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HAAHAAHAA - WHAT IF THE WEAKEST ITEM WAS SIMPLY THE STRONGEST - HAAHAAHAA

That's exactly what ‘+99 Reinforced Wooden Stick’ is about. Through extreme luck, a noob manages to upgrade a stick to level 99. This makes the weapon strong enough to destroy the world in one fell swoop! Of course, this must be utilised.

The complete gimmick of this manga is that the noob has this badass stick. Who would have thought it from the name?
The concept also entertains for a few chapters, but pretty much everything else is extremely off-putting, which is why I just couldn't continue reading after about chapter 15. The protagonist is ... a complete idiot, all the other characters are just unlikeable. The story isn't really taken seriously, but it doesn't really manage to be funny either, which is why strange situations keep arising that seem serious but are resolved by slapstick or other (often stupid or repetitive) jokes.

I'm all the more surprised at how bad I found the whole thing. Normally I'm a fan of such gimmick game world stories - I really liked ‘Bofuri’ or ‘Speedrunner Cannot Return from the Game World’, for example - but something about this manhwa made me find everything stupid to the max.

You have to be rich and beautiful, then you could lie on your arse all day and not be married off to some disgusting aristocrat!

Lady Debora, who has (of course) just been killed in a road accident and (of course) woken up as a villain in a book she knows, thinks the same thing. Initially shocked and worried that her life as a villain will be horrible, she realises that Debora has it all and so takes it easy. At least until her brother makes her realise that she is to be sold - I meant married - as a trophy to a sleazy creep.

Let's ... face it, ‘The Perks of Being a Villainess’ revisits a pretty damn generic concept. Treated badly in a previous life, reincarnated in a book you know, of course, as a villain who is doomed to die.... You've seen it all before. I would actually find it difficult to find anything in this work that I haven't already read several times in other, similar books.
But the fact is that this manhwa does all of that damn well. With a bucket of new paint, it also manages to make many of these constantly used ideas seem fresh and interesting. For example, unlike it usually is, Debora doesn't try to be good and thus change her bad ending, instead she uses her bad reputation and evil nature to avert her fate in her own way. What may seem insignificant here in the review and as nothing more than a different approach, a different perspective, makes quite a difference and more importantly ensures that many characters, as generic as their approach is, have fresh, interesting and unusual interactions with each other.

The only thing I really criticise is the very first chapter, the death in Debora's previous life to be precise. It's so stupid that I'm unsure whether it wasn't meant to be a subtle joke.

7 out of 10 stars, simply because I find it too generic to give more points.

It's rare that I'm at a loss for words when I review something. But I don't know how to describe how disturbed and at the same time fascinated I was/am by this story. Sometimes I describe bad stories as a “car crash”. You probably know the phenomenon of people seeing an accident and gawking. They may not want to, they may find it disgusting, but they can't stop looking. I usually use the metaphor “car crash” to describe something that I didn't really like but couldn't stop reading. But that's not the case here.

This is the most disgusting, disturbed manhwa/manga I've ever encountered. It manages ... to make you feel sick at the same time, but you're still hooked, you're rooting for the characters doing bad things. ed by detailed, beautiful pictures, this is truly the worst car accident you will ever read.

But what is it actually about?

A girl was bullied and takes her own life as a result. Quite a sad story, but no matter what you imagine 'bullying' to be, it's not bad enough. Please don't let your ideas of bullying fool you, because this isn't 'bullying' anymore. It's torture that cartels can take a leaf out of their book.
But even though the girl is the daughter of an absolutely loving father and one of the richest men in South Korea, she doesn't tell him. So when she dies, he announces that he forgives the perpetrators. As it turns out, he only does this because the legal penalties are too lenient for him.
He adopts a failed experiment who is as strong as the strongest humans, but at the same time can feel no shame or pain. Since it's a young girl, she's supposed to bully the bullies like they did the daughter, but go one better.

That's all you really need to know. I myself couldn't help but read on with my mouth open, thinking “oh-oh” or “oh-no” or “wtf” all the time. The manhwa is incredibly well thought out, rich in detail and brutal. Especially because there's little that seems unrealistic, it's extra disturbing. From chapter 44 onwards, I simply couldn't read any more, I felt literally sick and couldn't take it anymore.

For me, this kind of thing is not really for me - so even though I couldn't stop reading and am impressed that the author and artist were able to do such a brilliantly crafted job, I'm only giving this 4 out of 10. There probably could have been more if there had been nice scenes in between - maybe how the father and the experiment somehow learn to love each other as father and daughter (or something?) - but there weren't any.

An arrogant nobleman enters a restaurant and attacks the poor chef. After insulting, punching and kicking him, he now tries to take his restaurant away from him. Fortunately, this chef is the strongest creature in the world and won't put up with it!

The story type “chef is actually strong and helps with his food” is no longer a rarity. While the market isn't really saturated with this approach yet, it's not hard to stumble across the idea either. But where it's usually about the chef revealing his strength or using his food to make others stronger or whatever, “The Archmage's Restaurant” takes a different approach.

A ... world that was almost destroyed by war and still bears deep scars to this day. On the surface, everything is peaceful again, but not deep underneath it is seething. Gangsters run unchallenged through many cities, the government loses its power, dragons kidnap people and humans enslave others of their kind. Even though “The Archmage's Restaurant” starts out cheerful and colorful, the story quickly grows up. The main theme soon becomes loss, grief and self-sacrifice. For example, the sad side of Isekai - e.g. being torn away from his family - is highlighted and when the protagonist is close to tears, he finds his joy in cooking or his girlfriend.

I don't want to overdo it, because especially at the beginning this manhwa is still quite shallow, quite cheerful. Only after the characters, world and story in general have been introduced does it start to reveal the more gruesome stuff. Especially in the last arcs available to me, the story becomes so sad for this very reason, here it is revealed that the characters we have come to know and appreciate as shallow, joyful personalities have been through hell. Unexpectedly, I was really on the verge of tears.

Conclusion: I haven't been so emotionally moved by a story for a long time. Even if the manhwa still seems quite generic at the beginning and therefore probably deserves a point deduction, the final chapters blew me away. So even if there are books that generally have better stories, the brilliant staging here makes me cry. 9 out of 10 potato points.

Edit: I almost forgot to mention it, but strangely enough, there are some cases here where love affairs are d between people of very different ages. Some could be excused by fantasy “they just look younger” logic - a young dragon who looks 17 and a seemingly 25 year old human are one of these couples, for example - but at least one case is obviously a young woman and an old man. If this couple only existed, it could simply be ignored, but instead a comical story develops about the morality of it all and in the end the conclusion is “age is just a number”. This situation and these characters were at least strange, if not disturbing.

THE GODS LIED TO ME?! I'M GOING TO SMASH THEM FOR THIS!!!

A guy dies unhappily - he falls ill with an unknown disease, which is therefore named after him, which was discovered the day he won the lottery. His desperate desire to survive is noticed by the gods of another dimension, who make a pact with him: destroy the rebellious demons and become human again! He slaves away as a skeleton for centuries, denied human pleasures such as food and hair, but he succeeds! The gods, unable to keep their promise, now want to lock him away, but a stupid oversight causes them to lock ... away the wrong soul. Instead, he is resurrected as the youngest son of the House of Heroes, which fanatically raises new heroes, i.e. Demon King Hater. And without the gods knowing about him! Can he survive in this crazy house with demonic abilities and take revenge on the gods?

The manhwa (Korean manga) is still quite short at 23 chapters, but it delivers in full. The title ‘I'm Going to Destroy this Country’ and the description promise a crazy atmosphere, which it delivers throughout.
However, due to the low chapter count, I can't say much more here. The concept has potential, but I know many stories that started with an equally crazy concept and soon failed disastrously to maintain the humour of the concept in later chapters. Whether ‘I'm Gonna Annihilate This Land’ (Manhwa's other name) will be able to do so remains to be seen.

Stronger,.... Stronger,..... EVEN STRONGER!

This is how ‘Boundless Ascension’ starts. A young man lives in a world in which monsters and abilities suddenly appeared a few years ago. To avenge his parents, who were killed by one of these monsters, and to ensure that nothing like this ever happens to him again, he trains like a man for several years. In the end, he attains the body of a top athlete, but because no ability ever awoke in him, he can't match any of the true hunters (people with abilities are called hunters).
So far, so generic. If you have consumed manga, light novels, anime or any ... other Asian medium in recent years, this should sound familiar. Magic appears, people with magic become famous and rich, protagonist wants the same, trains his bones to destruction but never gains strength and then because of his training he gains some powerful, mysterious power.
Does that mean that every one of these stories is bad? No. The concept works wonderfully, otherwise there wouldn't be so many manhwa (Korean manga) about it and even more readers of such stories. But because the market is extremely oversaturated, a twist is needed to make the story stand out.

In ‘Boundless Ascension’, that would be the fact that it's hardly about the earth. The protagonist's ‘mysterious ability’ comes in the form of an ‘invitation’ in a tower, a gigantic dungeon, so to speak, which holds various challenges on an unknown number of levels. On level 1 you have to defeat a sand golem, on level 2 destroy an orc village, on level 3...
The manhwa's extreme focus on the tower and the levels instead of glory, money and power on earth means that the story very quickly becomes less like the standard generic rubbish and more like the story of a young man forced to beat a dungeon. This may not seem like much, but if you (like me) know far too many of the ‘magic appears, monsters appear, hunters emerge,...’ stories, this difference is worth a lot, simply because you're not constantly reminded that you've read it all three times or seen it as anime.

So now that I've explained to you why I didn't cancel the manhwa as a ‘generic pile of rubbish’, I'd like to talk about it itself. Is it good now?
I honestly wouldn't go that far. It's... ok? Or in other words: it's entertaining, but I can't tell you anything that was really funny, sad, exciting or anything else. Frozen pizza, so to speak.
Just like frozen pizza, ‘Boundless Ascension’ doesn't really have any negative aspects - except that frozen pizza is somewhere unhealthy and it would probably be better for your mental growth to read other stories. The only real criticism comes from the fact that there are moments or designs that are obviously copied from the thousands of other ‘magic appears, monsters appear, hunters emerge,...’ stories. In such situations, I found it difficult to maintain the illusion that ‘Boundless Ascension’ is so different. Technically, there were also a few inconsistencies in the story, firstly when it came to the backstory, the character and the protagonist's relationships, and secondly with the abilities that appear in later chapters. But I was probably so lulled into my own illusion that it hardly bothered me while reading.

Conclusion: Delicious frozen pizza.

Trolololololololololololo - hahahahaah.

Everyone probably knows the term ‘troll’. In video games, they are mainly there to make life difficult for other players or even to take away any enjoyment of the game and find their own perverse entertainment in it. In short: they never had a father.

Apart from that, the idea of turning this concept into a manhwa (Korean manga) amazed me. I had no idea how it would work, but it could definitely be exciting! Spoiler: Not really.

‘Game Choegang Troller’ or “World's Strongest Troll” is about a player who keeps appearing in some of the most popular games to become number 1 in the ... global ranking, only to delete the game afterwards. Is that enough to label him a ‘troll’? Not really in my opinion, but at least some of the characters think so. So one day, when the first real virtual reality game appears - a game in which you are 100% immersed by connecting your brain to it - of course he has to try it out. Due to some unusual actions - he reads 100 books, for example - he receives a quest and the secret class ‘Bard of Anarchy’, with which he cannot level up or otherwise become stronger, but he can earn points by creating chaos and use them to change the world like a creator god.

Let's start from the beginning, I've already hinted at it, but there's not really a ‘troll’ here. The protagonist is a bit of an arse, of course, but who isn't a bit of an arse towards other people? He doesn't go around setting fire to villages because he can ruin other players' fun, instead he has a strategic reason or a quest that doesn't give him much choice.
Thus, a rather typical ‘bastard protagonist’ story develops very quickly, in which the protagonist is a bit of an anti-villain. He grins evilly or takes revenge as brutally as possible, but that's nothing new, we've seen enough of that before. At least the protagonist is not the 910191 clone of Sung Jin-Woo - the protagonist from Solo Leveling, whose success triggered a flood of similar mangas/manhwas.

Overall, I would describe ‘World's Strongest Troll’ as ok. It's fun, but very generic and the title is misleading. If you read any of the other thousands of manhwas in this class (there's no name for them, so I don't know what to call them), you'll quickly see parallels. Apart from the uncreative content, I would have liked the title to be different or for it to be more about real trolling.

A little bit back... a little further... yes further..... FURTHER!

‘Proud To Be The Villainess: I'm Doomed After Stealing My Half-Sister's Fiancé And Having Her Banished’ feels a bit like someone constantly shouting “keep going backwards” while someone else parks in reverse. Because: a grand plan is revealed here by showing dozens of flashbacks.

When Wellmy's mother marries a nobleman and she not only gets a father, but also a big sister, she can hardly believe her luck! But she soon witnesses her parents mistreating her beloved sister. She simply cannot bear it and decides to save her sibling. However, because she is powerless against her parents, ... she decides to disguise her plan as bullying and at the same time accepts that her beloved sister hates her.
An interesting idea, the classic ‘otome game (Japanese love game, better google the term, it would take 30 lines to explain it) antagonist’ in a different way, but how is that supposed to work?

The manga demands a huge leap of faith right at the beginning. It wants you to believe that Wellmy really had no choice but to disguise her rescue as bullying. This is never really explained and feels a little strange, but it's easy to ignore.
What follows, however, is a work that is written in a very interesting way. ‘Interesting’ because it has a unique way of telling the story. It begins with the ‘revelation’, i.e. the moment when Wellmy's plan is finalised and all the accusations are thrown at her, which normally leads to the antagonist's downfall. Not a page goes by without some kind of flashback. Flashbacks that summarise so many years in just a few drawings that they seem like expedition dumps that are often rather difficult to understand. Imagine ‘Poppy's Playtime’ notes and videotapes strung together as a film. It's damn uncomfortable to read and feels like one of those ‘modern novels’ you read at A-level or even university.

Yet the manga works - somehow. I have no idea why, but even though it feels like swallowing large, sometimes sharp-edged stones, it's fascinating. In fact, the manga manages to grab the reader to the extent that you just want to know how Wellmy's crazy plan turns out. Probably mainly because you do feel sorry for Wellmy, her fate began to interest me. The art style is also striking and I liked it.

In the end, I would only recommend ‘Proud To Be The Villainess: I'm Doomed After Stealing My Half-Sister's Fiancé And Having Her Banished’ to a handful of people, those who really like such ‘otome game’ stories or modern books.

Forced to love someone in order to get home... No, this is not a horror or dystopian film, this is a romance manhwa!

Revived in the world of a book, the protagonist must defeat the tower. With knowledge of the story and the ability to be revived at the starting point, she finally beats the tower after her 58th attempt! After living through 57 times of her friends getting killed and people cheating on her, she is extremely jaded and only likes the three deities that have been with her as contractors for most of her lives. So when FINALLY the final reward is handed out ... and she's supposed to be sent back to her world, there's a bug and instead she ends up in a romance novel... will she ever get home?

In my brief summary, I have tried very hard to concentrate on the positive aspects of the manhwa. The three deities are witty commentators, and the harsh, direct manner of the protagonist doesn't seem to fit this world at all. After all, while she fulfilled quest after quest for over 500 years by defeating monsters, the current ones now revolve around romance! So she has to find ways and means of coping with her battle-influenced nature and character traits in this very unsuitable setting. For example, instead of throwing romantic glances, she prefers to knock out the male protagonists and is thus ired for her strength.

Unfortunately, the manhwa soon takes a route that I don't like at all. As I said, it was fun to see the protagonist completing the quests and ‘seducing’ others, even though she has absolutely NO desire for any human relationship and really just wants to go home to her dog. However, this fun ends very quickly when our S-class hunter also starts to fall in love with the characters. Instead of funny situations in which she has to somehow become popular with rolled eyes, we get the classic ‘damn I love you, don't love you. Damn I like you, I DON'T LIKE YOU!'. An endless back and forth about what her feelings are, who she likes or doesn't like and whether she might not want to go home after all develops, which might still be tolerable (even if I would have complained about it).
It became really critical for me when her quests were no longer ‘improve your social standing’ or ‘make the prince fall in love with you’, but ‘fall in love with character X’. Not only is the mission just stupid, love shouldn't and can't be forced like that, but any chance of there being any funny scenes like the one mentioned earlier disappeared. A ‘damn I love you, don't love you. I fucking like you, I DON'T LIKE YOU!’ after the other until I was completely fed up.

The story had potential, but for me it killed itself.

‘Not Your Typical Reincarnation Story’ was recommended to me as a rather atypical ‘ reincarnated as a villain story’ - OMG A MANHWA TITLE THAT MIGHT MAKE SENSE?!

Manhwa (Korean manga), manga or anime have the stupid habit of giving themselves names that are far too long and often inappropriate despite or because of this. That's not the case here, which is the first HUGE plus point.
Apart from that, we accompany Edith Rigelhof here, whose soul has of course been resurrected from another world. Remaining tropes are also fulfilled - for example, she knows the book and so wants to make everything better or everyone hates ... her as the villain of the story. But the hope of being able to make everything better is quickly dashed: a mysterious force pushes the other characters and also Edith into the course of the story! But apparently this force is not omnipotent - so will Edith manage to defeat it?

So what exactly is unusual about this story? Roughly speaking, EVERYTHING. What starts out as just copying all the tropes of the genre soon gets more and more twists, big and small, which quickly makes the story feel unique. E.g.: The mysterious force that pushes the story into its course is nothing unusual in such works. But Edith soon realises that there is a person with an ego behind the force. But who? A ‘fight against fate’ quickly turns into a ‘fight against an unknown enemy’. Edith is also simply another special feature. Normally in such works we get planning protagonists who use their knowledge to mould the world to their will. Edith tries to do this at first, but it soon becomes clear that she is a very emotional character. As a result, the story develops not because she planned it that way, but because she was simply a nice, emotional person. Instead of ‘I know the story, I can fix it’ out of thin air, we get so many emotional moments here where it just makes sense for characters to help Edith.

The only criticism, which for me is very serious, is the system behind the power mentioned above, which is not dealt with in detail. For example, the protagonist has to fulfil three conditions in order to break the influence of the person mentioned, but she has no idea of the conditions except that they exist, which means she only has the choice of stumbling into them by accident. Obviously this ‘I'm the protagonist, I accidentally fulfil everything important’ comes across as annoying, although ittedly there's a bit more to it than that, which I won't spoil. This unawareness runs through the entire manhwa. Every time this power plays a role, the protagonist has no idea and the reader has far too little to fully understand the scenarios. This is always annoying, also because the power plays an increasingly important role in the later chapters and seems more and more unnecessary or even like breaks with the actual plot.

All in all, my praise may seem rather meaningless to people who are not so familiar with the genre or type of story. It's great that a ‘fight against fate’ quickly turns into something else, but how is that special? Well, because ‘Not Your Typical Reincarnation Story’ just starts out so typical and consistently very self-consciously and seemingly intentionally adapts and then slightly breaks with typical tropes of such stories, you get something familiar that still feels new and refreshing. Compare it to a pizza: you'll have eaten pepperoni pizza far too many times to find it extremely tasty, but then you enter this one restaurant that makes it slightly different and suddenly you have a new taste experience. Apart from that, the manhwa as a whole, especially the characters, is simply well written.