OK, what if someone is transported to another world but they are ugly? Not serious, that’s it. Will this story be some sort of picky social commentary for the beauty in the eyes of lovers and the benefits of no chance due to their physical appearance? Maybe this story is a commentary on how to exploit a specific type of male character design in such a negative way in many Japanese media, but this time we use this look as the hero of the story? I don’t know; it might be any of these things, but based on the previous chapters, I can’t say for sure.
Say what you want about the Isekai type, but it does feel like trying desperately to find the next interesting head to keep the overall setup interesting. We’ve been trapped in video games, we’ve sent people to the world of fantasy in the Middle Ages, we’ve reincarnated people as monsters, we’ve reincarnated people as vending machines. This story asks a bold question: “If we give a person a second chance, but he messes up and now looks like endless villains in exchange for incredibly overwhelming abilities?” It’s definitely a setting that can be interesting, but as I mentioned before, the story doesn’t really do anything about it.
At the beginning, the protagonist is always ugly, so there is a long stage environment, so he learns to rely on practical skills and business strategies to succeed. But, because of his ugly face, it doesn’t matter. Now he is transported to a fantasy world where he needs to use practical knowledge and business methods to avoid the fact that he creates a character with an incredibly ugly face. Does this sound repetitive? Good because that means our leader has more or less experienced any potential roles he should have gone through before he even came to the world. There is no doubt how he revolves around limitations is a good guy, and Shigeru is a good guy, but that’s not enough to sustain a story, to the end of the first batch.
I think part of the problem is that this setting feels like it leans more towards comedy potential, but the story doesn’t play its part like an over-exaggerated comedy. If anything, it starts with a fatal seriousness and then gradually develops to a more standard fantasy tone. Maybe the story relies on the stupid look of our protagonist in a sharp contrast, but it’s simply because the artistic style isn’t enough to play with this exaggeration. Rather than having any strong pulling narratively or stylistically, it’s not really successful that we’re going to take the middle of the road approach. Even if our main characters are incredibly overwhelming, this fact is not fully utilized, as the story makes him so powerful that he can’t use any of his abilities to destroy the town he is in.
Side characters don’t necessarily help, as all of them are written or presented like a typical fantasy party. Their character design even looks versatile. You have the righteous leader, the sleepy teenager and the loli. Given his backstory, the organization’s leaders showed great potential for depth and there were hints that the girl had more girls from her previous lives. The problem is that it is really not like these characters belong to this story. I’ve been waiting for some kind of distortion we have about their party being actually futile or intending to contrast with our leadership, but we’re totally getting what the story promotes, which is boring.
Overall, I do have some high hopes for this story because I do think it can be solved from multiple perspectives. There are a lot of nice settings here that can lead to some interesting social comments and we have a great setup for many very interesting jokes. However, when the settings exist, there are many shortcomings in execution. Instead of laughing, I stared blankly at an incredibly bland story in which the characters don’t even want to attribute anything to anything. As of now, I don’t think you’ve missed a lot by skipping this number.
