Once More Isekai Quest – Review by Anon

By: Anon
Originally posted: 13.10.2018

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ONCE MORE ANOTHER ISEKAI REVIEW

This quest makes me feel things, and not good things. QM, if you’re reading, stop. You have plenty of players happy with what you’ve done and they’re eager to follow. Not to mention, I have a feeling you aren’t the type of person who would handle derisive vitriol too well.

That being said, we need to talk about this quest.

PREMISE

You are Fuuma Nagaro, a schoolgirl isekai’d into another world when the train you were riding on “spontaneously went up in flames”. The quest is written in first person, but I’ll continue referring to Fuuma as (You). Your classmates join you, though only five others survive being injected with magic isekai juice to give them broken powers. However, you’re split from the other five and are thrown into the wilderness to fend for yourself, and the first action you take is to punch a bear with enough strength to crack its neck and send it into a tree.

The purpose of your summons, you learn, is to defeat the demon king and his army with the other heroes. This goes nowhere. Instead, the quest is actually about subduing animals and playing house.

BEING EVIL IS BEING AN ASSHOLE

>Creating a strong and steady stream of water over the boar's face I watch it shake more violently to keep out of the water. Struggling, the boar is unable to breathe, its squealing nothing more than a muffled gurgle under the water.

>Just about it was gonna drown I stop the torrent, watching the boar haggardly breath desperately. Thinking that it was gonna live I continue the rush of water onto its head, taking its life in my hands as it has no means to escape me. It dies when i want it to die; this process repeats over a course of a few minutes. There was nothing stopping me from enjoying its painful screech, playing around with its life like a toy.

The main character is a psycho. Excusing it as “wanting to play as an evil character”, the players in the first bit of the quest are lunatics devoid of any compassion or empathy. My favorite bit is how after going the unnecessarily nonlethal route of stopping a monstrous wyrm that feasted on a demihuman village, you befriend it and convince it to follow you. When you decide to leave, the village asks you for help and you decide out of the kindness of your heart to give the village a charm of protection. You, of course, take your new wyrm friend, open his mouth, and rip out a tooth without any hesitation.

Then, under slightly different circumstances, you do this again with a wolf. Both of them still follow you as if nothing happened. It’s normal thing, I guess.

MOMMY ISSUES

At some point in the story, a traumatized enslaved bunny demihuman is introduced. She suffers a psychotic break, breaks free, kills the slaver, and runs away to search for her mother. Eventually, you run into her, and when she sees you, she instantly believes that you are the one whose vagina popped her out. She runs into your arms a vulnerable mess and calls you “mommy”, and that’s when something snaps. Both the QM and the players, in a coordinated effort, decide to make the wyrm, the wolf, and the bunny girl into your adopted children, going so far as urging the former two to stop calling you “master” and instead “mommy”. From thereon forth, the three are always introduced as your children, and the players have a laugh over other characters’ confusion. It does not stop. It never stops.

Fuuma is 16-years old, by the way.

4chan’s demographic consists mostly of little girls--I mean, men, so I find it incredible in how it manages to tap into the hidden maternal instincts of anons. No one seems to say anything, and everyone is even supportive if one were to go by the votes. Who knew so many anons wanted to be mothers?

POT AND KETTLE

One of the six heroes was gifted the power of slave magic, which is pretty self-explanatory. Let me give you some juicy quotes from the players.

> The first part of him being lazy and unmotivated doesn't bother me much personally. It's the second bit with being a super fan of isekai crap and having slave magic that gets my goat. Imagine you have the power to force anyone to be your slave through shenanigan powers and he absolutely loves the idea.

>...his main god gift is the instant enslave skill and being a lazy jackass pretty much all but confirms that he's the type of person whom left to his own devices will immediately become a sort of degenerative tyrant...

>Is having slave magic not an immediate red flag?

>There's still the chance that he's a decent enough guy to ask before he uses it? That's probably just my wishful thinking.

>probably a bad person and he uses slave magic

Completely unrelated, but the main character has a skill called “Marking Hex” which is a spell that inscribes magic tattoos on a target. By the powers of QM fiat, this hex can pretty much do just about anything, ranging from physical transformation to telling an arc to march back to a demon king’s general and explode when he reaches him.

>Casting marking hex on the orc, I brainwashed him, letting me have full control of his actions.

Oh, but it’s okay since it’s on an orc, right?
I mentioned a wyrm earlier. This is what you do to it.

>"What? Want me to cast obedience over you?"

>Seeing this, I took advantage of the hex, "Yoshka~ Open, please!" And just like that Yoshka's mouth opened. Grabbing one of the sharper ones I gripped hard, pulling a sizeable fang from the jaw.

The wolf also gets a “Marking Hex of Obedience”. If those aren’t the same as slave collars, I’m not quite sure what is. To add on, you also get this skill:

>[Imperfect Poison of Lust: Masochism]
>- The user is able to kiss a female target, putting her into a deep state of masochistic lust. Males are not affected.

It’s okay when you do it, right?

AND THEY DON’T STOP COMING

There are a gorillion fucking characters and they don’t stop coming. Though the main characters are unique and varied enough, the side characters turn into a blur as everything blends together into a horrid mess. The worst part is that nothing’s ever done with any of them. Characters don’t go through arcs, and things just sort of happen. Every single member of the “party” simply exists. The wolf always says something about not being happy with her human form and the wyrm has some witty reply; it’s like a played out comedic routine where they’re going through the motions. There’s also the demihuman, which, after her five minutes of fame, just calls you “mommy” and requires you to dote on her.

The closest the quest has ever come to anything thoughful was with the main character. You are a power-tripping, self-righteous psychopath, and after getting your ass handed to you by an unfortunate series of bad rolls, someone finally offers you solace and safety in her home. When you hear this, you turn into a sobbing mess, relieved that for the first time in your pathetic, uneventful life even before the reincarnation, someone cares about you. I thought maybe, just maybe, this quest would have a moment of meaningful introspection and what it means to have a friend. Perhaps there’ll even be some self-reflection.

And then you kiss her in the mouth and try to stand back on top because the players can’t stand being vulnerable.

The story also meanders; plot strings are picked up and forgotten immediately, the main arc of killing the demon king is dropped for shenanigans, and as of this writing, you’re a teacher at a school. More characters are introduced, more that I can’t give a fuck about as they all don’t do anything nor mean anything.
WRITING

No.

There’s some attempt at thoughtful prose, but it doesn’t work. It’s awkward and riddled with grammatical errors, so much so that I often find myself skimming rather than actually parsing every word. Still, the effort is very much appreciated. The sheer volume output is also incredible with eight threads in a little more than a month.

Often times, there would be bits of narrative where the perspective changes and the world is fleshed out through another character’s eyes. As clunky as the writing is, these segments help elevate this quest from the unspeakable depths below to something that approaches memorable. They give life to the world and turns it into something that is more than a simple cardboard prop that serves only to fulfill fantasies.


MECHANICS

The dice are 1d100 with criticals enabled, where successes override failures. You gain EXP and you can allocate them into different stats. Alternatively, you can invest in a field of magic, allowing you access to many varied skills, so many that you lose track and forget some of them.

Still, this is where the quest shines. The sheer flexibility of Marking Hex means it’s only limitation are dice rolls and your imagination. You also have another ability where you can create magical items, meaning you can theoretically do just about anything given the time and will. Surprisingly, some of the solutions that players come up with are clever. You could, for the most part, tackle any problem in any way you want, and the sheer freedom given means this quest actually delivers.


IT DELIVERS

The quest delivers. That’s all the matters. The only reason why any person would read this is for the power fantasy it offers, and it gives precisely that. Despite all of its massive, glaring flaws, it’s good because it manages to achieve what it set out to do. If this sort of thing isn’t your cup of tea, then this quest will change nothing.

But that mommy shit is weird. Y’all need Jesus.