Various Thoughts

The seventh Reborn as the First Boss novella is much better than the previous one, feeling both more in-line with how the series presented itself at the beginning and as a spiritual successor to Winterborn.

Shawn Wilson‘s eighth Ultimate Level 1 novel unfortunately returns to the garbage arena world of the sixth. Making things worse, while the author apparently realizes how terrible this place is partway through and eventually writes it out of the picture… the method used is a literal deus ex machina. This is indicative of a larger shounen-ization issue starting to plague the series: By any objective measure the protagonist is obscenely overpowered, yet somehow there’s always someone inexplicably stronger waiting just offscreen to curb-stomp him and trigger a training sequence.

The power levels are horrifically ill-defined and arbitrary. He’s killed a world champion tower-clearing dragon along with the allegedly favored child of a god, and has blazed through the tower itself for some time, but somehow a dwarf that abandoned the tower at level 60 because it was too hard (a level he breezed through solo) can utterly destroy him and his party attacking together. It’s nonsense. All that said… I do want to see him burn the elven capital to ash and so will be picking up the next book in the series. Although if that too turns out disappointing I’ll probably drop it there.