A Light Novel Recommendation: "Tensei Oujo wa Kyou mo Hata o Tatakioru"

Synopsis

A young woman finds herself reborn as a princess in the world an otome game with memories of my previous life. One would expect a princess character to be the protagonist of the story, but instead, she is the villainess of the tale. In addition to this, the love interests of the story are rather subpar and she wants nothing to do with them. Rather she is interested in the supporting character, the Commander of the Royal Knights.

Thoughts on Story and Characters

Initially, it seemed like the story would be a typical story involving a reincarnated female who easily gains the admiration of the male characters she is trying to avoid with her charm and personality. As the story progressed, however, it is notable that both the story and characters have a different and strong development to them. Basically, with the story, it starts off as something you would expect with the story concept in but goes in a direction that gives it more depth in comparison to other stories.

While it does have an interesting element of love interests not being the type that couldn’t charm the main character, their basic introduction went as expected but their development, in the long run, was something to note on. A primary example of this is with Klaus. He started off as one of the characters with the bigger flags in terms of game personality and story. Then as the story progressed you can see the development that he goes beyond what the protagonist initially thought him as.

Simply put, the story explores the characters and the flaws that they have which is something that you don’t see often in these type of stories. Flaws are usually in the backburner or are rather typical in connection to the category the character falls in, case in point, the female protagonist is dense to romance with reverse harem stories. With Rose, her flaws and learnings begin to pop out more as she meets her father the king. For this writer, it was the king that truly brought out the unique points of the series with how complex of a character he is. On one hand, you can’t help but dislike him for how cold he is to this daughter given the number of doting fathers in this type of story. On the other hand, he presents a realistic point of being a king first before being a father and pushing his daughter to strengthen herself as the princess of the country. He’s the kind of character you can’t help but ponder on, to be honest.

At the current state of the story though, it feels like things are getting a little too overcomplicated with the whole arc involving Rose becoming master of a clan. While interesting characters were introduced, it seems like the story is adding in more things than it should and is clearly set up to make Rose even more of a revered character. The only upside at this point is that there are interesting new characters that were introduced and it handled emotional moments well during the arc of Rose traveling.

Should you Read it?

This is a story that has the cliche points of a female character being reincarnated into an otome villainess role only to end up having the male love interests she’s trying to avoid being charmed by her, that much is clear for a lot of the introductory portions of the story. But in comparison to other similar stories, it holds a strong point in exploring the characters and their flaws which in result give them a surprising amount of depth. The story could do better in panning out its plot given how it seems to go in different directions. Overall, however, it’s a story that does well in handling and exploring the depth of its characters but not so much in terms of plot

Score: B-