Save the day… if you can make it through alive!
Creative Staff
Story: Tappei Nagatsuki
Illustrations: Shinichirou Otsuka
Translation: ZephyrRz
What They Say
Subaru Natsuki was just trying to get to the convenience store but wound up summoned to another world. He encounters the usual things–life-threatening situations, silver haired beauties, cat fairies–you know, normal stuff. All that would be bad enough, but he’s also gained the most inconvenient magical ability of all–time travel, but he’s got to die to use it. How do you repay someone who saved your life when all you can do is die? Find out in volume 1 of Re:ZERO!
Technical:
The front cover here is a rather nice image of our heroine striking a pose, with a window into a background. It has a great pop to it and really helps draw attention to the book. The back cover just kind of lazily takes a faded out version of the front one and slaps it over a synopsis, which is not the best. Paper quality feels solid, text reads smoothly, honorifics aren’t used, and as per the norm on light novels, we get some color pages at the front and an afterword at the back, as well as some character design sketches. There are a handful of typos that slipped by scattered throughout the book, but it’s not enough to count as a significant strike or anything.
The images used throughout fall somewhere in the middle of the road, as far as the application of such things go. They’re largely at least all trying to set up a scene, but none of them really help to flesh out the reader’s image of the world or its unique elements, instead focusing largely on showing off its cast. This would be all well and good, except for the fact that, as always, there are colored images in the front of the book that serve that exact purpose. As such I’d certainly say they aren’t used as well as they could be, but at least it’s not packed to the brim with sexy fan-service as these things tend to be. As for the quality of the images themselves, they’re all solid but not exactly mindblowing, and you can get a rough idea of what to expect by looking at the cover.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
As our book starts off, we jump well ahead to give us a scene of the main character dying. It’s largely a kind of shallow attention-getter because it just jams itself in to give us an in media res thing, and to make sure that the reader knows that things WILL eventually get serious. Which I guess is good since the book takes a while to truly get rolling, though it does truly feel like a haphazardly applied plot device. Anyway, with that out of the way, we truly get the book rolling, as we find average Japanese high school student Subaru Natsuki thrust into a fantasy world. And for what it’s worth, the book pokes fun at this by having him be genre-aware at least, though not necessarily genre-savvy. For example, as his first true event in this world, he ends up unintentionally the victim of a mugging, wherein he thinks by teleporting here he must have exceptional powers… only for that to prove false and for him to get the crap beaten out of him. And to further add to the craziness, a girl swoops into the scene, seemingly setting up a miraculous rescue… only for her to ditch him! Finally, we finally see our heroine, a spirit mage, swoop in and rescue our hero with her magic and cat spirit helper, while looking for a stolen item. She turns out to have a rather amusing personality quirk of pretending that she’s doing things solely for her own sake while being quite a do-gooder, so she claims that she saved Subaru solely to possibly gain information from him and tries to walk off. And of course, our hero instead gets involved in order to repay his debt, helping her look for her stolen badge.
Anyway, this first part of the book goes forward in a fairly straightforward manner, with our heroes proving incapable at first, but slowly moving towards their goal while getting closer all the while. This is where I’ll choose to bring up my first issue with our genre-aware hero, in that he just writes off the idea of actually telling anyone his deal, instead making up wholly ineffectual lies based on what he’s seen in other such series, because he assumes everyone will just think he’s crazy. But by doing so, he instead makes it pretty clear that somewhere down the line it’ll end up biting him in the butt, and I’ll honestly be kind of shocked if a “why didn’t you tell us this earlier?!” doesn’t come up at some point in the series. But for now it’s just a thing, and I suppose it makes for a good enough gag. Oh, and there are also some interesting tidbits of mystery behind our heroine, but they actually shockingly don’t get cleared up in this book at all, really. Anyway, they do their requisite bonding, complete with a “find lost child’s parents” cliché, and eventually wind up at a loot cellar where stolen goods are sold in the slums. With this the first chapter comes to an end by looping back to the start, with Subaru (and the heroine) dying in the loot cellar, never even discovering the identity of the killer.
And here’s where my second issue comes into play with the “genre-aware” main character: he doesn’t realize he’s looping when dying despite it being INCREDIBLY obvious. Like, maybe him being in denial for a bit is acceptable, but the clues are (sometimes literally) slapping him in the face, and he doesn’t fully accept it until his third death, despite calmly accepting being transported to a different world because he’d seen it in other series. It makes him look extremely stupid, and when the reader should realize this early on (if not immediately because, you know, they put it in the synopsis on the back), it’s bound to get a little frustrating during this period. Still, I actually like the structure here a little, as it gives the book a chance to flesh out the characters and their goings-on, this time by having Subaru interact with the old man who runs the loot cellar, Rom, and the thief who stole the badge, Felt. I honestly enjoy this whole scene as the interactions with these more down-to-earth characters feels a lot more genuine, and it’s great to dig into their relationship. And finally, Subaru finds that there’s another bidder on the badge, which he’s still trying to purchase for the sake of the heroine. It’s of course obvious to the readers from the start that this woman, Elsa, is the killer, but still, it’s pretty intense when she finally snaps and kills our hero for the second time.
The third death comes shortly into that loop, just finally driving the nail in for Subaru to figure it out, kicking off the fourth and final loop. It’s in this one that everything comes together, and it’s fortunately done quite well. Will Subaru be able to clear all the requirements for a happy ending, or is his power alone insufficient?
In Summary
This volume introducing the series is an interesting one, as it does indeed succeed quite well, but it has a few rocky points along the way. The biggest one is that the gimmick of revival, which I “spoil” because it’s literally placed in the synopsis on the book itself, takes forever to properly get rolling. By the time it’s finally “revealed”, the hero looks incredibly stupid for not realizing it, as the reader almost certainly figured it out at least 50 pages back even if they went into the book completely blind. The other frustration is that the first loop around is just a tad too cliché, even if the book mocks the occurrence of the tropes it pulls up. It’s not terrible, but it’s not really top notch stuff. Fortunately, though, the book starts rolling and doesn’t let up once the second loop starts, fleshing out the characters and events rather cleverly by using the time travel thing it has going on to look at things from a new angle. And when things come to close, they do so in a fantastic manner, packed with some seriously great action and intensity. There are actually a rather large number of plot threads left dangling, but as this is part of a series I won’t harp on that, as they’ll obviously be picked up in later volumes. All in all I’d say that this volume is plenty worth giving a try if the concept sounds up your alley. Just make sure to keep in mind that it has a bit of a slow start, as once it gets rolling, there’s really a lot to love here.
Content Grade: A-
Art Grade: N/A
Packaging Grade: A-
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: July 19th, 2016
MSRP: $14.00