Neechan wa Chuunibyou

Mutsuko Sakaki lives in a world where each individual has their own worldview. How they see the world determines what events will happen to them, who they will meet and the consequences of these events. For better or worse Mutsuko has learnt everything she knows from fantasy manga so this becomes her worldview. People with strong worldviews (like Mutsuku} are able to bend and distort the worldviews of the people around them until they share hers. One of these people is her younger brother Yuuichi who she fashions into her Guardian Knight. The story begins when Yuuichi suddenly sees everybody around him with labels over their head and discovers the people around him are not so normal. His class has a vampire, a witch, a werewolf and, most sinister of all, a serial killer.

This is not a standard fantasy novel, it is a parody of all that is held sacred in fantasy novels. If Konosuba is tongue-in-cheek then this is over the top. It deserves much more attention than it has received. After reading several fantasy light novels and skipping page after page of the same old fight scenes and the same old plots and characters this a breath of fresh air. My only criticisms is that it does not seem to treat the harem aspect of the story with the same disrespect.

tl;dr: A series about an overpowered protagonist in a crazy but interesting world that falls apart towards the end due to taking a lot of what were originally its strengths too far. 

This is a series mainly about an overpowered protagonist. He very much doesn’t seem like it at first, but it very much becomes clear that he’s ridiculously overpowered to the point that there isn’t really anything that’s a threat to him directly. Hence, while there are fight scenes against major players, they aren’t really the standard type where there's tension or suspense, but rather they’re just the culminations of stories where things quickly get resolved. As such, these fights in and of themselves aren’t that important, but rather the build up to them and the aftereffects of them being resolved so easily are what's interesting. This series does really well in that regard for the first four volumes, and the fifth was also solid enough though it was at a smaller scale with a series of shorter stories. Throughout these volumes, it uses the overpowered protagonist as a crutch to lead into all sorts of crazy plots with hilarious situations and amusing and likable characters. This was done with stories that for the most part were very distinct from each other and hence there wasn’t really anything like a deep plot, nor did it really try to develop characters all that much or give them character arcs, but it was still very amusing.

However, this started going downhill as it began getting too meta. There was some light foreshadowing of such elements in volume 3 with them being fully introduced in volume 4, though they don’t really become an issue until volume 6. The series had always been a crazy hodgepodge of a lot of things from the beginning and that’s part of what made it so interesting, but it felt like there was some level of consistency to it. In volumes 6 and 7 it seemed to rely too heavily on its meta aspects to begin doing things that were at a far greater level of arbitrariness in such a way that it started feeling overtly convoluted and random. This is exuberated by how it introduced way too many characters. The concept of everyone the protagonist defeats essentially joining his party was a good concept and pretty well done at first, but in the last three or so volumes it felt rushed with it being used with way too many characters too quickly and hence the newer characters not getting solid enough introductions while the older characters felt kind of left out. Also, while there were still great scenes with the protagonist being OP, the meta aspects and how the overpoweredness of the protagonist was relied on at a much greater frequency than previous volumes with not enough build up resulted in him actually coming across as kind of cheap.

All of this leads to an ending that wasn’t really an ending, in that it didn’t really try to provide a satisfying conclusion, but rather walked the reader through all of the various plot lines that the series had introduced and then never resolved. However, due to how there were so many of these plot threads and most of them were only kind of touched on it didn’t feel like this made the series feel incomplete, but rather just really random which ends up making the final impression just a general feeling of pointlessness really.