quite honestly the only reason i read this was because i couldn't wait for more chapters to come out for the webtoon, and you reeeeeallly have to make a concerted effort to not become a grammar nazi if you're going to read the MTL'd raws that are rarely proofread... more>>

in doing so though i've come to the realisation that proverbs and metaphors in korean translate even worse than they do in japanese, which kindasays something lol <<less

what, an actually GOOD webnovel in what'd otherwise be the collective isekai dumpster?... more>>

nah but seriously this is a genuinely fun read - reminds me a lot of beginning after the end, another decent novel you should check out some time (it's western though, so not on NU unfortunately) where the main guy basically gets ousted from his family when he tells them that he pretty much possessed the body of their infant son... unlike a great too many bodysnatchers of the genre, masquerading as someone else there will bite you in the ass

that's completely unrelated since i just wanted to shill TBATE for once, but the premise of this story is that an average japanese salaryman (original, i know) gets sort of... ejected beside some girl's body? anyhow, the two form a spiritual connection, and the idea's that they learn to communicate and eventually share each other's thoughts and feelings as one. it's less creepy than that sounds, i promise

it's interesting enough that i got bored one day and started editing an MTL of the raws on syosetu, which actually turned out all right. tl;dr, give this a read some time, it's worth your time and stands out as one of my favourite webnovels out there <<less

Liked SAO's initial premise, I hear? well, here's a perfect fit for you... more>>

unlike its counterpart new gate's a bit more laid back, but that's probably because it doesn't star a brooding middle schooler as its protagonist and instead a normal guy who... y'know, acts like a human and isn't a total cardboard cut-out for you self-inserters out there

it actually starts at the end of the 'death game' that you lot always talk about, which is only really featured in flashbacks (though it gets a whole LN for itself later on), and is actually set inside a fantasy world identical to that same game, only five hundred years later. it's cheesy at times, yeah, but honestly i wouldn't even say you'd have to turn your brain off to enjoy it as the gist is figuring out just what the heck's going on with this world, and what happened to shin (the main character) in the first place - really i liked it just because of how wacky it is when shin keeps trying to apply game logic to actual things; someone'll call him over and he'll just be like... welp, let's take the entire house! to everyone's astonishment. it's still a through-and-through power fantasy, don't get me wrong, and an average one at best, but a fun read none the less

maybe read the manga if you don't want to dive in just yet, some of the volumes are actually officially translated and around 70ish chapters are scanlated <<less

>mecha... more>>

heh

this one's pure self-insertion wish fulfillment, and coincidentally it and two as one princesses are what got me to start searching novelupdates to quench my thirst for decent webnovels. i made a joke thread about an anon who went on a meltdown about not being able to be a yuri isekai girlfriend or somesuch one day and someone actually gave a bunch of NU links as recommendations - this, two as one princesses and a couple other relibrary TLs to name a few were among the first I gave a go

i think i remember liking it at first when i read it, but looking back it's... not very good, to say the least and it might've been the case of it being the first webnovel i read that wasn't a half-baked fanfic off wattpad, kind of like when the first visual novel i read was tsukihime, at the time i loved it but looking back the writing is questionable and overall it's... not the best compared to literally anything else. run-of-the-mill isekai stories have the tendency to make the native populace as dumb as humanly possible - like, main girl invents a blackboard, one with... get this, wheels at that, and the adventurer's guild is so stunned by this marvel of japanese engineering that she's living like royalty from the patent alone. this is a civilized fantasy world with trade guilds and a system of patents for inventions mind you, not a neolithic farming village, so it's beyond a little silly

i'd say give it a go if you really feel like it, there's a manga adaptation out there too - i tried reading it, but couldn't stomach the first chapter so take that how you will <<less

pretty much misunderstandings, the novel - without eminence in shadow's rampant autism to tie it down... more>>

and instead of a thirty-year old wizard that gained magical wisdom via bashing his head into trees... who's subsequently isekai'd after running buck naked into a semi, demon god's lackey stars a chinese cultural historian. said chinese man happens to be whisked away to fantasy-land himself, but for one reason or another gets to keep his book collection.... and much more upon that, by making a deal with some unknown entity under the guise of running a bookstore. basically, my dream, only realised!

anyhow, the guy makes a living as the proprietor of this run-down 'bookstore' - only whenever he recommends a book to someone, what he sees on the cover and what they see differs dramatically. the books he's loaning out actually have wacky eldritch powers built into them, and he starts unknowingly gaining a reputation as this machiavellian incarnation of the world's god!

it's a bit odd sometimes as the world's basically got the same computers and communication tech as we do and is still somehow stuck looking like 19th century europe, but it's a decent read and i might go back to it when more chapters are out <<less

read about fifty chapters before i got bored and figured out it already had a manga adaptation... more>>

main character's diabolical plan to conquer the world for the imperium is nice and all despite being totally wonky but i get the feeling it's never going to be written out anyway <<less

this webnovel will trick you into thinking it's about an epic adventure to find the nine wis**en, in truth it's a slice of life romp where hardly anything happens... more>>

still liked it lol <<less

besides being an unedited barely-readable mess of an MTL, this webnovel has a nice premise!

bit of a wack take on the 'isekai'd into your favourite game' trope - yeah, i've read enough /isekai/ that my brain's starting to rot thinking about it. if i had to shove them each into groups of loosely-definable traits, isekai stories today can be thought of as... the power fantasy, the VRMMO/litRPG, the kicked-out-of-the-party-but-actually-OP, the power fantasy, and my personal favourite... the 'turned into a girl for no apparent reason'!... more>>

throw them all into the blender and you're bound to get a perfect story, right? however, it turns out a story outline and actually writing something out proper are quite different

this legit seems like something tailor-written for me but it's just too damn boring. i don't understand the appeal behind it nor do i get why it's so highly regarded by anyone who's read a crap-load of webnovels... despite being one of the highest rated entires on NU it bored me to death <<less

your average japanese high schooler dies by truck - of course he does, what else could've killed him?... more>>

after the obligatory traffic accident, he's 'reincarnated' on another planet - one which has solved world peace through... get this, magic! the inhabitants of this mystery utopia eventually find some unknown rockheap in the middle of nowhere, called earth - only it's seen as a barbaric backwater where humans mu*der each other for fun. can't say they're wrong!

well, our main character, after his new parents just... accept that he's a reincarnated human from this place, manages to become the sole ambassador to earth, as no one else is willing to bother to go there. he does this by trading magic stones - these things do quite literally anything your mind tells them to, and are seemingly an unlimited resource, for get this - video games! main character, before getting crushed under the pavement by that truck earlier, was a total video game otaku in the 90s, and finds that the one thing his utopian friends could use is a gaming addiction!

that's what I know anyway - fifty ish chapters in, main character is creating miracles on a whim in third-world countries, all with the power of these do-all magic stones. the idea's nice, but when it goes on for so long without anything going wrong, or really, any conflict at all, it gets a bit stagnant... the whole reincarnation trope with your memories in tact thing is a bit wack to begin with, and the only chapters i look forward to are where MC interacts with his (her? yeah, this is a genderbending story by the way, but that goes almost entirely unused since there's a fifteen year time skip at the start) old family and friends, which granted happen every once and awhile, but aren't exactly the focus and that turned me off a bit. overall, it's nice, but a lack of any conflict really hurts the story's integrity <<less

really liked it until the translator changed - chapters are now split into five or six segments of a couple paragraphs each that are released sporadically, so it kinda broke any immersion i got out of it... more>>

or could be that this is a bit of a wack story to begin with but what gives, i'm probably not going to re-read it any time soon <<less

you want edge? we've got edge! so much edge, in fact, you could lose a finger turning the page!... more>>

/isekai/ shills this constantly even after the manga got axed - yes, it's about as sharp-edged, filled to the brim with gore and wonky as one could imagine from a story of its caliber. and when you think isekai-tier revenge plot, you're probably picturing something like that with a far-more petty protagonist...

yet kurono is the one thing that makes the story bearable to read; he's basically an anti-keyaru. guy's jaded as all hell but he's at least somewhat logical in his ideas and seems to know what he's doing. either that or i'm a little jaded myself after trying to read redo of healer and a slew of other crappy revenge fantasies that all seem to star the same main guy surrounded by the same cardboard-cutout harem members /a/ calls female characters

all-in-all i suppose i'd recommend this if you're recently high off berserk or vagabond, and have an oddly-specific need for a quick fix in the form of a serialised webnovel <<less

if i were reading this for the first time i'd probably like it - and i've still got the first three LNs somewhere in my closet for a rainy day... more>>

but the anime kind of... well for lack of a better word it spoiled me because it's about as damn-near perfect of an adaptation as I could want - a 9/10 easily, and not just as an isekai either. if i wanted to experience it again in, i dunno a year or two from now i'll probably just go to my archive and re-watch the anime. web novels tend to be that way if you already have a decent mental picture of how characters look and act so it's always jarring trying to go to the source material if you aren't looking for it solely to get more content

i dunno. log horizon is a really well-written story so i'd say it's worth a read if you haven't seen the anime yet, can't say much about the light novel itself as i only ever finished the first season of the anime <<less

the new gate with a female protagonist, not much more to it - though it did come out before new gate, overlord, and most other isekai WNs out there, curiously? it's also one of the older titles on syosetu (i think it stopped serialising in 2010?)... more>>

has all the same problems associated with the whole 'stuck in your favourite video game'... nah scratch that, stuck in a VRMMO shtick and almost follows the same storyline as each of them word-for-word - though the LNs somehow got officially licensed and there's four or so volumes out in english right now. i'm not going to read the raws on syosetu because it seems like a massive waste of my time, but it's got an epilogue there if anyone's willing to give it a look

it's pretty much new gate without all the mystique - other players don't get the slightest mention, and it's said early-on that the main character actually dies and is unable to go back to her original world. though somehow elements of it pop up here and there, like a control AI she used to control her hospital bed or something like that but as far as i've read it's never explained or elaborated on

the year difference got me a bit miffed too - there wasn't an apocalypse or some cataclysmic dark age following the game's collapse, there's actually two separate worlds where players exist and they don't at the same time. doesn't make much sense, but the populace doesn't revere them as godly beings or whatever, and since the lead's a high elf character all the NPCs from the game era are just there like nothing had happened. in new gate it takes quite awhile for shin to settle down and just cope with the craziness of it all, plus the fact that instead of absentmindedly fitting in he's completely alienated when he can just do certain things that defy all common sense but F/MC whose name i forget just sort of knows how to fix everything instantly and never faces any difficulty. for lack of a better word, it's just plain boring

guess i'll skip this one, read a little into the second LN volume and it's a fat meh. i might end up actually finishing stormlight archive before i bother to touch this light novel again <<less

MTL is barely readable around fifty chapters in. remember sort of liking the manhwa, but WN is a lot less enticing and slowly becomes more... more>> difficult to decipher as it drags on <<less

sheesh, you'd think throwing a deadly assassin inside the body of a little girl would've been more interesting... more>>

that aside i really hate light novel MCs who feel the need to needlessly lie to everyone around them to their own detriment - they're usually grown adults on the inside, biology be damned, so unless there's threat of death or something similar, they should probably be a little more honest when they've essentially snatched someone's body. it got kind of ridiculous when it took 200 chapters for reid (the MC here) to find one of his old war buddies he trusted; ffw to chapter 400 something now, his parents and ex-girlfriend who mourned him for the better part of 20 years are still none the wiser

actually the only time I can think of a character getting... well, essentially disowned by their parents for this is TBATE, and it's written in a way that actually makes sense; whereas reid is supposed to be this master assassin, this morally gray paragon with a wide view of the world... yet he acts like a middle schooler who might be the stand-in for a reader when the plot doesn't demand it otherwise. it's kind of a pet peeve of mine and i just wanted to touch on it <<less

an interesting premise, shame it's been done to death a hundred times... more>>

can't say much since only around twenty chapters are translated as of my writing, but it's alright I suppose? fits every tickmark of the 'old badass reincarnated with his memories intact' trope to a tee but it just doesn't stand out in any way

i dunno - might come back in two or three years if it's finished serialising to find it's better than TBATE but in all honesty i hope i'm far the hell away from this rut i'm in by then <<less

generic power fantasy? generic power fantasy!... more>>

yeah there isn't much to this - RPG mechanics in an isekai, without any thought put into it, that sort of light novel. it's KIND OF unique with it involving dicerolls since the guy gets reincarnated as his dnd character, but that doesn't really matter when other characters have stats and levels and whatnot

after reading the first volume i'd say give this one a skip <<less

grimdark that's tied down by light novel tropes... more>>

the first chapter is pretty good- only the moment adventurers with 'skills' and powerlevels start popping up it kinda immediately soured the mood. i think i'll chalk it up to the artist being great enough to cover up the garbage but it's still a bit disappointing

time to re-read berserk for the tenth time, I guess <<less

translation is bad enough that i'm fine waiting two weeks between webtoon chapters... more>>

main guy loves flipping the switch between utter psycho who kills randoms without remorse to annoyed veteran who's well-aware of who's pulling the strings - it's really jarring, but i need a power fantasy every once and awhile to tie me down like anyone else <<less

pretty typical tower crawler - good enough if you desperately need to kill a couple of hours, but wouldn't recommend it otherwise

a pretty generic power fantasy, all things considered... more>>

i remember reading this a year or two before the anime came out - it was just kinda meh, if i'm being honest. i forgot it even existed maybe a week after binging all of the manga chapters that'd been scanned up to that point, and was bored out of my mind after finding some translations of the light novel

i'd say give this a skip unless you aren't burnt out on chosen-one type powerleveling stories set in an unbalanced RPG world <<less

fish-out-of-water time jumps count as isekai right?... more>>

i like to think of this as sort of... pseudo-bookworm, in the way that it works - myne and mariela are kind of identical in how ditzy they are, but apart from that they've not much in common

idea's that an alchemist of long-ago gets thrown into the distant future where not much has changed... save everyone of her kind around the area. this isn't exactly a power fantasy, in fact the main character is extremely underpowered besides being able to churn out scarce potions en masse. like, she's a totally normal person besides that. no foreign science instantly revolutionising the balance of power, that kind of thing is sort of off-limits. 'skills,' power levels and the like are kinda there but aren't mentioned often, i like to pretend they don't exist because just thinking of it as part of someone's experience and unique fighting style instead of having the 'swordfighting II' tree is more believable

for the most part it's pure slice-of-life too; haven't seen much conflict that results in anything, but that might change in volume 3. it's a fun world to try and imagine yourself in and it's been my comfort food for the past week <<less

I too want to commit war crimes with Nobunaga in 16th century Japan!... more>>

unfortunately i lack a doctorate in feudal japanese studies, so that won't be happening any time soon <<less

note to future demonjunkie: finish reading part 4, it's been translated for ages... more>>

the best isekai and best light novel i've ever read honestly (besides, maybe... twelve kingdoms? i dunno), go give it a read, you won't regret it

nine outta ten, would recommend <<less