Loner Life in Another World (Light Novel) Vol. 1

The main character is enjoyable at first and his antics are amusing for about half the novel but there is little to no character development for him or anyone else. In fact they all seem to regress development wise although this is acknowledged using the leveling up of the protagonists “blockhead” stat and the other characters basically spending to much time with him. The free sample gives a pretty good taste of exactly what the rest of the book will be like as it kinda just stays roughly the same. Solid time waster book but I don’t feel like reading it again.

While there’s a couple interesting ideas mixed with an otherwise formulaic isekai school group setup, the book is seriously damaged by the focus on the main character’s internal monologue and how he’s 90% disconnected from his outside reality. Possibly interesting idea, but the execution fails. The first third of the book is almost entirely his internal monologue, which gets tedious. Things improve a bit once he starts interacting with the other classmates, but he shows only the slightest character evolution through the rest of the book. At least this isn’t one of the “outcast kid gets his revenge” isekai plots; he’s not a bad person, but it’s impossible to find much empathy for him. Unfortunately, the end twist is a bad instance of the Tomato Surprise trope, and that, plus pedestrian writing and too many status screens, left me not wanting to see any more of this series, leading to me giving this only 2 stars.

Ordinarily, the idea of a bunch of trash skills coming together to create a beast of a warrior is something I can get behind. The thing that turns me off with this book is that the MC is so disconnected from the world around him that it becomes difficult, if not outright impossible to parse a reasonable sequence of events from his absolute apathy. And considering his reaction before being summoned, it gives the impression that he’s aware of his surroundings and can respond accordingly. Yet time and again, he completely disregards what others tell him, what happens around him; The descriptions and internal dialogues are also inconsistent, and contradict each other or themselves. The execution is sloppy, the story wanders without a goal, and elements are introduced and dropped haphazardly. Normally, I would be willing to get behind this. But there’s no sense to the story, and it takes “Antisocial” to an extreme that I can’t agree with.