Well after starting to read the web novel 5+ years ago in high school but never finishing, I have finally read and finished the final light novel series that resulted from that web novel. And in the end I think it was worth the very long wait, that is for sure. I ended up binge reading all 16 volumes over the course of 4 days, and don’t really regret doing so. This was an immensely enjoyable story, and I didn’t really hate all that about the series at all. In the end, I could fully recommend this book series to somebody.
So what exactly is this novel series about, and how does it work over the course of 16 books and probably somewhere close 4000 pages. Well at it’s heart it is a unique isekai novel series, in which a classroom of people end up reincarnated to another world. And therefore get involved closely with everything that happens in that world going forward, along with directly influencing the future of that world. With the slightly unique twists being the involvement of gods, and how they have influenced the world everyone just reincarnated in.
Along the way we get a large cast of unique and special characters. Many different power-ups and form changes and all those things you would expect from a long series such as this. And I can say by the end I enjoyed all the characters you meet along the way. I didn’t hate any of the characters, or get annoyed at the choices the characters made. The characters all felt real and individual, and proceeded in their own ways that made sense to each character.
In the end, things don’t get exactly as you would expect. And many of the novels do things that will surprise you and make you question what you knew previously. Changing the viewpoints and knowledge of the world in massive ways. In the end, you start to piece things together and it starts to make some sense. But to say anymore I will need to entire spoiler territory I feel, so read with your own caution below in the spoilers. But I can recommend the series I do believe.
To start, I feel incredibly bad for anybody who was waiting patently for each novel to release, and reading along as they released. I honestly think that would be the worst way to read this series, and I probably would have just dropped it.
See, the novel’s don’t actually start off in a linear fashion. You have two separate timelines running in parallel throughout about the first 5 books. And you don’t realize this is happening at all outside of some pretty minor references you could easily miss. And right when you are getting this big stand off, and just waiting to see how this proceeds. You have all these characters meeting for the first time, a ton of tension. There is no payoff, at least no payoff for essentially 10 more books. Yea…
At some point the author Okina Baba decided to change the structure of the series, don’t remember if this happened in the original web novel or not. But essentially you have a record scratch/freeze frame moment and get rid of the whole parallel story’s for the rest of the series. And we go back to just following the main character in the spider. And that becomes the focal point as we see her continuing to gain power and allies and changing the world. With the knowledge that eventually we will reach the point that book 5 was at, eventually.
Than interspersed between those chapters we get to follow the various side characters. Learn about their struggles and backstories. Mainly filling out the cast, and helping us understand all the other characters in this massive cast list. Sometimes these stories run in parallel or sometimes going back to where it all started for that character. And for the most part that stuff works great.
Until you have book 11, which is entirely focused on the original hero character from those first couple books. Whom we already know will die along with the rest of his party. Honestly it is kinda worse than that, because we already know the fates of all these characters. Since we saw a majority of who lived in book 5, you kinda lose some tension in fights after this. It is honestly the issue with most stories which attempt to do this, unless they decide to play with reader expectation and have that moment being some parallel universe of something. Which this isn’t.
But if I had one other issue with this series, is I kinda feel like something was lost with the transition in the main character after the first 5 books. I can’t really explain it, and I still enjoyed them. But for the first 5 books, just from the main characters point of view it was a very unique and fun story. You felt like you were along with them for their challenges and growth and rooting for the character the whole way. And yet after that 5th book, it almost felt more like watching a character mark off a list of requirements. Almost want to compare it to a RPG quest log, and that kinda goes for all the characters. You have the feeling you know what they need to do, and you kinda know where they end up. So your just watching them make slow progress down the list as they get closer to that point. Honestly can’t really say the issue, but just something felt lost.
Final thought to wrap up this massive review/final thoughts. The final couple books really started to feel a bit rushed. You start getting the feeling that things are being pushed along in a very haphazardly way, and just not as well crafted as the first 5 books. Things also start getting a bit predicable. You can guess something surprising will happen and vaguely what it will be so it isn’t really a surprise at all. And along the way it makes it a bit more dull than it really should.
Side note I just thought about. This series really could be a pretty decent JRPG, honestly has all the general points already there. A hero party that is full of tragic backstory and a good reason to grow and expand. Characters you thought were enemies the whole time were actually allies, and also have very tragic stories. Multiple moments you could loose all hope and regain it at. A very large map hard goal that needs to be reached in the end. Yea, a JRPG following the main hero's journey could probably work rather well.
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