異世界でおまけの兄さん自立を目指す

3.5 stars

This is one of those dime-a-dozen isekai stories: our hero gets caught up in a 神子 summoning ritual and, along with one other person, is brought to the world of a BL game, where he's considered an おまけ and shuffled off to the side. Shocker, he may have more abilities than previously thought!

Overall I thought it was a decent isekai; nothing mind-blowing, but definitely not the worst thing I've ever read either. The beginning was pretty good, the middle slow, and things picked back up in the end; volume 2 will probably be the deciding factor of whether it's a series I need to keep on my radar. As indicated by the cover, it looks like things are headed in a harem direction, though nothing was set in stone as of volume 1. This novel is based off of a webnovel, I believe, though I do not know how different it is from its source material.

Difficulty overall didn't feel too bad: vocab, aside from specific game slang and the like, was pretty standard, and grammar felt somewhere around N2. It felt like the author didn't have a good sense of connecting scenes sometimes; characters A and B would be in a room, and then a paragraph or so later walking to that room, as if they had moved somewhere else in the meantime. I'm not sure if it was an issue with the author or me. There were also times when I kind of struggled to figure out who was talking; it would usually clear up in a sentence or two, but then I had to go back and re-read to reorient myself.

There's not really a distinction among chapters; the occasional POV character shift (which happens more often in the beginning then tapers off) is marked by a heading, but when POV shifts back to the main character, that shift is not noted other than an extra line break or diamond symbol. Character POV shifts are, for the most part, retreads of the last section of story from that character's POV; useful in some places where the main character wasn't present/conscious, but more often than not it's the same sequence of events you just read. (Which means sex scenes generally get repeated.)

Please note that this book contains 18+ scenes.