September 4, 2024

Good enough story, nothing spectacular

As you can probably guess from the title and art, this is story where a Japanese guy gets isekai'd into a fantasy world as a sword and his adventure with Fran, the cat girl who wields him.

The book does a lot of things right in my opinion. In typical isekai fashion, the mc's are very strong. Unlike most other isekai's though, they aren't godlike or unbeatable. There are many close fights throughout the book which I appreciated. The power progression in this works by getting experience when something is killed, much like a video game. The writing wasn't anything special but it wasn't bad either. It's an action adventure progression fantasy in a pretty standard fantasy world. What I really liked about this book was there wasn't a harem or ridiculous fan service*(see below) constantly thrown in your face. I don't know why it's so difficult finding story based fantasy series in Japanese without those elements. Language wise it isn't to crazy, lots of fantasy vocabulary and the grammar felt straight-forward. I think the fight scenes were on the more difficult side due to the author using a lot of colorful vocabulary but it also gave me many new words to learn. There was a little bit of slang used by some side characters but even then the meaning is easy to infer.

The book had some drawbacks too. Again the writing was very average, I wouldn't call it mediocre but I also wouldn't fault anyone who did. It didn't really hook me until the last arc which wasn't that long. Also as the characters defeat enemies they can gain their abilities. While this is an interesting concept, by the end of the book the characters have gained so many abilities that I had trouble keeping track of them.

*My biggest gripe was a scene about halfway through the book. They needed to get new clothes for Fran and the sword insisted on her getting new underwear as well. The scene then continues with the swords inner monologue gushing about how good Fran looks in each pair of panties. For reference Fran is 12. The whole scene was gross and weird and made me very close to dropping the book on the spot. Thankfully, it wasn't very long and there weren't any other weird scenes before or after that.

Overall I think the book is a solid 3/5. I might continue the series in the future but I'll probably switch to something else first.

Gradings:3
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