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The first volume of Youjo Senki is the first physical copy of a light novel I ever bought.
It ended up in the trash can, where it rightfully belongs.

What I so utterly despise about the light novel is not the story, the militaristic overtones, the art, the characters, or anything like that. Honestly, those were the aspects that drew me in from the anime to begin with. No, Youjo Senki is bad because it is badly written.

To be fair, it's a little unfair of me to judge, as I read an English translation, but it was the official translation, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Anyway, I ... have read a lot of light novels and web novels throughout the years, and I'm used to low quality machine translations of already horrible fiction. Youjo Senki is bad in a very different way from those. What makes the writing bad can be boiled down to two main factors:

1: Everything is exposition. Every. Single. Sentence.

Have you ever heard the saying "show, don't tell?". When Carlo Zen wrote Youjo Senki, he apparently took this saying, and turned it completely on its head. You won't read about Tanya flying into the sky to fight other mages. Instead, you will read an omniscient narrator babbling on about what Tanya has planned, what she is thinking, what the political ramifications are, what her opponents are thinking, what her soldiers are feeling, how they regard Tanya, what equipment they are using, what spells they are using, and so on and on and on.

Everything is told as exposition, and the way it is presented, it sucks the oxygen out of absolutely everything that happens. I have read stories written by third graders that were more engaging than this.

2: Dialogue is repetition.

There is dialogue in Youjo Senki, but you'll have to look hard to find it. It takes up about two sentences every other page, and it blends so thoroughly into the exposition that you couldn't find it at a glance.

What makes me point out the dialogue specifically is that it just repeats the exposition. Let me give you a made up example:

The two officers were discussing Tanya's progress. They thought that her operation was moving along faster than expected.
Officer 1: "Tanya has been quick this time."
Officer 2: "Yes, she has moved faster than expected."

Although this example is made up, this is basically all the dialogue amounts to. Utterly meaningless repetition.

My recommendation would be to watch the anime instead, if you haven't already done so. In any case, the light novel is not worth your time.

Once, I read a web novel called "Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka?". I didn't like it all that much. The pages were filled with endless lists of skills and stats which didn't really mean anything, and the action scenes made little sense to me. But somehow, last season's anime adaptation kept me entertained with an amazing voice acting performance by Aoi Yuuki and fun visuals. What I'm trying to say is that an anime can be more than its source material. For Genkoku, this is not the case.

MyAnimeList has a rather strict policy on spoilers, so I won't go into details. Suffice to say that ... none of the plot points, and I mean none, make any sense. When you watch the series and something happens, try to think about it for a few seconds, and you should see that something is fishy. All the social/economical/political parts of the series are incredibly lackluster and poorly thought out, which seems even worse when you realise that all problems are made specifically so that the MC can solve them in one sweeping motion. For every challenge that the protagonist faces, either the problem should not be a problem, or his solution should not work as a solution.
A piece of fiction can not be any smarter than its author, and despite trying very hard to be so, the author of Genkoku is not all that bright. This part of the show largely reminds me of "Chōyoyū", another terrible adaptation of an equally bad light novel.

To make matters worse, the generic fantasy world that the protagonist finds himself isekai'ed to is more devoid of any cultural identity than the half-naked girls sunbathing at your local beach. The style can somewhat vaguely be described as European, though that might be a bit of a stretch, as there is almost nothing to build that statement on. Worldbuilding is one of the most important parts of high fantasy, and it has seemingly been neglegted in favor of what can only be described as pseudo-intellectual nonsense.

Finally, I want to write a little about the character interaction. Typically, most such interactions consist of people gushing about the absolute genius of a mastermind that is the protagonist. And would it really be an isekai if everyone didn't fall to their knees in complete awe of such brilliance?
Well, whatever, we've seen this trope a thousand times before.
What I want to write about specifically is what ultimately made me drop the series at episode 5. I don't want to spoil, so I won't go into details, but in the span of about 5 minutes, the MC and his friends call a member of his harem ugly and disappointing several times. This happens completely unprovoked. The only apparent reason for this bullying is that she doesn't fit into their racial steriotypes.
Is this what the author thinks counts for dialogue? Is it supposed to be funny? Maybe I just don't understand the joke, but if this is what the character interaction is going to be like, that's a hard pass for me.

2/10