March 18, 2023
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By Shelley Pallis.
He was the best swordsman on the planet. He superior by each stage, mastered each trick, and discovered each method. He reached the very best attainable ranges of feat, capable of defeat elite troopers with no sword, since he was simply as helpful with a little bit of wooden. He achieved a Zen nirvana of swordliness, and simply to show to himself, he went out and killed the best dragon of all, the dragon of dragons, a creature so highly effective that it was basically a god.
And that’s the place we are available, as our hero seems ruefully on the severed head of the best dragon that ever lived, and sheepishly listens to its dying phrases, as its thoughts slowly fades and its telepathy wanes. The dragon, it seems, is fairly copacetic about being slain, and provides to grant him a want.
And that’s when our hero realises – he’s completed swordsmanship. There may be actually nothing left for him to study, nothing for him to attain. He can not get any higher than he already is. So, he needs for one thing that was denied to him all his life. From the age of six, when he examined excessive in sword aptitude, he was destined for a life as a warrior. Now he needs to present all that up, and reside his life once more… as a wizard.
Shin Kouduki’s I Surrendered My Sword for a New Life as a Mage takes the reader by the lengthy, lengthy, lengthy technique of Soma, our hero, as he stumbles by the coaching for changing into a magic-user. Waking up as his six-year-old self, able to reside his life once more, he nonetheless retains the skills of a super-human swordsman, a few of that are oddly repurposable in fundamental magic. Kodouki has some good concepts about the way in which that utilizing magic may tax a human being, however sadly frames his whole story within the box-ticky, gamified method of too many mild novels, frequently stopping his narrative to assemble spells in some type of folder-tree like he’s accessing them in Home windows.
There are some intriguing stabs at addressing the frustration of an grownup, super-competent man abruptly trapped in a toddler’s physique, notably concerning the expectations and behavior of his tutors and household, however even when the story will get going (there’s a kidnapping, and a threatened demon invasion, and so forth and so forth.), his characters are so bland and uninspiring, and his world so sparsely delineated that it usually felt like I used to be making an attempt to make sense of The Lord of the Rings by its reflection on a dented kettle.
His afterword does Kouduki no favours, unsurprisingly revealing that he began out on the infamous fanfic and self-publishing web site Shosetsuka ni Naro (“Let’s Turn into Authors”) earlier than his work was snapped up by {a magazine}. Extra unexpectedly, he reveals that he’s not some teenager with no expertise of human beings or, effectively, describing issues, however a psychology graduate. He admits that he hasn’t actually put his psychology diploma to make use of, however as an alternative lurched into a brand new profession, thereby suggesting that your complete plot of I Surrendered My Sword is a few type of allegory of his personal life.
Properly, a bachelor’s diploma doesn’t imply you may have completed psychology, and probably the most thick-eared of martial arts turns of their higher ranges to philosophies of outreach, goodwill and justice. Pondering that killing the most important enemy was the top of feat was one thing of a callow transfer on the a part of his protagonist, though there are hints in Kouduki’s narrative that he is aware of this, and that he has a sardonic method to among the set-ups of fantasy.
Considered one of his characters discovers not solely that her father is the Darkish Lord, however that “Darkish Lord” is a mere job description, attained by a poll of fellow evil-doers, and that he was neither the Darkish Lord when he fathered her, nor something however a mere Darkish Minion till a couple of years earlier. There are comparable pops at a hapless village on the borderlands, which seems to have been established solely as cannon fodder to warn the authorities within the occasion of an invasion. However certainly even individuals who have learn nothing however different mild novels have seen all of this earlier than?
I Surrendered My Sword for a New Life as a Mage is offered from J-Novel Membership.
