"Ryoumin 0-nin Start no Henkyou Ryoushusama" is a story about a hero who after defending his country and people for 20 long years in the military, is "rewarded" with a fiefdom in a remote grasslands devoid of all life besides grass and its current occupants. The world is set in a medieval era with magic, other races, primitive life, and a monarchy as expected of such an era. The protagonist is essentially an overpowered 35 year old dimwit with a heart of gold who lives by his parent's last request of "Protect those weaker than you" and "Help those around you".
To summarize the early events of the manga, the protagonist meets a tribe who lives on the plains with the help of magic to hide themselves. The tribe ends up helping our overpowered protagonist in building his fiefdom of "A place where everyone can be free and happy". The protagonist is often visited by people, both good and bad, and the interactions that take place are interesting as he meets new races, cultures, and sometimes battles in his journey for creating a utopia-like fiefdom.
The things I like and dislike about this novel.
The protagonist is essentially an invincible moron who has the values of a saint. He helps everyone around him, takes down dragons like they're nothing, and has saved so many people in the past that everyone loves him. Now my problem with him is that he's essentially not a human. He has literally nothing going for him besides being amazing and gold hearted. No avarice, no lust, no nothing. In fact, he never kills anyone, even when his fiefdom is being attacked by bandits, he just beats them up, takes away their weapons, and sends them off after saying "Don't go around killing and raping people, lol". The dude was in the military fighting constantly for 20 years and... what... he's never killed anyone, what? It's at the level where I can't take it seriously.
Another problem I have with the protagonist being a saint, is that the tribe which he has in his fiefdom actually has the magic ability to "see into the soul and find out if you're a good person with good intentions". Surprise surprise, the protagonist is found out to be the absolute best of the best humans ever seen before. And what's worse is that while building his fiefdom and later recruiting people, literally everyone that joins him is the same in that they are angels without the slightest bad intentions whereas everyone not joining/allying with him are horrible or neutral at best.
Continuing on, the protagonist's fiefdom starts with no population, and the protagonist is met with the choice of purchasing a bunch of Furries as slaves to populate it. Normally you would expect a Shounen protagonist to buy up all of the slaves, free them, and have everyone live happily ever after. In reality though, the protagonist explains that if one were to purchase slaves, it would only make the problem worse as a merchant who's sold his product will be more than willing to replenish said product. It's more in depth than I would expect as seen from my first impressions, so I was pleased with this. However, the rest of the manga is almost always much more shallow.
Now onto one of my biggest pet peeves of this stories and even on some of the people reviewing it. Something that is normally taught in most schools at around English grade 10 I'd imagine, is that when reading a story that takes place in a different time or culture from ours, always leave your modern morals and standards behind. You should never read Shakespeare and then leave a negative review simply because there was racism or misogyny in it, that was the norm for that time. The same applies to the medieval era in terms of many, many things. The problem I have with this manga is that the author basically picks and chooses certain things that are present in either the medieval time or modern time without understanding why.
What do I mean by this? For example, in the manga's kingdom, those 18 and under cannot drink alcohol. Did you know that in medieval time, virtually everyone drank alcohol? It was the most common drink competing with water where weakened alcohol often replaced water for many. Alcohol, smoking, and other substances were only barred from the youth when we understood science and the world to a degree that's impossible in the medieval times. The exact same thing can be said about the marriage age, equal rights, and the mixing of several different cultures as seen in the manga. Normally I would just ignore this and chalk it up as a typical Shounen manga, but it keeps splicing modern day morals and medieval ones at its own convenience in such a shallow way that it gets obnoxious at some point.
If you can ignore those things, then I think this manga reads decently well. It's definitely better than your standard Isekai copy and paste.