Torture Princess: Fremd Torturchen, Vol. 1 (light novel)

by Keishi Ayasato

[sa090]

While I do believe that this Light Novel has some interesting ideas, I do think that there are quite a few things added to it that makes liking the full package somewhat of a challenge for me.

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In the Light Novel world, Isekai series or transported into another world Series are a dime a dozen. Most are just harem filled garbage with the most uninteresting main characters for self insert purposes, but there are some gems. This novel is one I have difficulty placing in either category, so I will put it in the middle for now, since it did have some pretty good ideas, but some of the additions didn’t help me enjoy it. The novel doesn’t sugarcoat things, the world is full of death and destruction and entities that only want to add to it. Which started out as a pretty interesting thing to see for me, but for some reason, or maybe it was the frequency of the told events or displays that made it not as interesting pretty quickly. Thankfully though, a reason for all of the display was given, so I can count that as a plus :)

That being said, the plot in itself seems to be like a monster of the week kind of thing which is more than fine for me if it was interesting to read, which this was in some of it of course, but because the events went in the same exact sequence over and over again with slight variations, it made things a little too predictable as I progressed in the novel. It’s one of those stories where the first half is all new and interesting and the second half is sort of like a rehash where the author will try to make it as interesting with differing results. As an animated series, I believe that this approach would’ve worked quite easily for a longer while, but as reading material, I think I need some sort of extra variety.

Furthermore the planning and the introduction of those 13 demons, the ones who were introduced anyways, didn’t actually happen in a logical sense. Usually taking down high ranking demons, should start from the lowest ranking to the highest or something along those lines, but here it seemed to be whatever. The worst part for me though is that seemingly the most dangerous of their opponents was taken out in the same fashion as the other demons, nothing was that different to me. Or at least nothing displayed by that opponent really showed me the danger of said opponent when compared to the others, the only thing that really made it different was because of the background information revealed about Elisabeth herself.

This brings me to the characters, I did find the antics and the interactions somewhat amusing. Having a character like Kaito and especially how he ended up in that world is interesting, but I did have some issues with his characterization based on his old world background. To avoid spoilers I won’t be going into details, but there were instances where Kaito seemed more like a “promised hero” kind of character, than the type the novel introduced him as. This would’ve been fine if Kaito had gone through enough in this world to warrant a change like that, or came from a background that would’ve given him this, but it didn’t. It’s difficult to see someone in those situations taking the same initiatives he did, I personally can’t see it happen.

Elisabeth on the other hand has a more difficult personality to like, at least for me, so although I did enjoy some of the instances, I did find others really annoying. The biggest issue I had with the characters though, lies with the new cook. Characters like these, in situations like these, feel like too much of the wish fulfillment harems the other lesser Isekai novels have and I personally can’t get too invested when there are characters like that around. Especially if they are around a lot, which this one was ever since they joined.

Well, as evident by the above comments, there is always a “but” after almost everything I praised in the book so again, while I do think it’s not that bad, I do think that some of the additions only took from it instead of adding to it.

Final rating: 2.5/5