Book Report - That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (Book 16) by FUSE

Originally Published: Nov. 16, 2023, 4:03 p.m. Last updated: Nov. 16, 2023, 4:03 p.m.

Tags: books

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime is part of a large trend of Japanese Light Novel series to put their entire premise in the title. The TL;DR for why they do that is that the most popular site for sharing this kind of content only shows off titles, so authors are incentivized to try to hook people with an interesting premise up front. The original title is Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken, or TenSura for short (Ten from Tensei, "reincarnated" and "Sura" from how "Slime" is pronounced). This is one of the kings of the Isekai genre and often shows up as a point of comparison whenever any new Isekai comes out.

The intro to TenSura involves our MC, a 30+ office worker, getting stabbed and dying. Some fantastical system listens to his dying thoughts and grants him abilities based on those thoughts, reincarnating him into a fantasy world as a creature that could feasibly have those abilities, a slime. He quickly realizes his predicament, comes to terms with it to an extent, and starts on his new life. This is a series with a heavy focus on progression, world-building, and empire-building. Rimuru keeps getting stronger and stronger, gaining new abilities from the things he eats, finding companions and allies, helping them get stronger, founding a city and then a nation, then engaging in international politics, commerce, and war. In general there's a well-balanced mix of dialogue, action, and exposition in TenSura, and there are a plethora of colorful characters, though most of them barely progress past being one-dimensional.

In book 16, we're finishing up a multi-book arc about a failed 1,000,000+ man invasion of Rimuru's country by The Eastern Empire. I'll be honest, it's gotten a bit tedious. I've already read the webnovel for this series years before, and this arc was already a bit long at that time, but in the light novel version it's been expanded even more than before to exhausting levels. I might be tired out by the series itself at this point, so I'm not super sure how fair this opinion is. There are probably 100+ named characters at this point, including 20 or so that are just Rimuru's main entourage. It's painful to keep them all clear and remember who did what and when and why and so on. We also haven't had an ally die basically since book 1 or 2, but we keep getting more and more new ones and even converting enemies so the cast to keep track of is enormous and only trends upwards. We've got lots of LitRPG-style listing out of the skills available to each character which I've taken to only glossing over for things that stand out. We've got frequent reactions, over and over, from Rimuru about how OP he or his subordinates have gotten and they've frankly gotten stale. I'm committed to riding this out because we're rapidly approaching the endgame, but I'm not sure how much I actually care anymore.

This has been a long ride, and there have been previous moments I've also felt this kind of tired about it, only to enjoy the book after. I'm hopeful for improvement, and the afterward note from the author mentioned the next book should be a collection of stories to flesh out points of view other than Rimuru's so I'm interested in that, under the premise that other points of view will be refreshing.

I don't have too much to say about this particular book from a story aspect, but I want to go on one quick rant about quality issues. The publisher for this is Yen Press. Yen Press was, for a long time, pretty much the only major publisher doing Japanese-to-English official translations. They were also notoriously awful, doing a worse job by a mile than fans doing unauthorized translations on their own. Worse quality of translation, worse localization choices, or straight up errors or typos. This lack of quality has not really been improved on, but book 16 here has particularly egregious. By the time I stopped counting, only halfway through this 300-page book, there were already 10 basic errors that would have been trivial to notice and fix in a single pass by a halfway competent editor. There were typos, there were clear errors about which character had said what, there were mistaken pronouns that completely changed what a character meant if taken as accurate, and so on. I'm so sad that even now when there's competition to Yen Press also publishing these kinds of stories Yen Press continues to lack any level of quality control.