Wew. Where do I begin with this. I know isekai aren't well regarded as paragons of good storytelling (because of the large influx of bad ones flooding the market and making supposedly better ones look bad) and I've more or less stayed away from them because of their reputation.
Nidome no Yuusha (NnY; in it's comic form) is a steaming pile of trash. Pardon me for the hyperbole but I certainly felt that way when I read the first chapter (to be fair, I read up to Chapter 4 before dropping it). At it's core it's a revenge story in an isekai garb. I'll discuss why as a revenge story and as a story, it fails.
Note: Spoilers if you haven't read the first chapter
NnY's biggest failure is that it assumes the existence of a formula for a certain type of story guarantees it's success as a token of that story. (Now I don't know if that's what the author was thinking but it certainly comes off like that.) To see what I mean by my statement let me state the most basic formula for a revenge story: (1) a protagonist who was wronged and (2) an antagonist who wronged him. Given (1) and (2), make (2) as morally reprehensible as possible so that any action the protagonist commits is seen as cathartic.
Note that I did not say the protagonist has to be morally right per se but all that it has to accomplish is to give a sense of satisfaction (i.e. catharsis) to the audience by righting the wrong whether by means of murdering the wrongdoer, torturing them, etc. (Though for a great story this is a bit more nuanced but this will suffice for our sake.)
Given the above "recipe," NnY mostly fits it. It meets (1) and (2) and makes (2) a questionable bitch (although there does seem to be a logic that gives the antagonists arguments for the treatment of the protagonist some weight; more of this at the end of the review*) and yet it still fails terribly. So why does it fail?
NnY's Failure
NnY fails simply because of structural issues. It jumps immediately for the main course (the revenge) and leaves the appetizers (the build-up) aside. We go from (a) defeating the big bad to (b) killing the protagonist in spite of the effort he (presumably) put in to (c) realize (a) and (b) were just part of a "tutorial course" to (d) killing several guards and torturing the princess who ordered his death in the "tutorial course." In one chapter we more or less achieved the goal of righting the wrong but no catharsis. We can not feel any catharsis because we still don't know the protagonist and so we can not enjoy our protagonist's victory. Instead we feel put off about his behavior; it seems the victim has become the aggressor. His torturing the princess does not seem proportional to what we see the protagonist go through. This last bit is important. Regardless whether the protagonist's wrong was a worse wrong than his torturing the princess, if we, the audience, do not believe it, it makes it hard to root for the protagonist.
Yes, the protagonist died but so what? Unless we empathize, root for, feel for, the character it is nothing but a plot point akin to a stranger dying thousands of miles away. The princess' pain on the other hand is real. We see it visibly in her face, in her words and while she certainly doesn't see the protagonist as a human, one thinks why not kill her instead of debasing yourself to their level? Our protagonist answers that his trust was shattered and his revenge must be served ice cold. Yet again who cares?. Who is this guy who we hardly know of? Why should I the reader root for him? No doubt betrayal is a bitch but how is it a bitch? Let me contrast NnY with another revenge story manga to prove my point: Berserk.
Note: Spoilers for Berserk ahead
Berserk has perhaps one of my favorite betrayals in manga that it builds up to meticulously over the course of its first half and when that betrayal hits. It hits hard. Unlike NnY, Berserk presents his protagonist Guts on a quest for revenge and gives us plenty of reasons why we should cheer him on (as well as reasons why we shouldn't but comparing the moral nuances between Berserk and NnY is unfair) like (i) the murder of his friends, (ii) the rape and subsequent PTSD of his lover, and (iii) the mutilation of Guts' body and the subsequent damnation of eternal struggle between him and demons. It's not like Guts' friends were a one drop thing. They were built up over the entirety of the first half (aside from the early chapters showcasing Guts as a loner) as a rag-tag team of drifters who have grown to love and trust one another. So when one of their own ends up massacring them for a second chance at life, you feel pained because you know these characters. You see none of that in NnY because it opted to jump for the revenge before the build-up.
While it is possible that the story will give details regarding the protagonist's betrayal later on, the odious pacing and overzealous protagonist presented in the first chapter is striking and indicative enough of bad writing for me to give this a pass which, in the manga business, means death. So there it is. NnY is not garbage for the morally ambiguous actions of the character (as I see some readers comment) but because it gives us an early revenge without any catharsis.
EDIT: I see in other reviews on other sites, the author in the novel reveals more in flashbacks but I still hold fast to my original criticism.
*The princess might be somewhat in the right here depending if you agree with p-zombie arguments. It might be that the protagonist only looks like a human but has no conscious features that would make him a human (and given how he acted it might be true lol, I kid). Considering that the protagonist is not from the princess' world, it is possible that the protagonist is from a world where only p-zombies exist. So the protagonist status as a threat is possible as long as it is possible he is not a human. So the princess' actions, while lacking rigor, in practicality, were valid given that she wished to save her world/kingdom.
(+35)
(-117)
