Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari
The Rising of the Shield Hero

Edit

What would you like to edit?

SynopsisBackgroundAlternative TitlesPictureChapters/VolumesPublishing DatesRelationsTypeExternal Links  

An extremely good Isekai novel that stands above the rest.

In a sea of low standard garbage schlock that is the Isekai light novel genre, The Rising of the Shield Hero, stands out by being just genuinely well written. Which after reading and watching a lot of Isekai, I can assure you is very rare. Shield Hero gets pretty much everything right, it does not disrupt the formula, but takes it's to peak.

The characters are for the most, very well written. Every character serves a purpose and shockingly, most of them have character development, the characters actually have arcs and drastically change to unrecognizable states. ... Completely abhorrent villainous characters get actual back story and have reasons as to why they're that way, and a lot of them get redemption and end up becoming very likeable.

The main character is the best of them all. He is not a self insert harem gathering chode that becomes invincible. He is a mature adult who gets thrust into a unworldly situation and tries his best to live his new life. While pretty much every Isekai just completely ignores aspects like " How does the main characters understand this other dimensions language?" The answer? The main character studies it. He realizes it is a massive problem and concludes he needs to be able to read the language in order to live. He needs to study and learn from books to improve his skills with medicinal herbs, with trading, when interacting with people. He does this for several volumes and ends up teaching other people what he studied. He is just genuinely likeable guy who tries his hardest and worked for everything. As the title suggest, he rises up from literally nothing. He slowly but surely gets more powerful by learning and building up an empire of people who will back him up. He does not have any love interests or constantly make inappropriate comments about the girls he finds. He just treats them like people. He makes mistakes and learns from them like anyone else. The author knows how to write a good character as the 3 characters who gets Isekai'd with him are the cliche anime garbage mc schlock that lesser works would include as the main character. The author knows that is bad writing and intentionally wrote those character to contrast with the main character. Characters are actually foreshadow and planned out ahead of time. You'll get a hit of a character and 3 volumes later you're like " wait a minute, is this who I think it is?" Is the entire plot meticulously planned out? No it is not but it still is planned to some degree whereas most Isekai manga don't even have anything resembling a plot.

I've been gushing about the characters because I believe that is the strongest aspect of the series. However that is not to diminish the other aspects of the story. Such as the fantastic world building. In such a wide genre as Isekai, where it is literally a magically fantasy land, series hardly ever take advantage of it. Shield Hero knows this, and makes some wonderful world building. The world is properly defined, with unique creatures, land marks, culture, different countries, different types of magic and weapons, different languages. This is such a simple thing that most authors completely forget about, but Shield hero doesn't. It uses this to create a grandiose adventure through ever changing landscapes and environments. You'll travel around the world with the cast meeting new and interesting things each volume. It keeps everything fresh and well paced. You never feel like you're stuck somewhere boring because something is always happening, the environment is always changing. The main characters is a wandering traveler. He will get his epic moments against impossible obstacles with huge magic spells and protecting countries. However, you'll also get get quaint moments where he does nothing more then wander into a small nameless village, meet people there, solve their problems, and get a nice story arc out of it. It allows us to see much more of the world seeing the extremes of fantasy castles to small poor villagers. Making us understand this places problems as a country. Not something just used to make up a plot for the story.


The only major negative I have is the lack of compelling stakes. In total, over the 20+ volumes, only one important character died. Obviously not everything has to be related to a character dying but there is no real end goal. There is no over arching villain expect some vague evil god introduced 20 volumes in. Characters gets captured and defeated but we all know everything is going to be fine in the end. When the series started with this pessimistic theme where the main character could barely scrape by living through a single day and the entire world was against him, it was interesting to see it would play out. How this evil environment affected this character and how we would survive in this world. Naturally he develops as a characters and gets past that. We are now at the point where the main character journey is practically over. He is the strongest person around, he a cast of invaluable friends he would lose life and limb for, he got past all his major hardships, he learned everything there is know and honed all of his skills, he bought a land built a house and small town where everyone he liked in the past gathers to help him build a peaceful empire, he has the favor of the government and mystical beings. There really is no where for him to go. He completed his hero's journey. The plot has to be sorta of forced on to him for something impactful to actually happen. With no major ever lasting villain or obstacle to over come the latest volumes have become kinda stagnant, a lot of it is just slice of life while something completely random and arbitrary happens to force a plot to happen. IMO it has overstayed it's welcome a bit, honestly with more planning on the story and shifting things around this novel could've ended a few volumes ago. In my opinion at least.

I highly recommended reading it.

Read the first vol of the Light Novel and didn't continue.
Went and read the manga adaption and fell in love.
DONT READ THE LN! IF YOU'RE INTERESTED, THEN READ THE MANGA

The short version- The writing is abysmal and reads more like a shitty first draft of somebody who has never read an actual novel in their life and only reads manga.
The manga, thankfully, translates the story much better because of this and is overall a much better experience.


The full version-
As I said above, the LN reads like a poor attempt at a script for a manga. Its riddled with tropes unacceptable in the writing ... industry and barely tolerated in the visual medium of Manga. The writing is at the level of a junior high school kid and gave me frequent painful flashbacks to my primary school days of writing short and terrible stories about vampires and angels.
It constantly breaks genre rules (and I don't mean in an innovative or subversive way) and just honestly lacks the grace and experience to execute the relatively good story.
Its hard to quite pin point just what went wrong with this LN. The poor writing, terrible execution of ideas, the clear lack of actual knowledge of books. Maybe its all of it.

But it has potential! And we see that in the premise and eventual adaption by the manga. The mangaka is clearly an experienced artist, and takes the good elements of the story, improves upon them and then translates it into the medium it was really meant to be in. The art is gorgeous like the cover, it forgoes the unnecessary protag introduction (which was frankly so bad, it made the protagonist unlikable from the get-go, which didn't help when the entire story is about feeling bad about him and wanting him to get the better over his enemies), and executes the tropes its diseased with in a decent way.

I understand why people might prefer the LN. It uh for lack of a more polite way to say it, it gets 'to the point' really fast (somuchsoitsrushedcoughcough) and the language is simple/easy to read (meaning you aren't choked by unnecessary prose or flowery writing). The pain the protag is forced to go through is *just* enough to make you sympathise with him and root for his eventual triumph over his enemies.

But. If you actually read books regularly, then you'll likely struggle like I did to get past the frankly insulting standard of writing and execution in this LN.

So, READ THE MANGA.

This is probably the most horribly written light novel I have ever had the chance to read. The issue stems from it's extremely strong start, up until volume 4, then the plateau up until volume 8, and then the sharp drop-off in quality as you slowly begin to not only see the faults in this book series, but see them repeated over and over again with absolutely no progression in the story past volume 4, or at least it doesn't feel like there has been any meaningful progression for the past 9 volumes, even if there is it's so weak that it's nearly impossible to ... catch.

Let's start with the biggest offender: action scenes. Almost half of every volume is combat, but unfortunately it's completely terrible. Each enemy is stronger than the last, or the main characters have a stupid curse or something is happening to make them weaker. On top of that, every enemy goes through 3-4 different phases and refuses to give up in the most boring way possible. It's so anime and is absolutely horrible on a written medium. You can skip half of each volume in action scenes and miss absolutely nothing in terms of plot relevance. On top of all this, every action scene plays out the same way, over and over again: Naofumi is kicking ass. Enemy pulls out some item or some technique that makes him weaker. Naofumi's party gets through it. Enemy yells "I'm not done yet!" x3, Naofumi's party hits this guy a billion more times. Finally goes down yippy yay that's the 5th antagonist in 3 volumes that have just been killed off after being introduced not even 50 pages ago!

Second point leads from the first. Antagonists. Either they are dumb as bricks (the other heroes), or so eye-rollingly bland you just can't wait for them to be dealt with. Either that or they're just creepy or maybe they don't even have a personality, like the final antagonist from Volume 13. On top of that, their motives are all completely shallow and are just there for Naofumi and his OP party to beat up after anime-style fighting the same way you've read 50 previous times. Either way, Naofumi's enemies are boring and one-dimensional.

Next up is the MCs group. All character growth has completely stopped, and on top of that all the characters are shallow. Atla, a relatively recently introduced character is consistently violent and just annoying but the author is trying to create some kind of romance rivalry with Raphtalia or something? It's not like either one says anything more than one-liners at any point in time, nor does anyone else. I find myself getting annoyed with the amount of characters and their obnoxious habits or ridiculous behavior. There are also so many characters now that the author doesn't have the skill level to juggle properly, and they are, on top of it, all stereotypes or cliches from Japanese Media. It's just "yandere #11" that you've already seen and there's no progression there. And I don't even want to get started about the actual good characters, like Melty and Filo, that just get abandoned for almost entire volumes and replaced by characters I honestly couldn't care less about but the author seems to want to force them down my throat. It's just awful.

Now we have Naofumi himself. The first person perspective eventually becomes a crutch to get the author out of writing anything complicated, since he uses it as an excuse to ignore important details, entire conversations, or just anything he wants. I'll give it to him, though, it's consistent to the point where it is now an obstacle to the story instead of the good trait it was in the first 4 volumes. Naofumi's personality and obsession with his pet, which literally comes up every 15 pages as a way to relieve his stress with the other characters, is just as infuriating as the characters he's ignoring.

Finally we have plot. Since volume 8 the story has gone into a lull. The author has spent 5 volumes covering about 2 months worth of time in Naofumi's world, and this is where all these problems stick out like a sore thumb. I'm not excited for the rest of the story anymore, if between each big event we have 6 volumes of trash to take care of every time.

So yeah, I thought it was great until it was obviously awful.