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A review by absentminded_reader
Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, Vol. 1 (light novel) by Tappei Nagatsuki
2.0
This was not a good book. The premise appeals to genre fans: A Japanese layabout is swept away to a fantasy world, encounters beautiful but deadly women, and has to survive by his wits and magical ability to start over again from the same moment every time he dies. Unfortunately, the story also featured stilted English, awkward phrasing, tautological terminology, and an uncomfortable lack of polish. I give it two stars instead of one because there were great concepts hidden behind the tortured text. However, I couldn't initially tell who was at fault: Tappei Nagatsuki, the original author, or ZephyrRz, the translator. I decided to look up ZephyrRz, found their blog (https://kafkafuura.wordpress.com), and discovered they are a college student studying abroad. Excellent Japanese knowledge (translates anime songs for fun), but inexperienced writing skills. The blog is filled with sentence fragments, terse phraseology, and literal translations. This is ZephryRz' writing style.
It seems this story was a novice effort for Nagatsuki as well, originally written as a serialized web novel on a novice author website. The story was quite fannish, with the main character Natsuki Subaru's name being one consonant away from the author's. Subaru would often choose unrealistic moments to pose like an anime character, which was supposed to be comical, but came off as off-putting melodrama. The battles would be constantly interrupted with lengthy, overly clever dialogue which might appeal to comic book/manga fans, but didn't appeal to me. Yet the concept of a guy who could fix his mistakes because his day reset every time he died was interesting, like All You Need Is Kill in a fantasy setting. There was also depth and backstory to the characters and world that was only hinted at in the story, but did intrigue me. Now that I know that the story originated as a web novel, the fact that it started off comical and gained depth and drama as it rolled along makes more sense now.
I loved the anime, and hoped to find more depth in the novel, but if you had to choose between the two, I would recommend experiencing this story through the anime. It's far more polished. I am not sure if I will pick up the second volume. As stated above, the translation became smoother towards the end of the novel, and perhaps that was due to Nagatsuki's growing experience. If ZephyrRz is the translator for the next few volumes, perhaps experience will make a difference in the readability as well.
It seems this story was a novice effort for Nagatsuki as well, originally written as a serialized web novel on a novice author website. The story was quite fannish, with the main character Natsuki Subaru's name being one consonant away from the author's. Subaru would often choose unrealistic moments to pose like an anime character, which was supposed to be comical, but came off as off-putting melodrama. The battles would be constantly interrupted with lengthy, overly clever dialogue which might appeal to comic book/manga fans, but didn't appeal to me. Yet the concept of a guy who could fix his mistakes because his day reset every time he died was interesting, like All You Need Is Kill in a fantasy setting. There was also depth and backstory to the characters and world that was only hinted at in the story, but did intrigue me. Now that I know that the story originated as a web novel, the fact that it started off comical and gained depth and drama as it rolled along makes more sense now.
I loved the anime, and hoped to find more depth in the novel, but if you had to choose between the two, I would recommend experiencing this story through the anime. It's far more polished. I am not sure if I will pick up the second volume. As stated above, the translation became smoother towards the end of the novel, and perhaps that was due to Nagatsuki's growing experience. If ZephyrRz is the translator for the next few volumes, perhaps experience will make a difference in the readability as well.