this was supposed to be a post about Mika from volume 3 but I couldn't quite build the energy (I'll get there!),
so here instead is a relatively spoiler-free bulletpoint list of reasons I think this book is easily in the upper divisions of isekai works, landing somewhere around "if you are willing to handle isekai material with characters like the header image, this one's a good time"
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it wears its Author's Hobby on its sleeve so hard that dice and a dice tray were once offered as a bonus for ordering
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passages in the narration are broken up by delightful little Tips that provide color both into the world of the story and the world of TRPGs, kind of like a tasty little loading screen treat
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the main lad is quite respectful of the world around him, wanting to make the most of his second life and treating the people within it as real people (because they are). he understands his actions affect the world around him and that even if his numbers get juiced to all hell, humans are still extremely squishy, physically or magically
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despite this respectfulness, he understands how to go Gremlin Mode when it comes to numbers, and you can practically hear the cackling coming off the pages as he burns a book's worth of stored XP on building a fantastically optimal build he had been turning over in his head for ages
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the most fantastically optimal build is not all flash and overkill, but instead a strong, well-rounded core with just enough tricks to handle anything. Get ripped and you can solve anything by force.
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monster girls
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"alternate ending" epilogues where the author visits some what-if scenarios that could have happened if the dice landed a bit differently. these epilogues also feature monster girls , including probably the second-best spider character in light novels so far (first goes without saying)
anyway I'm out of bullet points but I like it because I feel like, where I am in the story, it's not centered around "look at this guy go" but instead about seeing the world through his eyes and understanding how he can interact with it and how he can adjust his Numbers to better accomplish his goals
