Rimuru tests the limits of his power, and his governance, in the face of demon lords.
Creative Staff
Story: Fuse
Art: Mitz Vah
Translation/Adaptation: Kevin Gifford
What They Say
Times are changing for the world’s first monster town!
After a furious battle with the orcs, peace has once again returned to the Forest of Jura. Rimuru may be heading up the Great Forest of Jura Alliance, but he’s mostly worried about finishing his town…until a visit from King Gazel Dwargo of the dwarves turns everything upside down. Not only that, but he’s about to have a run-in with an exceptionally dangerous demon lord. What’s a slime to do?!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The challenges of running a city are presented in this volume of Reincarnated as a Slime. Rimuru is sitting comfortably in his new home and making great progress bringing the amenities of civilization to the monsters and others in his employ. All of these upgrades are presented to the reader in excruciating detail. Life seems good for our monsters, but Rimuru’s actions have caught the eyes of the most powerful in the surrounding area.
Among those most powerful are four Demon Lords. There is Clayman, a mastermind who is responsible for the orc disaster plot. Carillon, the leader of the lycanthropes. Frey, the sky queen of the harpy race. Lastly, Milim Nava, the Destroyer. All of them have plans for the forest and wanted in on the plot to raise up a Demon Lord who would work under them without complaint. With Veldora gone the forest is no longer protected, and they send out recon to find out who took out the Orc Lord.
Milim is a problematic character, in my eyes. She is a walking 1,000-year-old dragon trope. Immensely old and powerful, she looks and acts like a 12-year-old. Rimuru uses that to his advantage to keep on her good side and befriend the mercurial demon lord. Despite being told that she’s clever we never really see it. We do see her powers shown off in a multitude of ways, but it’s hard to take her seriously as a character. She feels like a shallow bit of creepy fan-service tossed in to appease a demographic. The cover image of her doesn’t help.
The main conflict of this volume is almost an afterthought. A terrible force of chaotic nature is about to be unleashed and it threatens Rimuru’s city as well as the surrounding countryside. The monster Charybdis is born from the negative energy of the recent conflicts and is unsealed and unleashed. Rimuru leverages the newly forged relationships among surrounding countries to launch a joint operation against the mindless monster only to admit that he’s confronting a foe that he’s not strong enough to defeat. It’s the first time in this series where we see Rimuru isn’t the most powerful thing around.
An unusual diversion happens about halfway through this volume. We break away from the town of Tempest to look into events happening in a neighboring kingdom. We’re introduced to a group of convicts tasked with investigating what’s happening in the forest, at the least cost to the ruler of than neighboring territory as possible. Yohm, the leader of the convict band, feels that this is his chance to break away and make a new start. They have to survive the forest first, and it turns out that even though the monsters have organized and made a safe city inside the forest there are still dangerous wild monsters about.
This whole chapter almost sits completely apart from the main conflict in this volume, although it ties directly into forming an alliance with Fuze and the Adventurer Guild in Blumund. It turns out it’s easier to convince everyone that a human killed the orc lord than a slime, and Rimuru isn’t out for glory. In fact, after Milim arrives he realizes that attracting attention from the Demon Lords is the last thing he wants. Rimuru finally found beings stronger than himself and his abundant caution pays off.
With the establishment of a force working against Rimuru’s kingdom in this volume it feels that the series has some real direction going forward for the first time. It will be interesting to see how Rimuru deals with the other powers out there far stronger than himself.
I still think the artwork for the series is a little unclear in the action illustrations. Plus, not a fan of the cover art with Milim, who is constantly described as childlike, being portrayed splayed crotch-first and covered in honey across the cover. The author’s afterword for this volume delves into Milim’s design a bit too much, mostly that he realized it was wrong and did it anyway. Yeah, okay dude. It’s probably the only downside to this entire volume.
In Summary
Rimuru grows his kingdom by leaps and bounds, and we’re given the play-by-play on the development as it happens. It makes sense that Rimuru’s actions would start to attract the attention of the surrounding countries, and it also would stand to reason that they’d be skeptical about all of this being orchestrated by a slime. For the first time we’re seeing that there are other beings out there far above his seemingly broken power levels. Ultimately, Rimuru can’t handle the problem of Charybdis alone. Diplomacy ultimately wins over more allies to Rimuru’s side and reforming and releasing seems to be going well but I can’t help but think that at some point it’s going to come back to haunt our slime in some way. All’s not perfect in this volume though, and Milim is a love it or leave it sort of character who seems to play into the ‘thousand-year-old-dragon’ trope too heavily to be believable. Still, the kingdom building and power-plays are engaging to watch, and Rimuru remains a very likable hero.
Content Grade: B +
Art Grade: B –
Packaging Grade: B +
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 13 +
Released By: Yen On
Release Date: August 21, 2018
MSRP: $14.00 US / $18.50 CAN
