Finished rereading the first volume of Maruyama's Overlord light novel series. (I plan to keep going with the others.)
(Overlord is an isekai light novel series where a man obsessed with an MMORPG that's fallen off gets isekai'd with his base full of loyal NPCs into an existing, unrelated-to-the-game fantasy world, which his high level NPCs and he completely outclass. He is in the body of his lich character from the game, and his humanity is dulled and only a distant memory of better times keeps him going, and over the course of the series, he becomes more and more monstrous. One of the more unique takes on isekai from that medium.)
8.5/10. Mostly enjoyed this nostalgic favorite from mine - first saw the anime and then read the light novels for these some time during the 2010s when I was in high school - they aren't that bad as an adult either. The prose in the official Yen Press translation feels a bit clunky and there are a couple of errors here and there, but it's not that bad.
There are quite a bit of Anime Oof Moments in this, the worst of which being that Shalltear is described as being fourteen years old and is written and described Like That. I won't defend it - but as someone who's grown up with anime/manga, I've grown inured to Anime Oof Moments - I go 'ew gross' and keep reading/watching assuming the entire show isn't just Anime Oof Moments, and I'll be more hesitant to recommend a product, but it's not product-ruiningly bad.
I'll also say that the opening half of this book feels a bit dull and expository, but given how convoluted the setup for Overlord is - very difficult to set it all up succinctly, so I can't be too mad about it. The kind of thing that will get less obnoxious as the series goes on, I suspect.
All that said - Overlord's chief strength, in my opinion, is that the New Worlders are treated with a sense of narrative respect by Maruyama. A consistent joke in Overlord is that Ainz and the NPCs of Nazarick are overpowered, that they are overly cautious in the face of people they woefully outclass. And a lot of the humor and drama in Overlord comes from the fact that neither of them wholly recognize the fact until it's all over.
But that joke would not work nearly as well if Maruyama did not spend quite a bit of page space, normally successfully, hyping up characters like Gazef or the Sunlight Scriptures. The people in the New World aren't just blank slates for the protagonist to obliterate - the New World had things going on before Nazarick arrived. The world did not spring from the aether like in a lot of worse isekai stories, it exists in conversation with itself and there's a very real status quo being interrupted when Nazarick pops in.
Not sure how enthusiastically I'd recommend this series - I suspect subsequent novels on this reread will make that determination clearer for me, but it was developmentally critical for me and I'll always have a soft spot for it.
