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ocelotdoll's review against another edition
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
0.5
In principle I should be unable to give a book a rating below 2 out of 10 because anything below that would be so outside what I enjoy that I would never choose to read such a book. Overlord is the first book I read going against my own choice system, and it unfortunately did not work out; maybe even worse than that it confirmed every one of my fears when it came to the "anime" genre (encompassing light-novels, manga, and anime).
The elephant in the room when it comes to any Japanese media is the translation, and unfortunately the translation of Overlord was plainly bad. At the best of times it felt like someone trying to write formal English whilst having no experience speaking the language outside of school, at worst it felt like reading the output of machine translation. Surprisingly there was a relative lack of typos as I've seen American books written with more spelling and grammar mistakes than Overlord.
Nevertheless, overall the book was unpleasant to read as almost every sentence there was something off with the way things were said, I never managed to get into a "reading flow" and instead constantly stumbled over weirdly constructed sentences and awkward word choices. In a certain way, it was very much like fan made anime subtitles, the translation effort being put into literal translation rather than putting any effort into the prose. Whilst I could bear that with subtitles for dialogue, I cannot accept it for lengthy descriptions and world expositions.
This leads into the second, and by extent, third problems of the book: the overabundance of completely useless exposition and descriptions leading to terrible pacing.
I've read some books with awfully long descriptions, Tom Clancy being a prime example of this, spending pages describing the inner workings of a military submarine. The key difference being that Tom Clancy's descriptions:
a) pay off
b) occur such that they don't affect pacing
c) are detailed, thus passively generating interest
Knowing that the 9th screw of a russian nuclear submarine's reactor is responsible for holding the whole reactor together is important when two pages later that screw melts off, causing the submarine to sink.
Knowing that the MMORPG has 1000+ races of which the author describes 12 before running out of ideas when two pages later the protagonist is thrown into a world in which only about 1 in 10 rules of the MMORPG world apply is useless, a waste of time, and ultimately uninteresting due to the 1000+ number feeling vague and random (this is then repeated for classes, spells, items).
This is rendered worse by the descriptions being repeated once more in a very anime way, the ever living classic being the "So this is the power of [insert name and description of something that was literally 1 paragraph earlier]".
This overindulgence on describing useless aspects however extends into descriptions that do not pertain to exposition. This is felt particularly when the protagonist is fighting off a group of adversaries. The protagonist is exponentionally more powerful than their opponents and the fight should be quick and decisive. However, in once again, a very anime way, this quick and decisive battle takes the better part of a 45min chapter because the author chose to add too many descriptions and the characters never stopped talking reminiscent of Fairy Tale and their 4 episodes-long combat scenes and Frieza's infamous 5 minutes from Dragon Ball Z.
The ultimate issue is that the book is not very long, barely reaching 250 pages, but with this abundance of dialogue and descriptions, there is very little left for action. In fact the saving of the village and the follow-up are the only two real actions of the book and they only occur in the last 40% of the book, the first 60 being dedicated to exposition through descriptions and dialogues.
Even more painful is the obviousness of the anime style episode cut-off including cliffhanger, truly giving the impression of Overlord being written with the idea of making an anime from the get-go rather than being primarily a novel in its own right.
However, a worse issue crops up when I think back to how little this exposition brought. The author made the dubious choice of jumping away from the protagonist to expose the events of other characters in the world the protagonist got transported to without context. All of a sudden names are being dropped whether it be for places or characters, a chase is being discussed, traps are being spotted and the narration then jumps back to the protagonist who does not know yet he's been transported to another world (still believing he's stuck in the MMORPG world) AND NEITHER DOES THE READER, making this change of point of view confusing instead of delivering valuable exposition. This change of point of view does tie into the ending battle but it retrospectively making sense does not excuse it being confusing ontop of feeling like a waste of time earlier on when the focus should be fully on the protagonist finding out he's not in the MMORPG world anymore.
Finally there is the sexism and child pornography issues that need to be addressed which unfortunately, I was also expecting before getting into the book (because they are what made me drop the genre to begin with). The immediate attention and needless description of women's breasts. The strictly male vision of what a woman in love should be like which as per use in anime seems to be synonym with brain damage. The sexualisation of a child character designed to be a sexual child because their creator was "a bit of a pornography expert" is simply unforgivable. Anime and manga might get away with it because lolicons are in a grey area of legality but a novel does not when it uses the words child and pornography in the same sentence.
The book has its occasional amusing moments and there is a concept in it that I could find fun if it had been better written (and not just better translated) but if "From Blood and Ash" which made me have genuine interest and thrill in its first 90% deserved a 2 out of 10 for its glorification of rape in its last 10%, then Overlord does not deserve anything higher than a 1 with its casual/pseudo-humorous mention of pedophilia and overall lacklustre writing.
The elephant in the room when it comes to any Japanese media is the translation, and unfortunately the translation of Overlord was plainly bad. At the best of times it felt like someone trying to write formal English whilst having no experience speaking the language outside of school, at worst it felt like reading the output of machine translation. Surprisingly there was a relative lack of typos as I've seen American books written with more spelling and grammar mistakes than Overlord.
Nevertheless, overall the book was unpleasant to read as almost every sentence there was something off with the way things were said, I never managed to get into a "reading flow" and instead constantly stumbled over weirdly constructed sentences and awkward word choices. In a certain way, it was very much like fan made anime subtitles, the translation effort being put into literal translation rather than putting any effort into the prose. Whilst I could bear that with subtitles for dialogue, I cannot accept it for lengthy descriptions and world expositions.
This leads into the second, and by extent, third problems of the book: the overabundance of completely useless exposition and descriptions leading to terrible pacing.
I've read some books with awfully long descriptions, Tom Clancy being a prime example of this, spending pages describing the inner workings of a military submarine. The key difference being that Tom Clancy's descriptions:
a) pay off
b) occur such that they don't affect pacing
c) are detailed, thus passively generating interest
Knowing that the 9th screw of a russian nuclear submarine's reactor is responsible for holding the whole reactor together is important when two pages later that screw melts off, causing the submarine to sink.
Knowing that the MMORPG has 1000+ races of which the author describes 12 before running out of ideas when two pages later the protagonist is thrown into a world in which only about 1 in 10 rules of the MMORPG world apply is useless, a waste of time, and ultimately uninteresting due to the 1000+ number feeling vague and random (this is then repeated for classes, spells, items).
This is rendered worse by the descriptions being repeated once more in a very anime way, the ever living classic being the "So this is the power of [insert name and description of something that was literally 1 paragraph earlier]".
This overindulgence on describing useless aspects however extends into descriptions that do not pertain to exposition. This is felt particularly when the protagonist is fighting off a group of adversaries. The protagonist is exponentionally more powerful than their opponents and the fight should be quick and decisive. However, in once again, a very anime way, this quick and decisive battle takes the better part of a 45min chapter because the author chose to add too many descriptions and the characters never stopped talking reminiscent of Fairy Tale and their 4 episodes-long combat scenes and Frieza's infamous 5 minutes from Dragon Ball Z.
The ultimate issue is that the book is not very long, barely reaching 250 pages, but with this abundance of dialogue and descriptions, there is very little left for action. In fact the saving of the village and the follow-up are the only two real actions of the book and they only occur in the last 40% of the book, the first 60 being dedicated to exposition through descriptions and dialogues.
Even more painful is the obviousness of the anime style episode cut-off including cliffhanger, truly giving the impression of Overlord being written with the idea of making an anime from the get-go rather than being primarily a novel in its own right.
However, a worse issue crops up when I think back to how little this exposition brought. The author made the dubious choice of jumping away from the protagonist to expose the events of other characters in the world the protagonist got transported to without context. All of a sudden names are being dropped whether it be for places or characters, a chase is being discussed, traps are being spotted and the narration then jumps back to the protagonist who does not know yet he's been transported to another world (still believing he's stuck in the MMORPG world) AND NEITHER DOES THE READER, making this change of point of view confusing instead of delivering valuable exposition. This change of point of view does tie into the ending battle but it retrospectively making sense does not excuse it being confusing ontop of feeling like a waste of time earlier on when the focus should be fully on the protagonist finding out he's not in the MMORPG world anymore.
Finally there is the sexism and child pornography issues that need to be addressed which unfortunately, I was also expecting before getting into the book (because they are what made me drop the genre to begin with). The immediate attention and needless description of women's breasts. The strictly male vision of what a woman in love should be like which as per use in anime seems to be synonym with brain damage. The sexualisation of a child character designed to be a sexual child because their creator was "a bit of a pornography expert" is simply unforgivable. Anime and manga might get away with it because lolicons are in a grey area of legality but a novel does not when it uses the words child and pornography in the same sentence.
The book has its occasional amusing moments and there is a concept in it that I could find fun if it had been better written (and not just better translated) but if "From Blood and Ash" which made me have genuine interest and thrill in its first 90% deserved a 2 out of 10 for its glorification of rape in its last 10%, then Overlord does not deserve anything higher than a 1 with its casual/pseudo-humorous mention of pedophilia and overall lacklustre writing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexism
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Emotional abuse, Pedophilia, and Toxic relationship
Minor: Sexual content