he is in his original body or not, but it’s certainly not the typical Japanese MC.He comes off like the worst stereotypes of a Japanese businessman we have in America (an overly polite suckup with extreme perverseness in some very taboo and disgusting areas). The protagonist has got an almost god-like recovery magic, but because the author didn’t know where to stop making him OP, he also has an inexhaustible massive supply of mp, high INT, and every level he gains a point he can put into anything. Even with lvl 3 fire magic, he is so powerful he can create a hailstorm of fireballs incinerating even wyverns in one hit. It seems like the only reason he isn’t OP as fruck seems to be his own idiocy on how OP is abilities actually are. Seriously, he could put his points in ANYTHING. Illusion magic to solve his ugly problem, transformation, barriers, defense… he does none of that. He becomes an adventurer and in perhaps the most unbalanced questing reward system ever he quickly becomes rich with just herbs. A single freaking herb quest nets him enough gold to buy a sword, armor, and live comfortably for three months. It wasn’t even like a lot a herbs… a single bag of them. Anyway, through various serendipitous events he meets up and befriends various nobles and knights. The story is kind of all over the place. His first night he gets thrown in jail with a lesbian knight and flat out murders a guard to escape prison. The knight was on death row and… neither of them ever face any repercussions from this incident. Simply fleeing from jail seemed to cause everyone to forget they were ever there. He befriends a goblin on his first mission, and nothing happens… at least not in what is translated, nothing ever developed from this strange friendship. It’s another event that is just sort of forgotten. It’s not an awful web novel… but it’s got a lot of weird moments, like the MC complimenting how a girl looks when she’s pooping, or his internal monolog about pissing himself. If you’re desperate to avoid the hero archetype and instead want to read about an ugly 34 yo man lamenting over how he wants to bang high school girls and live a simple life with a house and a golden retriever… this is for you?

Jikuu Mahou de Isekai to Chikyuu wo Ittarikitari:

Going Back and Forth Between Earth and The Other World with Space Time Magic

This story avoided my radar for far longer than it should have. A guy is summoned to another world. The King gives him a gem that unlocks his powers, which since he is an engineer turn out to be the powers of analysis, time, and space. The King then tries to trick the guy into wearing a slave collar, and when that fails, tries to assassinate him. Having received the powers of time and space itself, he quickly escapes that situation. Noticing the princess who indirectly warned him by being distressed at his would-be capture, he stops by her room and suggests to her that this whole “demon king randomly decides to attack a human village” thing is fishy as heck before returning to his own world. The next day she is imprisoned by her father for asking too many questions, and the guy decides to kidnap her off to his world. His younger sister is also entering college and moves into his home, and after explaining the existence of a fantasy world, they start heading over to the world to train, learn magic, and have fun. It’s a bit like Death march in the sense that the guy’s powers border on a demigod and he mostly does the equivalent of vacationing. He can teleport anywhere he’s been, including another world once a day. He can put “surveillance” on people and items, checking up on them throughout the day. He can sense enemies, use a mapping system, and of course the OP’d skill that is inventory. Since you learn magic based on your level of knowledge, most of his magic is learned very high level, and he maintains quite a few levels over his hare- err… his little sister and the princess. As he works 9-5 and his sister goes to school, the princess acts as a homemaker. Every weekend they go back to the other world and level up and go on adventures (the sister wants to become strong enough to protect those important to her). They’ve run into a few too many walking cliched badguys but otherwise, it’s a pretty lighthearted novel about a guy just chilling in the other world with his girls. And of course it includes the fun of exposing the other world to modern technology (and performing your job with cheat-like magic skills) He’s 30, his sister is 18, the princess is 16. Yeah, pure wish fulfillment here, but also fun. It’s got a lot of chapters, rather short. Like Death March, nothing important really happens and it doesn’t happen quickly, but to me, this and Death March are examples of slice of life done “right”. If I could select any cheat skill, Time and Space Magic would be it, so this one resonated with my heart. Fun story, worth a read unless you want something with heavy story or darker tones.

Kuro No Maou:

The Black Demon King

I think if any web novel could be called a textbook example of an “another world” novel, The Black Demonlord would be it. A standard Japanese boy with slightly intimidating eyes and the ironic first name Maou is summoned to another world right in the middle of an obvious confession from the school idol that he was too dense to see. Rather than being summoned as a hero, he was instead summoned to become an experimental weapon prototype. Infused with black magic, he was enslaved, imprisoned, experimented on, and tortured for months as they steadily turned him into a weapon, meanwhile pitting him against monsters and other test subjects. This all gets rushed through the first couple of chapters, and then he escapes, jumps on a boat, and somehow ends up in the middle of a forest on the “demon” continent. Typical church fighting for human purity while labeling all humans and demihumans who get along “demons” and perpetuating a war with them. In other words, the demon continent is really just the un-specist continent, and demons are really just normal good people that aren’t xenophobic zealous bastards. On the demon continent, he gets a grip on his magical powers and steadily increases them. With over 200 chapters out, the progression of this story is actually pretty slow. A long prolog actually achieved something very few another world novels achieved… that is… getting me to care about his life before he’s snatched away. I still want to know what happened to his mom, the would-be girlfriend, and his buddy. However, after that chapter, the details kind of slip away a bit. The prolog is full of descriptions for every person he meets, but later chapters don’t get any of that. This is a mistake young writers make all the time, starting out over describing, and then fall back to under-describing. You end up with a story that explains too much that really doesn’t need explaining. If you read a lot of another world novels, this one yet again introduces the protagonist to demihumans, adventuring guilds, and everything else slowly with all the mock surprise we’ve already heard a dozen times. The first girl he encounters is a half fairy with the body and personality of a 4 yo. They instantly become best buds just because the plot wanted it to happen, and then he… sleeps naked with her? I’m not even joking… he says yes loli, no touch… but it’s still weird the author felt the need to put it there. In the end, this book takes the events told by chapter 2 in other another world novels… and stretches it to 20 chapters. Although this story is about a “demon lord” instead of a hero… it’s really just a hero in the same way as every other another world story… except it moves the point where he discovers that it was the church all along that are the xenophobic badguys to the beginning, and he’s only the “demon king” from the point of view that he’s against the clearly evil church. That said, the story gets better the longer you read it, and aside from an early on five-some chapter battle between the dragon king and an apostle that the story hadn’t established itself long enough to be worth it, it really is the classic forming of a demon lord, full of strife, loss, and a series of bad things happening to the protagonist. The story doesn’t pull punches when it chooses to kill off characters to drive the protagonist into becoming a demon lord, and even the innocent loligirl becomes a terrifying presence deserving of the title of one of his generals as the story progresses. Still, like all novels of these types, to justify the protagonist’s evil actions, they end up making the bad guy even more evil, cartoonishly so. If you want to follow the classical “path of a demon lord” that so many stories parody, I’d call this the gold standard.

Goblin Kingdom:

Goblin no Oukoku

There is an argument online. Half the people that read this insist it’s just a rehash of Re: Monster, the other half vehemently argue against that. In truth, the similarities are hard to miss. A guy reincarnates as a measly recently born goblin, then he evolves and gains skills until he takes over his tribe and takes on a sexier human appearance, starts kidnapping and adding other species to his group (including love interests), then steadily builds a force to be reckoned with. I think RE: Monster is slightly better in a lot of ways. Are they different enough to be worth reading both? I think if you liked one, you might like the other. Goblin Kingdom has some pretty interesting back story about a battle between the gods where the MC is the avatar of the god of the underworld which is slowly driving him insane, although that growing insanity is never really clearly defined as he keeps getting skills that both fight and deliver mental attacks. In many ways, it more closely resembles Tensei Slime where he is building a Kingdom and pulling in other monsters as pets and allies. It pulls back the sex and skill acquisition a bit. Where Re: Monster had a strange ability that gives him random skills every time he defeats an enemy, I can’t say Goblin Kingdom is any better just randomly dumping skills on him for sometimes arbitrary and inconsistent leveling reasons. It’s a decent enough read. If you like the steady skill acquisition and monster building like you’d see in Re: Monster or Tensei Slime, you can read it. It’s a little silly with some of its actions. The human girls join him, for example, after he kills half their party and enslaves them… so it’s pretty hard to believe they become so subservient, whereas, in Re: Monster, he kills the ones who captured them and at least in some ways protected them. Either way, it’s not a bad read. It focuses much more on his unification of the Goblins and building a kingdom rather than skill acquisition, harem, or wish fulfillment.

Kujibiki Tokushou: Musou H?remu ken:

Grand Prize: Unrivalled Harem Ticket
Lottery Grand Prize: Musou Harem Rights
Lottery Grand Prize : Peerless Harem Rights.

By the name and the picture assigned to it, you’d probably think this protagonist is a badass who takes what he wants and has an attitude. Nope. Boring Generic Japanese Protagonist. In fact, this MC is more boring than usual. Him, and this story, are the ultimate in cliched another world. Gets generic and ill described powers that make him OP? Check. Finds a carriage under attack by bandits and saves a princess? Check. Finds an easily completed quest and instantly becomes wealthy? Check. Gets a cheap mansion because it’s haunted and easily overwhelms the ghost? Check. Generically good guy who just does whatever anyone asks? Check. The guy wins a lottery that sends him to another world and allows him to draw from a pinko machine any number of times until he finds the power he wants. He gets 777X the stats of a normal man, which is an inconsistent ability that makes him generically op’d. It’s random what is multiplied by 777 and what isn’t, never giving any rhyme or reason in a ‘whatever the author felt like’ kind of way. Then, he gets extra lottery tickets for completely arbitrary and unspecified tasks (whatever the author feels like again) and can get more abilities like an uninhibited teleportation to become even more op’d. Almost every novel on this list is wish fulfillment in one way or another, but this webnovel has to be one of the most blatantly lazy at it. It literally just hands him everything, and the worst part… it’s just boring. It’s not ‘In another world with a Smartphone’ boring, but it comes close. The only interesting things the light novel has are the products of it’s own laziness. Basically, the MC is a freaking psychopath. No, the story doesn’t try to present him this way, but he murders thieves without a second thought. He takes down an army, cuts off some guys head, and then delivers it to a princess without even batting an eyelash. He burns an unhappy female spirit away and never even thinks about it. Then he immediately wants a slave maid when he had option to own a, you know, not slave, because “she can’t run from him”. Then, as soon as he gets her home, without even having a conversation first , he drags her into his bedroom for mufo mufo (god do I hate those words after reading this novel for a bit). The scene is done so strangely that many readers were convinced he raped her, but really he just “snuggled” her like an animal (she’s a beastgirl), remember, it’s ‘just’ sexual assault so it’s okay 😐 . The list goes on. He sleeps with his harem, but like everything else, it arbitrarily put in there when the author felt like it without actually building for it. His first conquest goes from him meeting her to him screwing her in less than two chapters, which he does in a way that’s just as borderline sexual assault as the rest of his actions. It’s a story with no personality. Wish fulfillment distilled to its rawest form. There is nothing here. You might like it if you liked “Slave Harem”, and that is not a compliment.

Kamigoroshi no eiyuu to nanatsu no seiyaku:

The God Slaying Hero and the Seven Covenants

Another one I avoided because of the vague and nonsensical novel description. Basically, 13 heroes were summoned from Earth to defeat the demon god three years ago. Why 13 instead of the typical 4-5? No clue, but there you have it. After two years journey, they succeed in stopping the demon god and then go their separate ways. This story follows the thirteenth, a lazy protagonist with a serious case of ‘Imposter Syndrome’ (Look it up). Basically, he’s convinced himself he lucked through defeating the Demon God and it was all the other 12 who did all the work. So convinced he’s not a hero he spends his days earning piddling amounts of money collecting herbs and his nights getting drunk, with a sentient weapon/coin as his only companion. Okay, that’s not exactly true. He has a power that only activates given certain circumstances (the seven covenants). So, while he’s weak/average against normal enemies, if all seven conditions are met he can kill a god. The world also tries to stress “realism” in the another world genre (people are weak against monsters, normal humans can easily be overwhelmed by goblins, travel is uncomfortable and difficult, ect…). However, being a heroic person anyway, he saves, protects, and inspires people… even while trying to deny his role in events. It’s interesting. He’s not a standard Japanese MC, but his personality can also grate on you pretty quick as basically everyone tells him how great he is while he continually downs himself. Overall, it’s not a bad story, with good pacing, a growing plot involving the demon god’s powers mysteriously resurfacing, and the fun dynamic between a sentient weapon and its master that ‘I was a Sword when I Reincarnated’ failed to deliver.

The Death Mage that doesn’t want a fourth time:

The Death Attribute Mage Who Doesn’t Want a Fourth Time
Yondome wa Iyana Shi Zokusei Majutsushi

God has a problem. He has a planet that has been stuck in a never ending loop of demon kings and human wars that has caused it to develop slower than the other worlds. In order to fix this problem, he heard you can summon someone from another world with powers and their memories intact and they’ll somehow make the world a better place. However, to test this out, he takes 100 some humans who died in a terrorist explosion, gives them all powers and fortune, and has them make a dry run on one of his other planets before sending them to the final one. Our protagonist lived an awful life on Earth. His parents were dead and his uncle makes the Dursleys seem civil. He gives his life to unsuccessfully save a girl. Then, because his name is close to another guy’s name, god screws up and gives the other guy all of his fortune, abilities, and destiny (twice those of a normal person). Unable to reverse it, God sends the protagonist to the next world knowing his life will be hell with no luck of any kind. He ends up experimented on by evil scientists who use his massive pool of mana (because he is basically an empty shell without destiny/fortune) and get him to learn the newly discovered death magic. He’s tortured for 20 years until he dies, only to finally be finished off by the very guy who stole his destiny and the girl he saved who considered it a ‘mercy’ (The 100 other reincarnated grew to become the hundred heroes of this world). On top of that, he’s stuck reincarnating again without any more fortune than the last time. Not wanting the MC to seek vengeance on the treasured hundred when they reincarnate to the next world, God further curses the protagonist with the hopes he kills himself. Unable to get a known job or gain experience by himself, the MC is only left with the massive pool of mana and the death magic he was forced to learn. Plus, he’s a half dark-elf / half vampire, so he’s hated and basically considered a monster by anyone except other monsters. This is an excellent story. Those first few chapters, while depressing, do a good job filling you with emotion. For all those stupid revenge stories with cartoonish evil characters, this is how you do it right. However, the best thing about this story is that it ISN’T a revenge story. No, he’s not a happy go lucky standard Japanese MC, but he also doesn’t want to be evil. He tries to be a good person, and he spends the years before the hundred ‘heroes’ reincarnate trying to change the world’s image of him so the heroes won’t track him down and slay him as a monster. The only set back the story has is that it doesn’t do a jump ahead. You antagonizingly go from him at birth and it moves from there like No Fatigue. He steadily gets older and older, but you’ll have to read the painful suspension of disbelief chapters as a baby/toddler is interacting with adults. At 50 chapters in, he’s still only 4 years old and I think they say he won’t be an adult until at least volume 5. Still, the pacing is good and so is the story. It can be surprisingly funny, although I think you’d call it dark humor.

The Reincarnated Vampire Wants an Afternoon Nap:

Do people actually like these ‘I want to sleep all the time” protagonists. I’ve read enough of these characters that they’re basically a cliche of their own, and they are just one of the stupidest cliches I’ve ever read. Most of them don’t even make sense, their desire for laziness often indirectly causing them more hardship. I mean, there is ‘being lazy’, and then there is ‘being an obnoxious asshat who won’t even lift a finger to improve their own situation’ and this falls in the second category. Is there that big of a demographic of people who just want to sleep all day and do nothing? Not ‘play games all the time’ or ‘waste time’, but literally just lie on a bed and sleep? Sigh… a guy dies from freaking sleep apnea. Because it was a screwup, they agree to reincarnate him, giving him complete choice in what he wants and enough points to easily be superpowered. Yes, no good reasons he’s OP here, the god just decided to handed him hundred upon hundreds of skill points, enough to unlock EVERY skill he could, and still max out about ten of them. The writer seems to be as lazy as the character he writes. He chooses vampire because it’s literally the first thing the god offers, and he’s Op’d because with the number of points god offered him there was no way he couldn’t be op’d even though he really tried to screw it up. His own laziness (because even reading is too much effort) causes him to rush through his character creation. He finally gets reincarnated as a beautiful silver-haired vampire girl, because the writer couldn’t wait to shove more lazy cliches into the story. Which is also why the story starts with the lazy cliche of him saving a merchant’s caravan from a bandit attack. The translation and writing are decent, so if the ‘lazy mc’ trope is something you like (personally I can’t relate to it at all), then this novel probably isn’t bad… but for me, I can’t stand it, especially because in many cases their laziness makes no effing sense and seems to scour away any sense of personality the MC might have. If this novel is for you, you’ll know it, I guess. These will never be my kind of story.

Reincarnated as a Dragon’s Egg ?Lets Aim to Be the Strongest?:

Tensei shitara doragon no tamago datta ~ saiky? igai mezasanee~

It’s tough to read this without invoking thoughts of “I’m A Spider, So What?”. The two stories are very similar, although one involves a female spider in a labyrinth and the other involves a male dragon in the wilderness. Dragons are not OP’d in this story, and it most spends it’s time having him fight increasingly more powerful monsters as he steadily rises in power. However, at no point does he become OP, and every enemy seems to be a 3-5 chapter fight to the death. This would be fine if the fight scenes were decent, but they aren’t. So what you’re left with is a stat-building web novel mixed with random 4 chapter battles that felt basically skip-able. The story progresses slowly, and seems to have very little payoff. Unlike “I’m a Spider, So What?”, this MC has a strong attachment to people and spends a long time hinting about obtaining a human form. Meanwhile, circumstance seems to be pushing him down the “evil dragon god” route. Guess which direction he ends up? Well, if you guess wrong, you’ll join a long list of people who hate this novel because the pay off they wanted didn’t happen. A lot of other people hate this novel because they accuse the MC of being a coward. He acts a lot like the girl in “I’m a Spider, So What?” He flees, avoids pain, he exploits weaknesses, ect… so if you were looking for an RE: Monster level badass, this novel doesn’t have it. This story is mostly just a repetitive skill acquisition slog that doesn’t really have much to keep you invested. My opinion on this web novel was mostly ‘meh’.

Kokugensou wo Item Cheat de Ikinuku:

Surviving a Harsh Fantasy with Cheat Items

A guy is summoned to another world. Assuming he’s a hero, he goes to the adventurer’s guild and starts his first quest, only to then realize he’s unsuited to subjugation. After nearly being eaten by some wild dogs, he starts looking for another job. After realizing he can read and write in this world’s language, he ends up as an assistant to the town clerk, which quickly snowballs into him opening up his own business firm. Selling soap, gunpowder, and anything else his brain can figure out, he becomes successful and makes a difference through innovation. This is what ‘Netooku Otoko no Tanoshii Isekai Bouek’ should have been. Yet, still, it’s lacking horribly. Like Netooku, this guy is a mooch that everyone seems to bend over backward for with no real particular reason. His plans would have failed instantly if a high ranking adventurer and the clerk don’t literally work for free for him, despite the fact that he offered nothing to the table himself. He’s an idea guy, I guess, except that his ideas usually target things that already exist in this world. The MC is useless. He doesn’t know gunpowder recipes or how to make soap, but fortunately, this world already has that stuff. Fortunately, no one except him thought to market it in the ways he does. So, he makes the first every gunpowder bomb for mining purposes and cheap soap using monster fat… and that’s the source of his wealth. He then takes it a step further and makes the first ever guns. That’s right, gunpowder exists in this world, but not guns. I’ll leave that to translator oversight (it’s probably black powder), but still… this story is a bit silly. He inherited 13 slaves, all pretty girls, and uses them to open up his firm… but how he afforded to feed them in the weeks leading up to finishing his building, how he paid for the building, ect… all of this gets glossed over. In fact, most everything gets glossed over. The “how” in this story isn’t very important. It’s all about this guy being handed an entire business and becoming rich just because. Release that Witch has similar concepts but is 100X better. This is only okay.

Knights and Magic:

A skilled program developer obsessed with all things robot reincarnates in a world that contains massive mech robot knights that function as their primary form of defense against monsters. Thus, he decides to become a Knight and build his own robot, starting training at age three. This is a fun web novel. The world’s technology is never really clearly described, but it seems that despite the existence of mech robots, everything else is still carriages and horses. In order to be a Knight, you have to be good with magic and swordsmanship, so the MC spends his childhood training and by the time he’s ready for school he is already OP’d. Magic works much like programming, so his advanced programming skills and ability to perform during a death march (also known as the crunch), lend them to him being a highly skilled combatant. The only problem is that he’s young and too small for the standard-sized mechs. His small stature and female-like appearance lead to him being cuddled and loved by all the girls, so somewhat harem, but he only has eyes for robots. The pacing is good, the first volume following him growing to the age of 12. If you like Op’d protagonists with good hearts, this one adds robots. It’s a very standard gundam robot story, but for a list filled with ‘another world’ cliches, robot cliches actually feel refreshing.

Common Sense of a Duke’s Daughter:

Duke’s Daughter
Koushaku Reijou no Tashinami
Simply Good Sense for a Duke’s Daughter

Like Otome, a girl is resurrected as the villainess of a romance game she was playing. The problem is she didn’t regain her memory until just as the “bad end” occurs, which would have ended with her banishment and confinement. This quickly gets turned around in the first few chapters and instead of being confined, she is inexplicably given control of a territory. After that, the whole ‘this was a game’ thing seems to be unimportant. It’s not a redemption story or anything like that, instead, the entire point of this story is to put a mirror in front of the ‘love at first sight’ happily ever after endings and show the ugliness within. The Duke’s Daughter was destroyed because of her love and jealousy of her fiancee when he fell for the MC, and abandoning that love and doing what’s smart saves her. Thus, as a woman driven by more pragmatic desires, she functions like a proper aristocrat, as opposed to all the love obsessed characters from the romance game who ultimately cause trouble by following their hearts. Thus, this story serves as a comparison between the inept “MC” who everyone falls in love with compared to someone who actually works for what she wants. The story mostly focuses on her building up her territory: creating a business, starting a bank, ect… The pacing is fast, with chapters jumping months at a time. The writing is decent, but the story never really took off for me. Everything happens too smoothly, there is very little characterization, and no real adversity either. Basically, nothing to keep you reading.

Nidoume no Jinsei wo Isekai de:

Nidome no Jinsei wo Isekai de
Second Life in Another World

A somewhat stupid god creates a badly designed planet that is slowly going to hell, so she reincarnates an MC to act as the intermediary sort of like The Man Picked by the Gods, but with at least the self-awareness of the poor sustainability of a badly designed world. The MC lived a long life and died at age 94. He is resurrected at the age of 18 while lacking memories of his previous life. Well, he remembers everything except who he was. In his former life, he was a badass kendo master with a massive kill count which included being a soldier in World War II. This only gets creepy when you remember he was on the Axis side and probably sits closer to being a war criminal than a war hero… but the story at least is trying to paint him as a war hero. Immediately rescues a damsel in distress who was in threat of rape by a gang of men, yadda yadda. Nothing in this story stands out from any and every other another world novel. It’s not bad. It’s not good. If I had run into this story a hundred stories ago I might have found something to like, but now it just feels like more of the same.

Reincarnator: 

For 25 years, humans were mysteriously pulled away from Earth into the other world, a place of magic where you gain power by killing others and absorbing their runes. There, fairies put them into malicious life and death games that encouraged betrayal and rewarded recklessness. Then the Abyss opened, releasing demons and monsters, and humans began their final trial… and after ~50 years, failed. The last of humanity used their remaining resources to acquire an artifact that will allow one person to go back in time, and one of the four strongest is chosen to go back. The MC is chosen, because he came to the otherworld the latest, yet progressed the fastest of any of them. Thus, he travels to the moment he was dragged into the other-world, 5 years prior to the opening of the abyss. His mission? To acquire as many resources as possible and save as much of humanity as he can, preparing them for the abyss. This starts in the “tutorial” section, where humans are immediately culled by their willingness to fight and betray each other. Then continues the mad dash as he tries to meet the conditions to complete missions, acquire the best equipment, and ultimately save humanity. The closest thing to this story I can think of is God and Devil World. Although a few girls try to cling to the MCs strength, he doesn’t drag them around or sleep with them like that MC. For me, it starts out strong, but gets weaker the longer I read. There is no characterization, and many many characters are introduced, only to be arbitrarily tossed away and not mentioned again. You never really get much of a feel for anyone, because none of the interpersonal relationships are given a chance to develop at all. Thus, it’s just the MC, interacting with random people, most of which act like complete arseholes most of the time. Although this novel is Korean, it has the knack of many Chinese novels of making the most cartoonishly stupid and evil people imaginable, and really making you root for the MCs often brutal decisions because everyone else is even worse. Although, he does have a code and does try to save everyone, just about every one is an ungrateful arse hat about it, to the point where you’re left thinking that maybe humanity should have just died after all. Many of these kinds of novels can drag me hundreds of chapters before I get fatigued reading them… this one lost me in about 50. Some of it is just hard to believe (his near encyclopedic knowledge of the first part of the tutorial, a space noone had visited in 50 years, and his desperation to gain items that are seemingly discarded shortly after, for example). One of the first main villains actually makes no logical sense if you think about their origins. In the end, that kind of stuff is what kills this story. It’s just sloppy. Tons of unfinished or dropped story lines. Nothing gets tied up. It’s a story that feels completely unfocused, and for a story with such a set plot (as opposed to something like a slice of life), this unfocused narrative becomes all the more visible. I’m not saying it’s bad, but it didn’t do it for me, so you’ll just have to decide on your own.

Everyone Else is a Returnee:

Earth is about to reach the next stage in its existence, which includes the addition of mana. In order to improve human’s rate of survival, every human on earth is sent to other mana-containing worlds where they can learn it and practice it first. Well, everyone except the MC. A guy with a godlike level of conceal was always left out of everything, including being sent to another world. God catches this error too late, and then sends an angel to help the MC through the ten years until humanity returns. Although, the time dilation seems to be off a bit, and instead of being trapped for 10 years on an earth frozen in time, he’s trapped for 1000 years. This gives him plenty of time to read every book, visit every country, learn every language, master dismantling, blacksmithing, and every martial arts as well as every weapon. The trial finally ends and humanity returns with our MC massively overpowered but lacking the ability to use mana. However, there are more problems with earth, the time dilation having resulted in most of the animals on earth also living for 1000 years, and thus high-level monsters start popping out faster than expected. Thus, while he waits for his mana to kick in, he helps the angels keep Earth in check until other humans can catch up level-wise, completing angel assigned quests for heavenly rewards that make him rich and op’d. I really love this novel. It’s a lot of fun. He creates legendary equipment, runs around in a mask like a vigilante hero, and makes the angels all fall in love with him one at a time. It lightly explores how a present-day world would deal with the existence of an RPG-like world, and is full of humor, fun and interesting fight scenes, and an overall interesting story with an overarching problem, just how I like it. This story is very light-hearted, even when mentioning apocalypse level death and child slaughter it never tries to tug at your heart strings. Anyone looking for a complex, engaging, or emotional story will not find it here. Instead, it’s a rollercoaster ride, always throwing twists and turns, even when they don’t make a lot of sense, just to always keep things interesting. With over 300 chapters, it progresses much like a Xian Xia, following the protagonist’s gradual progression in levels from 1st class to god, but without some of the more annoying aspects of Chinese Web Novel.

Dungeon Defense:

Deonjeon Dipenseu

As a boy who grew up with a despicable harem-building father, the MC became an extreme pessimist after seeing his yandere mom fight with other women over his father’s affection often using their children to do it. Eventually, his father dies in prison after molesting a high school girl. Then, the MC becomes a NEET until he completes a survey for a difficult game he just beat, and is summoned into a world based on the game. Instead of the hero, he becomes the 71st of 72 demon lords on nightmare mode. With a broken ankle, a ludicrous debt, and adventurers literally breaking into his castle to murder him, he has nothing but his ‘do anything to survive’ personality to survive. That’s honestly when this story shines. When he’s manipulating people, he acts, moves, and thinks like a demon lord, and the story is at it’s finest when he is murdering adventurers, tricking receptionists, or exploiting game knowledge. Unfortunately, the rest of the time he is the “I want to sleep all the time” obnoxious protagonists I just hate. I mean, NEETs are fine. Never want to leave your castle? Okay. Don’t want to work? Fine. But these freaking ‘sleep 22 hours a day and then claim they’re exhausted when they put 1 hour of thought (not physical effort, just thinking) into it’ protagonists just piss me off. They are so pointless and so boring. The novel seems to completely drop this aspect of him by the third volume, but it seems to only add to the inconsistency of this novel, where characters seem to act exactly how the author needs them to act to pass the scene. In the end, you end up with a fluffed up “genius” MC, whose only real intelligence is Monk/Psych style cold-reading that is cartoonishly perfect even by their standards. I get how people can like this, especially those sick of “standard Japanese MCs” and want someone dark and psychopathic. This guy IS a demonlord, legitimately… and not the situationally misunderstood kind from Black Demonlord. However, in the end, the ultra-pessimistic view on life with his know-it-all narcissism puts me off of the character, and with a character driven story, it puts me off the story as well… It’s a story for angry goth teenagers. So if you listen to angry music and think about how much smarter you are than your parents, you’ll probably love this story. To me, it’s just something that thinks it’s smarter than it actually is. It’s not bad, but for something that’s trying to be dark it comes off as silly. If you want dungeon building, character building, stat acquisition, or, you know, actual dungeon defense, you won’t find it in this novel. If you want an MC acting like a smug asshole while always getting his way with minimal effort (usually through extortion and blackmail), because the story literally is built to make him always get his way with minimal effort, this is for you.

Stunning Edge:

Is this really the Claire that was a man-chasing idiot? Get prepared to read that sentence and variations of it about five times a chapter. In this web novel, a cold woman is seemingly reincarnated simply so the gods didn’t have to deal with her overbearing personality. However, she ends up in the body of a man-chasing idiot (are there even women like that, I find it hard to believe an attractive and powerful woman needs to fight that hard to lay attractive men). But whatever, it’s their universe, which attempts to blend the chinese Dao profound powers of Xian Xia novels with the western magic and knights. It doesn’t do that bad of a job of it, but the problem is that the novel just isn’t very interesting. It still contains many of the cliched trappings of most chinese web novels (malicious and disdainful people, constant repetition, slow progression), but it lacks any true develop. Everything feels random, not earned. The attempts at foreshadowing are just lazy (if only they knew what was about to happen… dun Dun DUN!!!), and as a result things just get set up and fall in her lap without ever making the reader feel like she earns it. As a result, the tension is also basically nilche. Furthermore, despite the fact that she contains the memories of both her old and new life, the cold, power-hungry personality completely overtakes the “man-chasing idiot”, which also overtakes anything about her that might be interesting. They could have played the personalities off of each other, maybe had her eyeing men and being annoyed by it or something… but that would involve writing depth, and this character has none. Despite being a welcomed female protagonist, she’s just a dry, boring Xian Xia protagonist desperate for strength for no freaking reason other than she thinks she’s entitled to it. It’s not unreadable, but in my limited Xian Xia experience (i’ve only read about 5), it’s on the lower end.

Ascendance of a Bookworm:

A young woman who loves reading is reborn to a poor family in a world where books are hard to come by. After a heavy fever at the age of five, she awakens to her memories of her former life. She decides to dedicate her life to fixing her lack of books problem. A lot of people hate this story because the protagonist is selfish and conceded. I hate this story for completely different reasons. Specifically, the story is very disjointed. This is perhaps one of the least consistent stories I’ve ever seen. A lot of people hate how she treats her family, which is basically to constantly talk about how poor and dirty they are. However, how dirty can people honestly be? I mean, she claims her sister is so dirty she doesn’t even want to touch her hand. But her family has a string to dry laundry, so they do wash laundry. They understand ‘clean’. They yell at her for dirtying her blanket when she cries on it. Apparently, hands so filthy you don’t even want to touch someone are fine, but tears are too dirty for this family? It’s like the author is trying to imagine an impoverished family despite never having seen one, and in his pompous attitude decided ‘poor people are dirty’, because ‘homeless people’ is as far as their understanding of poverty goes. The inconsistencies permeate this story. An unrelatable girl lives in an unrealistic family. Despite being a “bookworm”, she lacks common sense, and spends most of the time being surprised by everything (despite inheriting the mind of a 5 yo already living in this world). Add on to that the fact that the story has 600+ chapters but the relatively slow release schedule has pumped out only 50 chapter in the last 2 years and you have a recipe for a web novel that is a polite pass.

The Strategy to Become Good at Magic:

In a world with VMMORPGs, a certain girl gets trapped in the game made reality in her avatar after trying to log out. She finds herself at level 1, age 4, with all of her skills locked behind her low level. She also has an unhatched egg for a holy beast white tiger. She hatches it, finds out it’s as useless as she is, and the pair set off to survive in a high-level forest, which turns out to be somewhat easy because she spawns at a “safe zone” in the center of the forest that only she and her tiger can enter. Unlike other stories where the MC takes off on an adventure involving guilds, etc… this girl just stays tight and builds a home where she is, befriending the wild-life and setting up ground rules while she’s at it. The magic cataclysm that brought her there attracts various races to investigate, and a large portion of the story is dedicated to her interactions with people visiting the forest. The best thing I can say about this story is that it rarely goes in the direction you’d expect. It keeps itself light and funny, as she puts her high-level skills for sale, offering high-level potions, cooking, forest visitor accommodations, and even training. She peddles her wares while mostly just doing whatever she feels like. There is no gain or goal. It doesn’t focus on her leveling or gaining skills. She’s an OP character who comes off as mildly villainess in her selfishness and pragmatism, embracing her assassin class, and seeming more demon than human, despite her young form. She does eventually leave the forest, and it seems like the same joke gets repeated over and over again where she goes somewhere, acts ruthless, everyone tsukkomis, and then she goes somewhere else. Not an awful read, even if the story title is meaningless.

 I Will Live with Humility and Dependability as My Motto:

Kenkyo Kenjitsu

Kenkyo, Kenjitsu o Motto ni Ikite Orimasu

A woman is reincarnated in the body of the villainess from her favorite romance game. It’s basically the same exact story as Destruction Flag Otome, complete with taking place in a high-society school where the “Emperor” meets a commoner on scholarship and falls in love with her, and the MC is the jealous villainess that tortures her and as a result eventually gets her comeuppance. On her first day of school, she recalls her former life as a commoner and that this was a game, changing her personality from cruel to kind. Of course, she has a good 12 years to prevent herself from reaching her bad end. The difference between this and DF Otome is that this takes place in an alternative modern Japan that is identical to our world other than the school. There is no magic and no swordsmanship. The ‘Emperor’ is just a nickname for a wealthy, popular guy in school (there also seems to only be one male lead in the game). She’s part of the top 1% at a top school, and in a special prestigious club. Where Otome was pure cutesy wish fulfillment, where the girl causes a harem of guys and girls to fall for her… this story isn’t so romantic. She interacts with various people, and the pacing is brisk, but it’s not like everyone falls for her instantly. Instead, the story just sort of keeps going on, with her occasionally making friends, helping people in relationships, and navigating her high school life. When she does interact with the characters from the game, you never quite know how she comes off, because her silly, idiotic behavior as displayed in the narration is supposedly hidden by an unapproachable, cool atmosphere not unlike the school idols. It’d be nice if this discrepancy between appearance and reality was addressed more often, but instead, you only get maybe a chapter every 30 chapters that shows things in other points of view. In fact, that’s really the only payoff this story gets. She’s an insecure, sometimes silly girl, but she doesn’t realize that she has the reputation as the school Goddess to which noone but her posse can breach. The fact that she is in a game and knows the bad ending is rarely addressed, and doesn’t serve to add anything to the story. Instead, it’s a fairly generic slice-of-life high school story, with none of the charm of another world stories. The romance moves at a crawl (if you can even call it romance when 100 chapters in she hasn’t made any progress with any boy), but the pacing is very steady as it gradually pushes her year after year through elementary school and eventually high school. It’s not bad, but it certainly isn’t like most of the stories on here, with no clear direction and very little satisfaction. If you like high school comedies like School Rumble, this would be more appealing. As an another world story, it barely is one.

Breakers: (Completed)

Breakers offers the same setup as Dungeon Defense. After purchasing the VR special edition release of his favorite game where you could play either as the demon king rising to power or the hero rising to stop him, an MC named after a korean word for “protagonist” awakens in the game world on the eve of a battle in the body of the lowliest demon prince. Five years before the infamous massacre where the would-be demon king savagely murders all his brothers and sisters, the weakest 9th prince must start gathering power and steal his favorite allies from the former MC to survive the new world he found himself in. That’s as far as this novel aligns with Dungeon Defense, where it drops all the moodiness of an angry teenager from that webnovel for something that is actually fun to read. Fortunately, instead of a pouty, whiny, dipshit that sleeps all day (Dantalion), the protagonist is willing to work hard as he sees the gains it gives him in status. In addition, he isn’t simply the protagonist of the game, but it’s literally his job / skill, giving him a constant stream of benefits that almost guarantee his success. I can see how that takes a lot of the pressure off when he’s literally got an ability that will insure he’ll always come out on top, but that’s basically the curse of all webnovel protagonists, this one just has the guts to amusingly acknowledge that fact. He impresses many of the other children of the demon king, and many of the allies turn out to be cute girls, thus giving a harem vibe between him and his allies and half-sisters. He also manages to obtain many of the legendary dragon god items that even the hero MC never managed to acquire. There is a background story (as if preparing for the demon king massacre isn’t enough) regarding the four horseman of the apocalypse, where the protagonist represents conquest. Oh, you don’t remember the conquest horseman? Yeah, for some reason the author swaps pestilence with conquest, even though the two have nothing to do with each other. Maybe it’s a Korean translation thing? Anyway, it’s an odd change that spoils the impact of the main storyline a bit when it makes no damn sense. Other than that, it’s actually a pretty fun novel with good pacing and good progression. The protagonist is just as much a flat everyman as your standard webnovel protagonist, so I could argue it’d be nice if he, and many of the side characters, had a bit more identity and personality, but compared to most webnovels on the list, it’s fun, light, and entertaining. While it may not reach my top ten, I think the fact it’s one of only a handful of novels with an actually finished story and translation, that’s worth something as well.

Running Away From The Hero:

An odd and rocky story, the author actually recently scrapped the whole story and decided to start a remake, rewriting from the first chapter. A guy is reincarnated to another world, but instead of getting things easy like your standard isekai protagonist, he had to lie, cheat, and murder to survive, ultimately becoming a villain and the head of an evil organization. Fast forward 40 years and a true hero is born. However, through various misunderstandings, that hero decides he is his teacher and sensei. So, he has to keep up the rouse of being a teacher while secretly trying to escape the hero and his inevitable justice. The story is another one of those ultra-pessimistic stories and written very casually. Even the remake, while structurally a bit improved, still falls on hefty exposition and telling instead of showing. It’s written in perpetual 4th wall break, with the narrator literally speaking to you, the reader. As a story that seems intentionally designed to stop immersion, it’s very difficult for me to get into. It doesn’t come off as interesting to me, but for the pessimists sick of the standard Japanese MC, this is one that mocks it from the side of the villain.

The Tutorial is Too Hard:

This strange Korean novel feels a bit like a merger between Reincarnator and Everyone else is a Returnee. Just as the Earth changes to having monsters and magic, 100 random people from each country is sent into a “game” where they fight their way through 100 grueling levels before being sent home, and the returnees keep the powers and equipment they gained and become the new form of defense for Earth. While they call it a Tutorial for effect, this isn’t REALLY a tutorial. It’s more of a trial designed to strengthen humans so that they can effectively protect earth (after the trial period, you can’t get any stronger). Every month another trial begins and another 100 humans are selected for each “server”. Each level has their own themes from testing physical abilities, endurance, or mental stress. At the time of being selected, a person can choose between easy, medium, hard, or hell modes which increase the difficulty but also the inevitable reward. The protagonist is a former professional gamer who selected hell mode during the first trial before anyone even figured anything out about the system, only to find himself the only survivor of his group. And the next group, and the next group after that. No one has successfully completed Hell mode and the protagonist runs into yet another problem. At level 60, he can no longer progress without a second player, and since noone else on Korea’s server chooses Hell mode, he’s been trapped in the tutorial for years alone, with only access to the forum of other tutorial players to communicate with the outside world. Then, as luck would have it, a girl with real world skills as an archer accidentally selects hell and shows promise. So, you’d think the story would be about him providing her advice and help as she fights her way up to level 60? Alas, no, we’re given a teaser followed by a flashback where we have to watch him fighting his way up sixty levels. Every level takes 5+ chapters to conquer, so suffice it to say the payoff of her fighting towards him and the pair of them working to escape is a long way off… and since we already know the fact that he survives since this all occurs in the past, it really kills a lot of what could have been awesome about this story. The story mostly focuses on skill acquisition with no clear rules, the author clearly just making things up as he goes, mixed slightly with some psychological aspects. The protagonist himself is an unlikable douche-bag, which kind of kills a lot of the sympathy we’re supposed to be feeling for him in his plight. He comes off a bit like a child… as someone who never quite grew up… and even in the prologue (level 60) he acts this way, so we know his character doesn’t develop in the slightest over the story. It’s not a terrible story… but it is a story with absolutely nothing going for it since a lot of it got spoiled in the prologue and the expected payoff is so far away that I could make a comment about seeing the peak of Mount Tai. Sorry, that’s Chinese. The story literally breaks the best parts of its own premise in the first chapter, the progression you want it doesn’t offer and the progression you get just isn’t rewarding enough. I’ve rarely seen a novel so self-defeating as this one, but if you want a time killer it isn’t a bad one.

Even Posing As A Hero Is Easy. Why? Because I’m A God:

Yuusha no Furi mo Raku Janai–Riyuu? Ore ga Kami dakara–

Like Noragami, a small-time god has reached the point where the last of his shrines on Earth is destroyed. Deciding to return to heaven, he accidentally ends up in a fantasy world desperately looking for a “true hero” to defeat the oppressive demon king. Upon rescuing a princess maiden from being sacrificed to the demon lord, she reveals that in this world, heros who stack up enough accomplishments are revered as gods of valor. Thus, he sees an easy way to regain followers by performing simple feats of heroism. However, he also must keep his godliness a secret and reign things in as to not get noticed by this world’s gods or the demon king. Furthermore, when he gains followers, his stats get boosted, and maidens offer the biggest boost, so harem! However, his stats are already so large that these boosts look like a drop of water. It’d be nice if his godly stats were a little more dependent on having followers, but alas this is not that kind of story. It does has heavy harem elements as all the girls gush over him and the story does try to ramp up tension by having an overarcing plot about the demon king manipulating events and wiping out competition. However, the story never leaves you too concern, as the MC sort of just fixes everything because… god. Occassionally, the story gets really lazy, especially when writing action or harem characters with believable motivations, so I’d rate this story as fairly mediocre. It is not well-written enough to stand out, but it’s distinct enough that it’s not like everything else.

Semi datte Tensei sureba Ryuu ni naru: (Completed)

Even a Cicada Becomes a Dragon If Reborn

A happy-go-lucky Cicada lives out his relatively short three weeks of life followed by death with only a single regret. He never mated to pass on his genes. Then, he finds himself reborn as the last living dragon in a fantasy world. In that world, dragons are the most powerful, nearly god-like beings which also contain a genetic memory of their ancestors. Apparantly, three weeks as a Cicada can overwhelm the 1000s of years of dragon history plunged into his head, and his personality becomes unlike any other dragon. Namely, he doesn’t have a taste for meat, and instead lives of the nectar of the world tree, and also really wants to find a mate, completing his life-long dream. I first noticed this story because of a very large number of 5 star reviews accompanying it. My impression is that the entire story desperately tries to be poetic. It’s trying to make some kind of grand comment on the nature of life. But to me, rather than being a story that IS beautiful, it comes off as a story that’s TRYING to be beautiful. The plot is silly, the story is contained (and finished), but it’s literally manufactured to try to make you feel something. If you don’t mind how cheap and delibrate the story is on forcing an emotional response (or if you just want the feels at any cost), then this is a simple, light, somber story designed to make you feel butterflies with all the skills of a Sophomore English major.

I’m bored, so I Decided to go to Another World:

A king tries to summon heros from Earth to help him fight in his war against the Demon Kingdom. Earth’s minor goddess delays the summon, but must find 10 people to send to another world. The protagonist has superhuman powers, but as he’s the only abnormality in a typically normal world, he jumps at the chance to be sent to a new world. The goddess gives him (and the other 8 humans) the ability to speak their language and a ring full of vaguely described powers such as inventory. She convinces a fairy to go with him who acts as the slightly less annoying Navi to his Link. Upon being summoned, he immediately dislikes the king, beats him up, and then goes off to do the standard adventuring in a new world, which quickly spirals into freeing slaves with the goal to create his own city/kingdom. Although written in English, it isn’t the author’s native tongue so expect the writing to be about on par for a translation. It’s a fairly standard isekai story, but it takes from many different Isekai stories to try to create something unique. You have a confident, superpowered guy not dissimilar to Izayoi from problem children (so not Standard Japanese MC), but unlike Skill Taker where he has the power of a god just because, this story uses that plot point to help you understand his character. His “harem” is composed of a little fairy and a six-year-old girl, so not really romance/harem building. Most of the side characters don’t have much of a personality or individual voice, and you’ll find queens talking the same exact way as street urchins. Also, to show how strong the MC is, his opponents are stupidly powerful, and when you have simple thieves that are supposedly faster than SS ranked adventurers (a group of 30 of them, protected by an even stronger SS ranked monster), you start wondering how this world even manages to exist before the protagonist came when all the bad guys so absolutely outmatch normal plebs. Still, if you love the another world cliché, this novel functions as a fun homage to the genre written by a fan.

Long Live Summons!:

LLS
Zhaohuan Wansui

What can I say about LLS? Another Chinese Webnovel. In this one, a guy teasing his daoist priest master gets literally kicked into another dimension waking up in the body of a failure who tried to kill himself over his inability to make a contract with a grimoire and also loosing his fiancee. This guy, a casual pervert, becomes superstrong, acts ruthlessly, dominates women. Basically, this is a Xian Xia version of pokemon, with grimoire books acting as pokeballs. He’s able to instantly contract his grimoire shortly after being summoned and instantly becomes OP’d for vaguely defined reasons. Most Xian Xias sort of just dump abilities on the MC, but this makes his OP in random ways that don’t even really feel earned. First he’s handed a skill that is basically OP Identify, allowing him to instantly see through all weaknesses and use his contracted monsters to their fullest. Then he’s handed an innate sword skill that instantly makes him a super swordsman. Then he’s handed a super summon that is just the strongest. His fights never feel challenging, as he’s always just a tad more OP than the situation calls for. Everyone assumes he’s trash to a laughable degree… and then he impresses everyone by being a bad ass. It’s written to be full of humor and doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it doesn’t feel self-aware enough to truly take advantage of how ridiculous most of its content seems. This IS a silly story, but treats itself a tad too seriously to make it work. So, in the end, the entire thing just feels disorganized. The fight scenes, the OP progression, the characters, the plot… it is all over the place. It goes from great to boring and back again. It’s not a bad novel, just uneven. If you like comedy and vengeance, that’s what this novel is… a ruthless guy being ruthless while cracking jokes and conquering the hearts of women while every other person in this world is an evil dickhole just waiting to be stepped on. If you want to read that theme being repeated ad nauseum, this is the book for you.

Chronicles of My Adventures in Another World With Kawazu-san:

Ore to Kawazu-san no Isekai Hourouki

A powerful magician on his deathbed decides to go out with a bang. Using magic to search for the most powerful magical vessel alive, he decides to endow him with all his magic and power so that his disciple can one day surpass even his own legacy, destroying himself in the process. That turns out to be a college student from our world, whom he drags over to his own without giving him any choice. The college student realizes that rather than having a magic of a couple thousand as expected, his magic exceeds 8 million, giving him godlike magical abilities. He brings the magician who summoned him  back to life using a frog as his new body, molding it into a beastman like appearance… and then the pair just go out and do stuff. It’s sort of like “The Odd Couple”, two people just whining, complaining, and bouncing jokes off each other. Sometimes they reach a teacher / disciple relationship, but most of the time it’s just the god-like magician going around doing whatever he feels like while the frog-san tsukkomis and laments over his own insignificant accomplishments which are but a grain of sand compared to what his disciple can do. The sensei / stupid, op’d disciple trope can be fun, but this story doesn’t really double down on it. Instead, it feels more like a story that doesn’t know quite what it wants to be beyond mildly amusing. It is mildly amusing, but don’t expect much more out of it but a light read about a chilled back god and his frog mentor.

I Leveled up from Being a Parasite, But I May Have Grown Too Much:

I Leveled Up Through Parasitism But I Might’ve Gone Too Far
Kisei shite Level-ageta n da ga, Sodachisugita kamo Shirenai

A 20 yo NEET ends up falling through a hole made between his world and another world. The goddess confronts him and offers to let him to take his pick of 3 classes, but when his list of possible choices appears, parasite is the only choice. Thus, he goes to another world and must live as parasite on other people… kind of. The author doesn’t really understand the definition of parasite. He’s more a commensalist. In other words, it’s a ridiculous OP’d class that let’s him to target people, and while they are targeted he gains equal experience in their class (thus gaining him dozens of classes / class-specific skills like Slave Harem and Growth Cheat, but without any reason why it’s so OP). As he quickly becomes able to attach it to more people, it also boosts his experience so he received multitudes more experience than the people he’s parasitizing. This quickly includes gaining equal money to what they earn as well. That’s right, his ability is so OP’d he can literally sit on his butt and level 3X or more faster and reap 3X or more the rewards for doing absolutely nothing. But… at least the people he’s parasitizing loose something, right? Nope. Where does that money come from? Who knows. And mind you, this isn’t a world were when monsters die they drop gold so the money is like magical counterfeit, right? A class hasn’t been so unbalanced since “Cheat Skill: Sleep Learning”. He starts out as you typical Neet / lazy protagonist, but he quickly melts into the role of generic Japanese protagonist. So, at least it’s good he actually does stuff despite not having to. A bunch of girls all fall in love with him. No reason. Just because he’s the protagonist. Why is this one class of parasite so completely unbalanced? No reason. Just because he’s the protagonist. This story could have been something had he actually been taking something from others and had a bad personality, but the story goes out of its way to paint him as a saint: sharing openly, freely distributing money, and rushing to the rescue to save damsels in distress. It’s a weak story, with weak justifications, and just weak writing. Yet… it’s not that bad. It’s not boring to me like “Smartphone”, it doesn’t piss me off like “Sleep Learning”… It’s a lazy, cheap wish fulfillment story, but for reasons I can’t even understand, it works well enough. There are worst ways to waste your time. It’s a solid average. Worth trying if you’ve already read all the good ones.

Magi Craft Meister:

A magical craftsman on the verge of death builds a robot that she orders to find someone to inherit all of her magic and legacy. After a thousand years of looking, the automata finds a Japanese guy with the right conditions (ie, being the protagonist). He was a former orphan who cared for his orphanage, and moments before his death from a work related accident he ends up teleported to the magi’s workshop. Once the collective knowledge is passed on to him, the automata falls apart, leaving him alone in a place he doesn’t recognize and no food to survive. He fixes the automata and then tries to use a teleport gate. It fails, sending him to some unknown place. A few moments later, the automata finally wakes up, and starts searching for its new master. The guy ends up in a small town from another world, where he befriends the locals. As the new magi craft meister, and with the magical powers to create just about anything he can imagine, you’d think he could create some pretty crazy and wonderful things to revolutionize this world, right? That’s why the first thing he creates is a water pump. Yeah. Just a water pump. And then a hotspring. I guess if there is a volcano nearby you can just toss one of those up anywhere. Even more strange, he tries to patent the water pump and make money off of it. He’s a meister who can literally create life, and he’s worried about getting wealthy from a water lever, which is off given what we know about him. He turns from a generous guy who just wants to improve the lives of kids into a money grubber within chapters. Don’t worry, another chapter later he no longer cares about selling his creations again, which is just in line with his shallow, empty, lack thereof a personality. His powers are underutilized and most of what he creates are trivial things such as balls, lighters, and rubber tires (and I guess horse golems, but not cars because… reasons). The guy himself has no emotional reaction to being teleported to another world, and just immediately starts chilling in this new village for months without a care. When the robot finally shows up, the story starts recycling the plot every volume. He goes somewhere, helps out some cute girl, crosses a noble, and then flees the area after getting into a fight with the noble’s men. He flees abrubtly barely caring for the consequences of the people he abandons, which makes him look like an asshat and probably should lead to some repercussions that don’t happen because everything always works out his way. The girls all fall in love with him, and he’s aware they love him (in a rare twist he has a valid reason for ignoring their confessions), which makes his willingness to abandon them at the drop of a dime all the more baffling. The story isn’t bad, but it forgot the most important thing, creating characters and a scenario that actually makes any logical sense.

Hail The King:

A king with the mind of 3 year old is shot with an arrow during a siege on his castle, only to awaken as a reincarnated college student with the mind of a 12 year old… so progress? No, but seriously, this novel is the equivalent of a child smashing his action figures together. The main lead is an overbearing, whiny, petty, childish arsehat, but naturally that’s still an improvement over the functionally retarded person he was before. That’s not me being crude, the book flat out tells you he was retarded… over and over again, nonstop. Anyway, in perhaps the strangest direction I’ve ever seen a webnovel go, shortly after waking up in a over-the-top world with a continent the size of Jupiter, he’s the weakest King in the weakest Kingdom in the Weakest Empire on a continent with literally millions of kingdoms constantly at war, yadda yadda… anyway, just as he starts to acclimate to this world, he gets summoned to another world. The world of Diablo. Yes, Diablo the video game. He gets a couple hours a day where he can cultivate, and cultivation involves playing a life-like version of Diablo and gaining all the stat-boosts and skills he acquires in game. Fortunately, he desperately needs them, because his kingdom is on the verge of being annihilated by invaders. The novel is so blatantly silly. Fights are over the top and gory. The main MC is about as nonsensical as you can expect, immediately becoming an overbearing war-mongering tyrant so the author doesn’t have to think up motivations, character growth, or subtlety. It’s got all the trappings of a chinese web novel, but it’s so blatantly shameless at doing it that you almost don’t want to fault it. It embraces its immature silliness in a way few novels do, and thus it’s nothing but silly fun. If you like the chinese web novels themes of getting women, getting vengeance, and lording your power over others, then this novel takes it to the extreme. Hail to the King, baby.

Tensei Oujo wa Kyou mo Hata o Tatakioru:

Tensei Oujo
The Reincarnated Princess Strikes Down Flags Today as Well

Another girl is reincarnated as the villainess in a game she played. The difference is that it was a crappy game where each of the male leads suffered from perversions, mostly related to herself (a siscon, a masochist, a yandere, etc…). Only the side characters that were barely in the story had admirable personalities. To prevent her bad ending in ways that aren’t terribly clear, she uses her knowledge of the future to try to fix the bad personalities of each of the male leads while trying to successfully build a relationship with the side character she loves. He’s her senior by ten plus years, so he gets to watch her grow up so I’m not sure how far that’ll go. Meanwhile, by preventing all the male leads from falling into their perversions, they all start to fall in love with her instead, naturally. It’s not as cutsie as Destruction Flag Otome, and she’s not a ditzy idiot. This backfires a bit because it makes her denseness more a plot convenience than something that makes sense in the narrative. Furthermore, to avoid making her look annoyingly dense, the boys often act vague and mysterious, which makes it difficult to see how anyone truly sees her. It leaves it up to the vague smiles and sometimes nonsensical dialogue so that you can only guess as to their true feelings. Also, there are no females in her life. Even her mother is only ever mentioned in name. Pure all-boy harem. If you liked Destruction Flag Otome, this one offers a slight variant. The character’s backstories are decently complex. Their motivations and character growth are sound. One interesting thing it does is actually have her share her knowledge of the game with other characters to help prevent the future events like the coming of the demon king. I won’t say it’s better than DFO, but it is an alternative.

Boundary Labyrinth and the Foreign Magician:

Boundary Labyrinth and Magician of Alien World
Boundary Labyrinth and the Foreign Magician
Kyoukai Meikyuu to Ikai no Majutsushi

A guy going to play his favorite Virtual Reality MMO is interrupted when he realizes a burglar has snuck into his house. The burglar uses his virtual reality machine to immobilize him while he “allegedly” murders him, but none of that matters because a second later he awakens in the water, being rescued just as he was about to drown. He has the name of his avatar, and is the bastard son of a noble. Hated by the wife and her children, he is regularly abused and was in fact pushed into the water by his bully brothers. With his mind merged with the ten-year-old noble, he gains the ability to cast magic which uses the same system as the game and immediately lashes out at his brothers. Afterwards, he convinces his dad to allow him to leave to the labyrinth city where he can work on advancing his magic and… it’s not very good? I mean, it has it’s uniqueness. It’s harem. He fights around in a labyrinth with cute girls. However, the story is just flat. He’s basically a robot. The girls are the same. Not saying the story is bad, but however it is written, I find it difficult to be engaged.

It Seems Like I Got Reincarnated Into The World of a Yandere Otome Game: (Completed)

Yandere-kei Otomege no Sekai ni Tensei Shite Shimatta Youdesu

Another girl reincarnates inside a romance game as the evil villainess. Why is it always the evil villainess? In this case, it doesn’t even make sense. As you get by the title, she’s in a game where each of the male leads is a Yandere… wouldn’t the person most at risk of being killed be the protagonist of the game? Even if the evil villainess has one or two death endings, it just seems strange that the author would go that direction just to stick with the status quo. Anyway, she’s a noble who lives her life with the personality of a the reincarnated Japanese person rather than her original “game” personality, only remembering the game when she meets the first male lead, her soon to be fiance. Her memory only comes back at plot convenient intervals, so she can never plan to stop flags until right as they are happening. In this case, the boys are not born yandere, they become yandere after traumatic circumstances, so she tries to head off and prevent those circumstances from turning them that way by dealing with the crazy people who put them in that circumstance or dealing with their subsequent issues. It’s a bit like Tensei Oujo replacing perverted with yandere. It doesn’t have any demon king plot, and is actually a pretty short (only three arcs) story. You’d think being based on a yandere game would make it a lot darker story, but it really doesn’t. If you were looking for hardcore yandere, you won’t find it. I seriously doubt the author even knows how to write a yandere, and he apparently thinks ‘willing to kill the mc in the right circumstances’ = yandere (Those circumstances never occur or even come close to occurring in this story). This is yandere light. Other than that it is a decent story. I got a few laughs and a few touching scenes. My only major complaint is that structurally it can be tough to read. It doesn’t flow very well and a lot of scenes are not clearly described and can seem jarring to follow. Whether this is a result of translation or writing is anyone’s guess, but compared to other Otome reincarnation stories I’ve read, this one is a bit rough around the edges, although the storyline isn’t bad and it ends with a satisfying enough conclusion. Aspects of Harem, but not a true harem. More the “one main squeeze” and a few other guys that may or may not like her and it’s never clear how into her they are.

Life Howling: 

In this Korean novel, a 24 year old part-timer finds out he has been teleported into an arena style battle every night at 2 pm. Completing that night’s “mission” earns him points which he can spend on just about anything from weapons, armor, and food to skills, techniques and magic. His first randomly selected “skill” is a paladin-like god-tier skill that is used to explain away his OPness for the duration of the story. As the logic goes, using the skill takes external energy, so he doesn’t have to use his own stamina to heal himself or recover. Basically, he can fight better and last longer than anyone else, and that’s that. The missions start out as waves of enemies but quickly turn into survival challenges and dungeons and labyrinths to beat. Time doesn’t pass while he’s in this RPG world, and he can take anything he wants from the RPG world to the real world and vice-versa, including his skills and abilities. The story does not explore his life in Korea at all. Rather than exploring how his skills benefit the time he has in the real world, the story instead focuses on the missions and skill acquisition. His real world time only focuses on him preparing for the next mission. He can and does meet other people in the missions, including a high school girl early on. The chapters are rather short and the release time only picked up recently, so it doesn’t have too many chapters out. This is just another skill acquisition wish fulfillment story, without too much in the way of substance or story. If you like the overcoming challenges and gaining skills stories, you’ll like it. If you want deep characterization or complex stories, this won’t be for you.

Infinite Competitive Dungeon Society:

ICDS

On Earth there exists a select group of people by invitation only who are allowed to enter the Dungeon, a special training area where people from any world can gain items, learn skills, fight monsters, and even buy property to live if they want. The son of a dungeon explorer is trained relentlessly by his father for years until he’s finally old enough to get membership to the 1st (hardest) dungeon. There is just one problem. Earth is a world that traditionally lacks magic, and thus his father has been stuck on the 5th level for 20 years as the 6th level requires mana to defeat ghosts. Thus begins the boy’s path towards defeating the dungeon and gaining more power. Unlike any person before him, he continues to fight the bosses that appear every five levels over and over again until he can solo them (a raid usually requires 10 people). This gets him unique abilities and equipment sets which make him OP. Kind of silly that noone but this one guy ever thought to fight bosses over and over again, but let’s just say this story seems to drop all gamer logic so that this one guy can be OP. That guy grew up as a meathead with low intelligence, all muscles and only knowing how to fight. But through muscle potions and status points, he’s increases his intelligence and gains an attractive body with ever climbing charm. Also, Earth suddenly starts having monsters and people start gaining abilities. These abilities seem independent of the dungeon, and they seem to propel people to ranks far outstripping the protagonist without effort. The whole thing with Earth takes 100+ chapters before it goes anywhere, but it eventually paints a pretty interesting story about a multiverse of heros fighting world enemies (who take the form of any fantasy enemy from demon kings to brain slugs to dragons, etc…). The dungeon was created by former heroes so they can fight and level in a risk-free environments before fighting for their lives on their home planet. Predominately, the story is about him steadily becoming more powerful, gaining skills and aw-ing everyone while the girls form crushes on him because of his high charm. The pacing of this story is fast at first, jumping ahead in six month increments for years as he beats levels and gets stronger but ultimately slows down as the story progresses and the harem grows. The plot is paced slowly, and other than the tons of skill dumping that actually is retained throughout the story (as opposed to Arifureta and similar novels that sort of just drop it half way through), you also get 1-3 chapter fights with similar skill name dropping. Honestly, I typically just skim through the battles and only care about the loot he gets that will make him more OP next time. You’ll also get the “author is just pulling crap out of his arse” feeling as he comes up with OP skills just as he needs them to pass the next scenario only to have them replaced with even more OP skills twenty chapters later. If you liked “Everyone Else is a Returnee” or skill acquisition novels in general, you might like this one too. I’d say it ranks up there pretty close to “Everyone Else is a Returnee”… maybe less interesting fights, but still, a solid time-waster novel.

Tilea’s Worries:

A former otaku NEET who suffered from 8th grade syndrome lives a life of regret and is reborn as a girl in another world with magic and monsters. Determined to live this life properly, she puts her 8th grade syndrome aside, considering any talk of demon lords and ancient wars to be the talk of myths. Then, at the age of 17, her 14 year old little sister suddenly declares herself to be one of the six generals of the demon king reincarnated to conquer the world. Convinced her little sister has 8th grade syndrome and has met up with a rather large group of fantasy-era LARPers, she works to set them straight. The most comparable thing to this in my knowledge base is Angel Densetsu (great manga, read it), her reputation and allies growing with minimal input. A simple girl wanting a simple life gets confused as a reincarnated demon god, the overbearing power she isn’t even aware she has leads to her easily swapping away powerful monsters and demons like she’s dealing with tantruming children. She conveniently interprets events her own way and then it switches to the alternative party’s PoV who interprets events their own way. It’s funny, but it’s a bit of a one-note hit… so either it’ll do it for you or you’ll grow bored and quit. Overall, my biggest complaint is that the story really isn’t that clever. Rather than writing double entendres and creating amusing and unique scenes, he instead spends an insane amount of time detailing the mental gymnastics needed to bring everyone to their conclusions. In fact, I’d say about 90% of every chapter is just detailing the mental gymnastics so that something could happen. Better writing might have made this self evident or simply allowed us to enjoy the scene and accept everyone is making ludicrous assumptions… but this one instead focuses on the assumptions needed to write scenes rather than writing scenes that could lead to logical assumptions. A cute joke story about misunderstandings, sisterly love, and heros fighting demon lords. You’ll like it for a chuckle or you’ll hate it because of stupid characters and simplistic writing.

Magic Bullet In Magic Land: 

Magic Bullet in the Magical Land
Mahou no Kuni no Madan

A guy who becomes a NEET after his parents died plays a gun virtual reality MMO. He is inexplicably teleported to another world within his game Avatar and possessing all of the inventory of his game avatar, which seems to include every weapon ever conceived and infinite money. I’m not joking, it says he has infinite money apparently. Instead of starting the story there, he chills out in the cabin he was summoned to for a year. I know this guy is a NEET, but still, NEETS have video games and TV and entertainment. You expect me to believe this guy just sat in a cabin eating MREs for a year doing nothing? It didn’t even say he was practicing shooting or something… Anyway, he finally gets lonely and goes out only to find a village recently slaughtered by human supremacists who are a step away from raping a girl and murdering her little sister. He saves them, cliche cliche… and they meet up with her general father on the eave of an invasion where the human supremacists want to wipe out the demi-human / human mixed country because isn’t that the plot of every isekai? He uses his bottomless arsenal of weaponry to fight back against and battle the enemies while impressing all the girls. The girls take to him really aggressively while he acts impossibly weird and creepy (to the point the translator has to point it out various times a chapter). He drools over a 15-year-old almost-rape victim with all the concern of a pervert, even trying to grab her butt when she bends over near him, and perhaps worst she’s totally receptive to this treatment and not at all bothered by the 20-year-old stranger treating her like a sex toy. It’s a little weird, but fortunately you don’t have to deal too much with the characters, because the story mostly just focuses on the gun porn. Reading off types of guns with types of ammo, then details of him running around gunning down armies of opponents like Rambo. I mean, I don’t have much I can say against it, the kind of fighting isn’t any worst than my “skill fights” where they read off tons of made up skills used during battle, but at least in those stories the skills are earned. This guy can just pull out any weapon he wants. The story introduces a “shop” where he can presumably buy more guns/weapons with the points he gains killing people, but allegedly his inventory is basically infinite anyway so it doesn’t matter. He seemingly pulls whatever gun he wants for whatever situation whenever he wants without rhyme or reason. If you want an OP guy with guns in a world of magic, then this story is a lot more blatant than JSDF or gun ota. Like I mentioned, it’s pure gun porn.

The Ability to Make Town!? ~Let’s Make a Japanese Town in Different World~: 

Machi o Tsukuru Nouryoku!?? Isekai ni Tsukurou Nihon Toshi ?

A group of people all die in a train accident and are teleported to another world by a god performing an “experiment”. He offers them the capacity to choose a “power or cheat item” based on a random card selection. The protagonist instantly plays suck up to god, and even though god said the other people’s rudness was fine and he wouldn’t treat anyone differently, he treats the protagonist differently by selecting him last and letting him choose whatever card he wanted. Ranked from 1-10, he of course selects a level 10 card. Rather than eternal youth or some other OP skill, he picks the ability to make a town. He can make literally any item or food from any era of Japanese history. However, his “city” is set in the Edo time period so he gets a money “penalty” for purchasing modern stuff. This is meaningless, though, because his starting salary is so freaking enormous that he can buy all the modern amenities he wants unrestricted and still have enough to build a massive city around himself that supports him for years. He ends up setting up this city in a desert/Mongolian dry plains sort of area of unclaimed land. Eventually, demi-humans fleeing the human manifest destiny come to his town and he settles them all in, creating a multi-cultural demi-human city. You think it’d be a fun city-building story, but it really isn’t. Instead, it’s just really awkward. The MC is weird, coming off more like a alien trying to act human than an actual human. None of the characters are given any depth, so you have no emotional connection to any of his citizens, expect zero characterization. He walks around the city with a 9 mm pistol and bulletproof vest like a paranoid freak, and rather than growing a self-sufficient city of knowledgeable citizens he hand feeds them everything like he’s creating a mindless cult. In fact, the whole story feels less like he’s building a city and more like he’s building a compound, training desperate hungry refugies with no place to go like his own personal petting zoo while he remains held up in his modern home surrounded by 20 foot tall walls, and supplied with running water and electricity (solar panels) like a screwed up Willy Wonka hermit. At one point, a woman tries to leave and he even drives her down in his truck and forces- I mean “convinces” her to return. He’s so reclusive he even set up a telephone with a direct line to the leader of the tribe, who is the only person allowed to contact him on issues in his home. Like I said, this story is just screwed up. Ultimately, rather than a guy creating a city, it’s a guy trying to play god. Meanwhile, the author seems obsessed with the wrong things, including details about feces and pissing that seems to border on a fetish, not to mention the author’s true romance of the story, his love of camels. The most amusing thing in this novel seems to be the running commentary between the translator and the editor, which comes off like a Statler and Wardolf routine. I won’t say it’s an absolutely awful novel, it’s an okay story, but like uncanny valley, something about it just seems off, and the more you look, the more uncomfortable it becomes.

Arena: 

??u tr??ng
?????

A guy perpetually trying to pass a certain government exam so he can live the traditional 9-5 dies in his sleep and gets summoned to the Arena. An obnoxious chubi angel offers him a second chance to live as long as he can pass a certain series of tests. These tests transfer him to another world where he must complete certain criteria like defeating enemies in a certain amount of time and surviving in the woods while being hunted for a week. It’s nearly identical to Life Howling (Or I guess you could say Life Howling is identical to this). The difference is that he gets more time in between every “test”, (anywhere from 11 to 40 days) where the story focuses on him changing his personal life to meet the challenges of the Arena. After each test he get Karma points based on how well he performed during the exam, which he can trade in for skills, weapons, and so on. The optional skills and their respective costs are a lot more conserved than Life Howling, so the MC’s OP is a bit more reasonable. His main feature is that he’s very intelligent, but doesn’t apply his intelligence unless he’s under stress. To this book’s credit, it actually does well in displaying his intelligence in a not over-the-top or condescending way. It’s also that intelligence which seems to score the most karma points on tests, quickly turning him OP. The story switches between focusing on him dealing with his overbearing family of attractive sisters/mom and him dealing with the next challenge, which quickly includes pairing up with potentially troublesome teammates like gangsters and *shivers* women. For a Korean novel, this one is surprisingly sexist, the comments it makes are something I’d expect more in a Chinese novel. Anyway, guy becomes OP, guy gets girls, guy completes tests. That’s really about it. The skill acquisition is scaled back a bit where the story focuses a lot more on the characters and their interactions.  In a strange twist, it goes all hunger games as his party meets up with a mysterious organization that already knows about the arenas and future tests and wants to help them survive while paying them a salary. If you like the characters, you’ll like the story. If not, you still have Life Howling.

Risou no Himo Seikatsu: 

The Ideal Sponger Life

A beautiful Queen summons a generic Japanese MC to another world to be her husband and give her a child. In a male dominated society, she needs a husband with no aspirations so that she remains in power as Queen. He’s a distant, yet highly conserved relative of the royal blood and space-time magic, and thus she’s motivated to make an heir as well as potentially push concubines on him and resurrect the dwindling bloodline. He gets a month to bring ~300 squarefeet of junk from Earth, and rather than picking things that can revolutionize this world, he picks a refrigerator, a generator, and air conditioning. He makes a big stink about how difficult it is to get the generator and air conditioner too because he isn’t aware of portable air conditioners and how battery storage works. Half the stuff he takes it is later revealed could have easily been replaced with “magic items” anyway. He complains of “insects” and being unable to close his windows, yet has fabric over his bed acting as insect nets, but simply covering the windows with mesh is outside of this author’s brain power. It’s also a world that has magic, but can’t make glass. Freaking glass, as in melted sand. It doesn’t need to be see-through or perfect glass, just something to cover openings while letting the light in… but so stupid is this MC (the author), that he can’t fathom how a literal King could obtain glass in a world with freaking magic! (although I was informed his imbecilic quest for glass is actually a plot point in one of the later volumes). But you don’t read these kind of novels for the logic, you read this kind of story for the romance… which there is none. No chemistry between him and his wife. They have off-screen sex described in the way only a modest Japanese man can… which is to say… nothing special. It’s described like a womanly duty that the Queen doesn’t even really want to do all that much, really, but it makes him happy and helps make a baby so… sounds hot? I know they just met, but have some freaking passion here! The story focuses on her dealing with political intrigue while her husband lives like a careless NEET with no ambitions. He still has to fulfill roles as the prince consort, but everything he does it filtered through the Queen as the ultimate whipped man. He never does anything “impressive”, “amazing”, or “unexpected”, making the story the driest slice of life imaginable. Wish fulfillment at its most modest. The only good thing I can say about it is that it isn’t cliche.

Change: New World:

Another one that isn’t really Isekai but I’ll include it anyway because the world is changed into an RPG world much like God and Devil World. I have to say that if it resembled any web novel though, it’s most like Boku wa Isekai minus the rape. A wallflower-type socially awkward protagonist is in the bathroom when a goblin magically appears. He narrowly manages to kill it, becoming the first person to kill a monster in the new world and thus gaining a unique skill. After he kills it and levels, the announcement only then arrives confirming that everything is about to change, and thus monsters start to spawn. I guess the goblin spawned early by accident? His school is literally turned into a dungeon, with various spots acting as spawn points where monsters appear rapidly and fester. Steadily growing a form of girls, he camps spawn points to become more powerful. His unique skill is Equip, which gives him the always op’d analysis ability as well as the capacity to equip any item (RPG or not) and gain stat bonuses from it. He also gets additional stat bonuses from RPG items unique to himself. So, basically everything makes him uniquely stronger than anyone else, and thus OP. After that, he quests to escape the high school which is protected by a boss and filled with monsters much higher level than he is, which takes up a large portion of what is written so far (at least the first 90 some chapters). It’s a very fun and interesting book, with a slower pace than many of your standard Isekai. The story has some glaring inconsistencies and random retcons of a classic beta read. In many cases the author will just tell you he changed something rather than going back and actually changing it. However, he often listens to his reader base, and will make changes based on popular opinion. You can take that as good or bad. My biggest beefs with this book are how he treat girls and how he handles numbers. He really treats the girls in this story like they’re idiots. The MC is painted as a master manipulator who seemingly can dance psychological circles around these women. As a result, the women’s personalities are skin deep, and the plot has him basically molding them to his will in order to survive. The story does improve on tone as things progress, but for the first 50 chapters none of the female characters experience any kind of character arc or display signs of a deeper personality, well, with one notable exception. The other annoying aspect of this novel is that the author is just… really bad at math. The numbers never add up right. Like he’s got it so Minotaurs spawn every one minute thirty seconds. That’s 40 minotaurs per hour. It’s been like 2 days before they start hunting them, let’s say 36 hours, that’d mean this school allegedly contains 1,440 minotaurs by the time they start fighting them, and they spend a week hunting them. Exactly how freaking big is this high school? It’s described as gigantic, but it has to be the size of a freaking 10 km complex considering the number of monsters it allegedly contains. He describes the walk from the bathroom to his classroom as something taking 10+ minutes. Even being slow and sneaking this is ridiculous. Don’t even get me started on how uneven the leveling is. He can get to level 12 in four hours fighting lvl 6-8 goblins that spawn every seven-fourteen minutes, yet it takes the girls a week to get to level 15 fighting level 15-17 Minotaurs that spawn every 1 minute, thirty seconds (That would be +7000 Minotaurs after a week). Even though they have to split up the kills between them, this makes no effing sense. Anyway, it’s not a bad story and can be a lot of fun if you can get passed the misplaced sexism, the frequent inconsistencies, the tendency to pander, and the egregiously inconsistent sense of numbers. That sounds like I hate it, but I actually thought this one was a pretty entertaining read and worth the price of admission. It was also recently announced that he’s stopping the release of chapters and will be publishing online, so consider this discontinued. You could still finish the first “arc” which is ~100 chapters.

Isekai Yururi Kikou: 

A guy is accidentally killed by one of world’s five Gods (the god of Wind) and resurrected with generic OPness including mapping and infinite time-stop inventory. He is resurrected right next to a pair of twin 5 yos who happen to be Herculeas-like demi-god children of a water God. After he decides to take care of them, the water and air gods proceed to add various gifts after gifts on him until he starts to look a bit like Ichiro from Deathmarch: full of magical artifacts, money, abilities, and a laid back attitude. The story mostly follows him raising the children while doing whatever slice of life activities he wants, from cooking delicious meals to coming up with sweet recipes. He let’s the children do most of the actual fighting while he watches and uses magic to make sure they’re safe. The twins are as dry as toast, and never exude even a semblance of a personality. Occasional chapters reflect random witnesses points of view to show just how off and Op the MC truly is, but other than that, there isn’t much to this story. If you wanted to strip the loli harem and romance out of Death March and make it about a father figure with two nondescript twins that lack any personality, then you have this book. It seems to actively try to be anticlimactic, even going so far to introduce a villain and an evil plot, only to instantly resolve it off-screen through the actions of a noble friend. It’s a laid back slice-of-life novel with regrettably weak and forgettable cast, but it’s not a bad time waster.

Absolute Choice: 

A guy with extreme 8th grader syndrome is transported to another world while in the middle of playing a video game. This is a modern world that already faced an apocalypse as demon-like creatures break in to our world to regularly wreck havoc. Groups have thus formed that fight the monsters and each other full of psionics and espers which take on the role of superheroes for hire. This novel is a very strange mismatch of One Punch Man, Xian Xias, and of all things, “My Mental Choices Are Completely Interfering With My School Romantic Comedy”. It’s the kind of novel that literally puts a bald headed capped character wearing yellow and a white cape and calls him One Pun. Get it? Cause One Pun is a Pun on One Punch? Sigh… The MC has delusions of grandeur, but as it turns out, he happens to be an S classed super genius. The speed of cultivation is controlled by the capacity to imagine things and treat them as real, and who would be better at that then an 8th grade syndrome sufferer. While declaring himself “this king”, he is occasionally forced to choose between two “absolute choices”. He HAS to complete the option he selects which nets him a benefit, but if he fails he has to keep repeating it until he succeeds. Or maybe not, because the next time he has a choice he has to do it right or he gets a punishment equal to the reward. And then sometimes his choices don’t get him a reward at all and only serve to embarrass him! Yeah, it’s one of those novels where the rules don’t really apply as the author does whatever he wants to advance the scene, sometimes even forth wall breaking for a cheap joke. You think it might be a funny book about a weird over the top chuubi who happens to actually match his delusions of grandeur, but it turns out all the side characters are just as crazy and nonsensical,  which make their reactions of “shock” at our quirky protagonist odd when every other character he meets is just as over the top and quirky. At first, I only found it a little amusing, but as I read more of the book I found it can be genuinely interesting and occasionally even heartfelt. The novel shamelessly rips off anything cool from any anime, manga, or novel the author is familiar with, ripping even entire scenes from more popular IPs like Full Metal Alchemist and of course One Punch Man. Still, the MC is more likeable than your typical Xian Xia protagonist. However, like most Xian Xias, it suffers from the similar issue of being so caught up on expanding the story to increase the chapter count that it becomes a bloated mess and the progressing story slows to a crawl in the later chapters. Despite that, I find myself enjoying it. It’s not quite a satire, but its over-the-top silliness is played to the extent it might as well be enjoyed as one.

The Bear Bears a Bare Kuma:

Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear

Bear Bear Bear Kuma

A hikkomori girl updates her favorite VRMMO game which she uses to become super-rich somehow. She got awarded an OP bear suit with bear puppets for hands, and after completing a survey, is send to another world in that suit. It’s a story that supposedly tries to be cute, but as a web novel that doesn’t even have illustrations, all that “cuteness” is just left to your imagination. The girl herself is a 15 yo loner, once again showing an author who has probably never played an MMO in their lives (MMOs are hardly loner anti-social activities). I don’t know what it is about authors who try to make “cute” characters, but they always seem to make them violent psychopaths. Her cuteness seems to be underlaid by a lust for money and extreme brutality against those that slight her that borders on a Xian Xia protagonist. She’s OP, despite starting at level 1, and it’d never explain why. Yeah, the suit makes her OP allegedly, but the benefits it gives are described as level specific. So, when she’s level 3, fighting adventurers presumably 20 levels higher than her, it makes no freaking sense. She might be strong for a level 3 because of her suit, but nothing should make her so powerful nor so confident in her own abilities. However, that’s it, you’re expected to see her as cute while she acts like a tyrant. I guess if you just LOVE bears and bear-related humor, you’ll love this novel. Otherwise, it’s just about as generic of another world novel as you can get, complete with rescuing someone,  reaching her first city, finding an inn, joining the guild, and all the other “so” generic Isekai tropes you come to expect, except she’s in a bear suit! So… different?

Library of Heaven’s Path:

A librarian reincarnates into the body of the most pathetic teacher at a martial arts school. After screwing up someones cultivation, he no longer has students and was graded with a zero in his last teacher evaluation. He reincarnates with the gift of an internal library that unlocks details about people once he sees them use their techniques, which includes anything from flaws in their technique to personal details and more. Thus, he rises to becoming a great teacher that fixes student problems while propelling them to the top of their classes. If you were hoping for a Xian Xia version of Great Teacher Onizuka, you can keep hoping. This story could have been that good… if it had any heart to it. Instead, it takes all of the stupid and none of the cleverness and emotional weight. The MC is an OP teacher not because of any ability of his own, but because he’s a BS artist with a skill that basically tells him how to fix every problem with every cultivator. How a quiet mannered librarian turns into a over-the-top BS artist? Shrug. There is also face slapping, not the metaphorical kind, but he literally has slapping contests where he slaps people’s faces. It’s probably trying to parody other Xian Xia, but it isn’t self-aware or smart enough to pull it off, so it ends up as more of just a slightly different take on a Xian Xia for those easily amused by Xian Xias. If you like Xian Xias and want to waste two weeks of your life, read this.

Crossing to the Future, it’s Not Easy to Be a Man:

On the other side of Chinese Xian Xia novels that I don’t typically review are the science fiction “mech” stories which replace cultivation with injecting yourself with “genes”. Very few of them are actually Isekai, but this just happens to be one. A young woman dies after living a life of extreme pain and torment. The reason she died was the result of her high spiritual energy being too much for her body. It was induced by an interactive learning AI that invaded her body from a super advanced world. Where/when this world existed and how the AI ended up in her is unknown. What is known is that upon her death, the AI manages to send her soul energy through a wormhole that takes her to a future humanity that does have the cultivation technology to cope with her soul energy, yet still not as technologically advanced as the world her AI partner came from. The AI partner takes the form of a child-like super-hacker AI, but her learning space also includes 9 unique instructors who also have their own personalities. She is born as the daughter of God-like Mech Commander, the youngest and most popular in the entire federation. As luck would have it, he is lost before she is born, presumed dead, in an evil plot by their enemies, and in a strangely sexist society she must masquerade as a boy to accept his government benefits and go to the best schools. A mixture of her father’s legacy, her extra 20+ years of life experience and pain tolerance over the other kids, and her often brutal learning AI which forces her to become familiar with deathly situations and can turn a single night of real time into a month long training routine, and she quickly becomes OP’d as fruck. Although she’s surrounded by boys, there is almost no romance, so don’t be worrying about any subversive yaoi. The story is like most Chinese stories, very slow progression, lots of repetition, Chinese nationalism. Strangely enough, the author is clearly a fan of anime and manga and it shows throughout the story. However, he tries to make up for it by showing an intense hatred for the Japanese. Naturally, the good guys are modeled after the Chinese while the detestable bad guys are Japanese. He even has the Japanese enemies talking like manga cartoons, shouting baka and hai, even in situations where baka doesn’t even make sense (I guess in 10,000 years, baka has become a Japanese curse word). The novel progresses slowly. The big “twist” is actually spelled out in the stories summary, and also spoiled about a hundred chapters before it happens. If you want an idea of how long it takes for the setup of this story to finish (ie, the point the summary blurb covers), you’re looking at 200+ chapters. Yeah, I’m not lying, it’s 200 chapters before she gets into the military school mentioned in the freaking summary. Before then, you’re dealing with strangely mature 5-13 year old kids. And if you were hoping for some awkwardness of gaining hormones in their teenage years, this is all sort of just skipped in two sudden 3 year time skips from 10 to 13 and then 13 to 16. Apparently, boys only think of military and responsibility, and not at all about girls. So, yeah, if you didn’t want romance, this book is so much anti-romance it goes the other way into the realm of being unbelievably lacking in any sexual anything. Overall, it’s funny, but like all Xian Xia, if you want it to go anywhere you’re in for a long ride… to which I’m not sure the 300 some chapters out as I write this are enough. Might be better off waiting for chapter 500 before you start this one, less you want to join the chapter a day club of most Xian Xia readers.

Epoch of Twilight: 

Since I included God and Devil World, I probably should included Epoch of Twilight as well. It’s another story where the end of the world occurs with RPG stats. The difference is that only the MC has RPG stats, which came to him for no clear reason years before the apocalypse. At first, I really liked the novel. It dropped the zombie aspect and purely kept it evolving monsters and plants. The process actually occurs much slower than in the other novels. It’s not instant apocalypse, but a slow, gradual decline as the monsters slowly outnumber the humans, who can only evolve by eating the meat of evolved monsters raw. I should also add the story does have sex, but it’s not really an R18 book, so it’s forgivable. The books known for introducing a lot of characters who don’t stay around for a long time. Other than the MC and a few of her main girls, the people in his life seem to come and leave. As the world falls apart, the MC keeps getting into a good situation (lot’s of food, secure location) only to lose it just as quickly. It’s like survival NTR, with the MC, despite his power, never managing to keep more than a slight edge over certain death for him and his followers. I like these kinds of stories, and like God and Devil World, I wanted to like this one. However, it has another overbearing, hypocritical asshat of a man protagonist that some readers seem to like because they’re horrible people who secret wish fulfillment seems to be overbearing and monstrous. It shows all the shortcomings of Chinese webnovels from blatant nationalism to massive chapter count to everyone being just the worst people imaginable. The biggest problem with this novel seems to be the author, who is just constantly writing plotholes, inconsistencies, and blatant falsehoods. He really doesn’t have his crap together, nor did he really know where he wanted to go with this story and it’s characters. That’s why characters come and go without rhyme or reason. Not in a “Walking Dead” anyone can die at any time kind of way, more as in a “I don’t know what to do with this character, let’s kill them off” kind of way. Many characters who are introduced you have to wonder why in the first place. I hear the story really goes of the rails later, so if this incoherence bugs you in the beginning, it’ll only get worst. I’m not saying it’s a bad novel, per say. But all of the characters were either unlikable or fleeting, the story was all over the place, and the inconsistencies were severally annoying. Eventually, I just had to give up, maybe you’ll find something more to like.

I Have a Mansion in the Post-apocalyptic World:

The first chapter or two have a high point of entry as you get infodumped, instead of shown, a lot of information. However, once this webnovel gets going, it’s surprisingly fun. A mixture of Dominion’s End, Merchant Isekai (general, not a specific one), and of all things, Fallout… you end up with an MC whom one day spontaneously gains the ability of interdimensional travel. Although it sounds like he should be able to go anywhere and any time, when he triggers it, he specifically ends up in a futuristic world that had undergone a nuclear apocalypse. Basically, Fallout. They call it the wasteland. Colonies are set up in small locations that used to be part of the real world. Mutants and ghouls (I mean zombies) roam the waste. He gets a special armband that can display his health and status aka the pipboy. Many survived in special fallout shelters, each one undergoing various experiments. It has Deathclaws! He even runs into the Lone Wanderer… I mean a Wasteland Scavenger that was a former Vault Resident who is strong enough to wipe out an entire battalion of soldiers with her laser rifle. He finds her starving, and that’s where the story takes off. He saves her life, and seeing him as like the innocent vaultdweller she used to be, she decides to go under his employ, taking clean fresh food in exchange for protection and guard duty. Thus, he sets out to make a fortune in both worlds, selling the advanced technology and otherwise useless gold to his old world for millions, while trading nearly perfect unmutated food to the wasteland for tons of bottlecap… I mean energy crystals harvested from mutated beasts. It’s actually a good novel. There isn’t much more to say about it. It’s a fresh take on Isekai, so from someone who only recently touched on scifi-themed isekai, I enjoy it. It did rub me the wrong way a bit by often focusing way too much on Earth and the MC’s own wish-fulfillment, spending too much time having him bang gold diggers, go on vacations, build a business, hostile takeover a country. These are the longest parts of the story, and also the most boring. It even throws a 17 chapter arc at you in the middle of a climactic scene, forcing readers to slog through a mindless side story of boring symbolism all before they can return to the parts that matter. After spending enough time with this novel, tedious… would be the best way to describe it. The best parts… the parts worth reading, are far and few between. It’s less about having a mansion in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and more about becoming a billionaire by suddenly gaining access to cheap third-world labor and gold. It has some things to like, but just as many things to hate.

Oh no! After I Reincarnated, My Moms Became Son-cons!:

A guy reincarnates into the body of a prince who just died attempting to kill some dragons. He was a engineer/ solider-boy from a military family, and after dying saving a drowning child, he ends up waking up as the last survivor in a battlefield as his elf mom cries over his body. It turns out he’s a prince with two moms, one human, and one elf. The elf was his surrogate while the human was his biological, and both want him to the point that they started a brutal war that ended in a truce of shared custody. So, how does being a soldier from a strict military family tie into a unique and interesting MC? Well, it doesn’t. He’s just a standard Japanese MC who has creepily obsessive mothers who constantly rub up on him, an assassin fiancee who loves him unconditionally, and some strange plot-convenient mana problems to explain forced echii between him and his mother, who must bath him and “suck out his mana” every full moon. I’ve only read one volume, and I’ve been told volume 3 is where the story actually picks up, with nearly 72 chapters as merely a “prologue” to the real story. Screw that. If you love incest, give this novel a try, but I guarantee that’s the only thing that will get you through the boring first two volumes, so you better REALLY love incest. If there was ero, it wouldn’t be on this list, and even the echii is surprisingly light for a novel with “uncensored” chapters. I can’t even tell what’s being uncensored. If I had to describe this novel in a word, “forced” would be that word. This novel just feels forced. Not logical. Not well thought out. Just forced.

Gourmet of Another World: 

What if Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma was a Xian Xia style web novel? That’s it. That’s really all you need to know to decide if this is something you want to read. Basically, a guy ends up in another world where he’s supported by a system that’s trying to make him the God of Gourmet. He’s forced to make really specific decisions, not given a choice in what he serves or the location he serves it in, so that all of his guests can only be flabbergasted at his exorbitant prices. He slowly starts out at fried rice and vegetables ans works his way up the list, impressing certain cultivators, who find out his food actually benefits their cultivation greatly, while slapping the faces of arrogant cultivators who aren’t willing to tolerate his many situational and constantly changing rules. He charges in cultivation crystals, which automatically get converted into energy to help his own cultivation. However, all of this is meaningless because he’s supported by a godlike system that regularly gives him challenges for rewards. All his food, skills, and everything is supported by the system. All he has to do is cook it, and stay open for 3 hours a day, which he sunbaths for most of. My biggest issue with the book is that nothing is earned really. His food is great because he’s handed exceptionally rare ingredients by the system, as well as the talent to cook them also provided by the system. It mentions every morning he practices, but it’s never establish why he’s so good at cooking with rare ingredients. He just is. He also acts somewhere between an arrogant Xian Xia protagonist and the “Lazy isekai protagonist” trope, his character often acting inconsistently, forgiving and tolerating some while dumping on others. He doesn’t even need to worry about offending, because he’s got a security robot (yeah, it’s a robot, I have no clue how this fits in the setting, which is never clearly defined), and that robot can defeat anything that threatens him. So, it’s about a guy cooking food he’s handed with skills he’s handed while slapping the face of arrogant people who come to his store (or more accurately kicking them out and stripping them naked) using the power of a robot he’s handed. It’s all quite meaningless, because it’s food cooked with imaginary ingredients from “spirit” animals, using ingredients he doesn’t have to gather, in a world we don’t know and is never established for us. So he can talk all he wants about how rare and hard to get an ingredient is, but since it’s all just handed out, the novel has no weight to it. If you just love foodgasm novels, this one isn’t bad, but unlike the meals described in it, it’s just not very satisfying.

 

Recommendations:

I haven’t read even a word of these, but they were suggested in comments. I will go through and remove/add to the list as I check these out in due time.

World teacher

My pet is a holy maiden

Warlock in Magus

Those Who Aspired to Become Gods: A darker fairy tale

Cop Craft – Dragnet Mirage Reloaded

King of the Battlefield

Forgotten Conqueror

Chaotic Sword God

1000 nin no homunkurusu

Hachinan tte, Sore wa Nai Deshou

Re: Master Magic

Chaotic Sword God

Martial God Space

The Strongest Dan God

Din no Monshou

Elqueeness

Tower of karma

Legend

The Strategist Knows Everything

Other World Assassin Life of a Man who was a Shut-in

Commushou no Ore ga, Koushou Skill ni Zenfurishite Tenseishita Kekka

The Demonic King Chases His Wife: The Rebellious Good-for-nothing Miss

Wortenia Senki

Manowa

Desolate Era

Great Demon King

Sovereign of the the realms

Mythical conquest

Kujibiki Tokushou: Musou Haremu Ken

Epoch of Twilight

My Entire Class Has Been Reincarnated-I Became The Weakest Skeleton!

Reign of the Hunter

Blue Phoenix

Emperor of Solo Play

Peerless Martial God

Rebirth of the Thief

I Shall Seal The Heavens

Akuma Shoujo

Dragoon

Mother of Learning

History’s Strongest Senior Brother

The Nine Cauldrons

Novel Removed from the List: 

As this list gets older, some novels are bought up and no longer available online for free. Others stop being written or translated. I will move the ones I see down here.

Fimbulwinter:

This one is written by an American, following the formula you know and love from light novels. In it, a 30-something guy who works in programming gets fired, finds out his wife cheats on him, gets arrested based on false charges from her, and then ends up in a car accident. In the hospital, he suddenly gets approached and offered the chance to start life anew by the god Hecate if he protects her last follower, who is stranded on a world that has started Ragnorak, a fantasy fueled apocalypse, for a year and a day. On the way, he has a few minutes to grab-bag from a list of magical powers, to which he chooses earth, fire, flesh(healing), and magic itself. While he understands the concepts behind magic, he doesn’t know any spells, so he basically has to make up stuff on the fly, usually with a very limited timespan. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the story is pretty high-octane, as he’s never given more than a moment to rest before the next crisis. The problem isn’t that he’s  not OP’d enough, it’s that he can only manage so much at any given time, and he’s never given more than a day to rest. The story slips into the mature territory, but I’d still want to include it because it’s not much worse than other fantasy novels I’ve read. It’s a pure wish-fulfillment novel. The world he’s in has no respect for women, and most woman are reduced to attaching themselves to a strong man so that they survive. And of course, that’s ripe for harem, as the girl he protects, her bisexual lover, and two more “servants” get picked up along the way to join his harem. The Hecate worshiper herself is a part-succubus demon, and her lover is essentially a homemaker love doll. Like I said, wish fulfillment. That said, I had a lot of fun with the novel. It doesn’t end the story, obviously he’s looking to get you to buy books 2 and 3 by offering 1 for cheap, but that’s up to you if you want to keep reading. The world is themed around Odin, Ragnorak, and other viking stuff, which is fun. There is a lot of banter, more than most Japanese web novels, so the harem feel a lot more fleshed out than you get with most web novels. At the other hand, it can be grating since their banter doesn’t usually fit the mood. They make too many casual quips in life-or-death situations. The girl’s feel diverse, but that is mostly just a cover. If you really analyze the characters, there isn’t much there. Sorry, I could write a ten page essay on what I liked and didn’t like about this story. I think it’s probably worth a read if you’re looking for something with a little more raw western feel with maybe some sex thrown in. Give it a try.

E? Heibon Desu Yo??

I know nothing about this one, just made 20 chapters but it’s updating monthly so I’ll give it a mention. Here is the description: Yukari was a high-school student when she died in a traffic accident, but when she woke up, she had been reincarnated as the daughter of a count in another world! But strangely, what was waiting for her was a life of poverty, so she decided to make use of the knowledge from her previous life.

Mushoku Tensei:

A loser neet is reincarnated to a magic world after trying to save a high school girl from being hit by a truck. Due to having the brain of an adult in the body of a baby, he learns magic at an early age, and becomes stronger as a result. It’s heavily implied that the earlier you start learning magic, the higher your magic ends up, so since he started by like age 3, he became pretty powerful. This novel is different in that it follows a large portion of his life, starting from his birth and jumping forward in time from toddler, to adolescent, to young adult, ect… ect… He ends up having three girls fall in love with him and marries all three of them. Definitely harem. He also ends up having children too. It spends a lot of time on side characters near the middle and end of the book, and to be honest, I gave up on it before the end. Although he’s not a neet in his new life, he still kind of grates on my nerves, because it never feels like he tries very hard for anything he accomplishes in life. It’s one of the few finished stories, so if you are looking to actually have something you can complete, this would be it.