Jun 22, 2024
Seeing as there aren't many reviews for this light novel I decided to copy my post from the Failure Frame anime forum here. I wrote the post to answer the question "is this the same as Arifureta?" which is asked often, but many of the points are valid for a more general review too:
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TL;DR the LN's are much better than Arifureta and a head above almost all the other LN's I've read. But probably some of the advantages will be lost in the anime adaptation.
Many of the isekai light novels follow the same pattern: +1 girl for the harem per volume, +1 epic fight with
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a demon general at the end of the volume. Therefore authors have to increase the level of drama to keep things interesting. After defeating the local bad king the MC is up against the evil church that controls several nations, then against some mighty evil empire, then against the invaders from other continents. At some point authors introduce time travel or parallel worlds (with pretty girls for the harem ofc). One can argue that these points are what makes anime interesting and I won't argue with that - to each their own. When you watch anime this structure is less noticeable because the boundaries are set by episodes and seasons and not by volumes. But when you read the light novels you quickly get tired from this copypasted stuff everywhere. I can't even count how many titles I dropped because the things kept dragging on.
Failure Frame on the other hand is closer to what we call fantasy novels in the West. No harems, no defeating 16 demon generals, no time travel, no parallel world jumping, no cooking, no crafting modern firearms with magic. The MC states his intentions in vol. 1 and the plot progresses just like that until the end (e.g. like in LOTR). The writing is good, you're never left to wonder what time of day it is, where the events are happening (in the woods, in the plains, near a city etc), everything is described clearly. Travelling from point A to point B actually takes time. You'll have a solid understanding where each country is situated even without seeing the map and the political situation is more complex than the usual "nobility is bad, church is always plotting something". Just like in Arifureta there's quite some time devoted to describing his classmates' lives but unlike in Arifureta they are not just NPCs waiting for the MC to rescue them. They even influence the plot a lot.
The only downside I can think of is that the peak of the tension is not at the end of the series but somewhere in the middle. I'm currently reading fan translated chapters from what would be the final volume and the things are a bit quieter there.
But as you can imagine some of these points relate only to the writing, I'm not sure how well it will translate to anime. Either way I highly recommend reading the LN.
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P.S. I would have given this series a 10 but many of my points seem like "the other LNs are so bad that the one series avoiding these blunders is actually great"
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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