The main drive of this story is watching the protagonist slowly conquer his world, through war and political maneuvering, while raising the level of his civilization.
First off, the system of Professions or Jobs isn’t all that unique from any other stories out there, though you will be surprised that there are no expected status screens, and only the MC seems to have the voice of his profession guiding him. In tandem with that, you might recognize the name ‘Oda Nobunaga’ because he’s one of the most famous characters from Japanese history, and the most famous from the warring period. He almost conquered and unified Japan and would have done it too if he wasn’t betrayed. Basically, he is the go-to when describing a Japanese conquerer. In relation, the MC, his skills, abilities, and the story function much similarly to the history of the man—Rising from almost nothing to greater and greater heights within a period of perpetual war.
Moving on to a more detailed analysis of the story:
The writing, the grammar and prose, is pretty well executed. Whether due to the author, translation team’s handiwork, or both, you will have almost no issues enjoying the story from a purely English point of view. There are extremely minimum grammar, spelling, or typographical errors. However, you’ll see why I still wouldn’t rate it highly once you reach my gripes.
The romance(s) in this novel, although above-average for most Japanese web novels, still sucks in my opinion. Don’t enter this story for it, it’s just a small icing on the cake. Though, the plus side is that the interactions between the MC and the female characters are interesting for the most part.
The action in this story is what I call ‘Soft Action’. It’s not the focus of the scenes and nor do they really tell a story of their own. It’s written well, for the most part, but it doesn’t follow the formula of ‘Action, Reaction, Result’ to enough of a tee. It basically says what’s happening, loosely shows some minor things, and carries on. It doesn’t make me sit in anticipation or anxiety, doesn’t make me worry, fear, or root for the MC. You know what’s gonna happen in the end, everything goes as predicted, there is no suspense. Thus, as I’ve seen so far, and with any ‘Soft Action’ type stories, it serves only to keep the main premise of the story going—a man rising to conquer a warring period. Just like the romance, it is only an icing on the cake.
The MC is fitting. Although he sometimes contradicts himself—like saying he is doing his best to protect Lavalia while literally bringing her through even more dangers, bruh she’s strong, stop saying that so uselessly—but he is mostly uniform and near perfect for this type of story. I could believe he existed in this world as a concrete being.
Other characters are also well executed. They are individualized and stand on their own with clearly distinct personalities. Even the female characters are written well, which is rare. Some of the female characters sometimes, however, lose part of this aspect as soon as they are within the vicinity of the MC for more than a couple breaths. This doesn’t happen frequently enough to be an issue for me, though.
The art in the story is great, but I feel like it’s often utilized or inputted at the wrong places.
Now for the gripes with the story:
My first main gripe comes in the form of the MC’s older brother, who was essentially used as a stepping point (this isn’t a spoiler, you know it will happen within two chapters if you’ve ever read any story before). He is way too incompetent to be believable as a Viscount heading a family that owns such a large land. Supposedly, since his father had planned for him to inherit the family lands from his birth, he should have been bred from a young age in all manner of things; from Politics, to Strategy, to War and Combat especially in their warring world. However, nope, he shows none of this traits, in fact, he is at the opposite end in almost every good trait but looks—which I assume the author did only to stroke the ego of the MC when compared to his brother. —Some of the MCs foes are like this, made to look dumb and weak in comparison to his oh so brave self.
A second gripe is that somethings just don’t add up at all. At one point it states that one of the MC’s ability withers the opponent’s fighting power by 20%, but then next it states they are shaking, barely holding on to their weapons. In effect, that’s at least a 60 to 75% reduction. If you can’t grip your weapon properly, you can’t fight, plain and simple. This isn’t just a one off thing, there are many other situations where stuff just don’t make sense.
Third gripe, the whole ‘milk sister’ this and that is simply cringe inducing to the modern reader. The best way to go about establishing such a relationship in this times is simply calling them proximity siblings or something. Good grief. At least it isn’t used too often in the later parts.
Fourth gripe, the dialogues sometimes says things that are as clear as day, or could be better said through the narration of the main character. Like(spoiler):
——
“There aren’t many foes here, since your brother was only planning to assassinate you! Let’s press on!” Laviala called.
“Yeah! And I’m not letting him escape, either!”
——
This would have been better told to us through his thoughts. ‘There weren’t many foes standing in our way due to the ploy being only to assassinate me, so we pressed on, cutting through the few in our way.’ Something like that would work far better.
Fifth gripe, the story keeps mentioning it takes place in a war torn era, and how the MC will end that, but it doesn’t really show us any of the damages the wars have cost.
Would I recommend this story? No. I would pin it at 2/5 amongst all the light novels I’ve ever read.