異世界迷宮でハーレムを

Description / Comments

The protagonist finds an MMORPG online, goes through character setup, and blasts through all of the prompts since he just wants to get into the game like anybody else would, only to find himself getting sucked into a hyperrealistic “VR” before he knows it. He has all of his starter equipment he chose and his appraisal skill, but everything seems way too real and it doesn’t make sense that he was sucked into VR without putting on any headsets. However the beginner event of bandits attacking starts so he uses his holy sword to mow down the bandits and protect the villagers as if it were a game. However upon laying down in the village chief’s house he then finally tries to log out, and realizes this isn’t a game, but his new reality.

This work handles the worldbuilding very well; it regularly goes into the particulars of why things work the way they do along with the expected norms, in order to make the MC breaking all of the norms seem even more special. There’s a ton of nice systems and superstitions from the natives that comes about from not being able to use the protagonist’s Appraisal skill, like if a smith becomes a slave they typically change their job to something else due to them being forced to do skill-imbue gambling constantly but regularly failing since nobody can see which equipment has skill slots. The party also slowly builds up their strength staying in the beginner areas for a very long time despite having like 5000x exp gain rate so that there’s a gradual sense of progression instead of the protagonist slaying dragons right off the bat; the protagonist is “OP” in that he has a wide variety of skills and unique information, but he’s not the saviour of the world.

However this work is also essentially erotica with at least half of the work being focused on sex scenes and general ecchi content. Everything the protagonist does is for the sake of having a happy harem homelife with sex constantly, which is understandable for a 16 year old isekai’d dude where slavery is rampant and death is imminent. However as a result of at least half of the work being sex scenes the plot and worldbuilding takes longer to develop than most people would probably like. If this were a VN it would definitely be a nukige, unlike a normal VN that has a majority of plot/SoL with occasional sex scenes. However a majority of the scenes are pretty well done, and the weaving in of the plot and character development makes it more worthwhile than just reading h-magazines or whatever, similar to the effect a VN would have; although only if you manage to click with the only 2 characters that are currently in this work.

I would say that it’s a fairly unique and noteworthy work in that regard that it manages to handle both aspects extremely well, both the normal “plot” and the sex “plot”. However if I had one complaint it’s that the primary “heroine” (roxanne) is fairly boring and bad as a character and i’m not particularly fond of her; she exists solely to be the caring booba character who praises the protagonist constantly regardless of what he does and essentially is no more than a sexdoll. Sherry is far more interesting though being far more skeptical and questioning of the protag as well as being generally intelligent in her own right, but it takes an extremely long time for her to appear in the story as a result of the slow pacing which is kind of unfortunate. And if you don’t like either of these characters you’ll be stuck with just them (and the protag) for like 90+ chapters.