You could be forgiven for assuming that you've read or watched this story a thousand times before in the year 2025. The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows draws from some very dry wells if you look on the surface; it appears to be both a demihuman harem and a story about a powerful guy who gets kicked out of his adventuring party because they don't realize how skilled he is. Since both genres have been beaten into the ground by this point, it could be very tempting to just write this one off as another in a long line of creatively bankrupt light novel series.

As you no doubt guessed from that introduction, it turns out that this series is greater than the sum of its tropes. It does still indulge in them, with the harem element being the most persistent (and frankly irritating), but the story across these five novels is something much more enjoyable than just another knockoff. Zenos being removed from his party barely factors in after the first book, and he's utterly unaffected by the antics of the increasing number of beauties who want to be his wife. Instead, the series is more interested in exploring the social dynamics of a world where status is everything and talented people are shunted aside if they come from the wrong socio-economic background, and how Zenos can work around the system.

As a character, Zenos grows increasingly human with each book. When we first meet him, he seems like a boilerplate character: undervalued for plot reasons but incredibly gifted. After being fired from his adventuring party, Zenos finds himself in a not-too-ramshackle building in an abandoned area of the city and sets up a clinic, and it quickly becomes apparent that he's more than skilled. But he's oblivious to that; his entire drive is to heal people, no matter who they are. Since the slums don't have city-sanctioned healers (meaning they've gone through the academy system), he knows he's very much needed. As a child, he was able to activate his own healing magic without knowing what to do with it and was helped by a mysterious man, who ultimately trained him. Now he's ready to give back to the community in the same way, and he begins by rescuing a child from slavery and healing a lizardman. In later volumes, he reconnects with others who grew up in the same orphanage as him and helps them to get on the right path, which is also in line with his desire to give back, something that becomes more and more apparent with each successive novel.

Of these first five books, the strongest are volumes three and four. Both of these deal with people from Zenos' past, two girls he knew in the orphanage. They've taken very different roads since the orphanage burned down, and while it wouldn't be right to say that Zenos wants to “correct” their courses, he does want them to reconsider their choices and whether or not they're really making them happy. He's not out to fix either woman; they're just people he cares about and who he wants to be happy. That's an equal plotline with his own desire to understand his childhood trauma and the man who helped him to rise above it, and there's a sense that helping his old friends is part and parcel of helping himself. These two books solidify the idea that Zenos' medical career is largely about giving others what he never had, starting with rescuing Lily from slavery. He doesn't do it because he wants to own an elf child, and he doesn't let her stay because he wants something from her. Rescuing Lily is a stand-in for saving his child self, and once you recognize that, that motive becomes obvious in each action he undertakes.

The novels are a combination of serious plot and goofy antics, and they do balance out surprisingly well. In part this is due to Carmilla, a lich who inhabits the property Zenos decides will be his clinic. Carmilla, who died three hundred years ago, serves as our sarcastic commentary, a modern voice who fully recognizes that Zenos is building a harem of all the requisite types and is happy to note whenever things get too tropey. (My theory is that she's the undead spirit of an isekai traveler.) Carmilla's voice helps to keep the harem aspects from feeling too serious, and the contrast between the three demihuman women (a lizard person, an orc, and a werewolf) who make up the core is also fun. The harem is still the stalest piece of the series, but it's at least clear we're never meant to take it seriously. Meanwhile, the more serious story beats, such as what happened to Liz after the orphanage was burned, are treated with respect. It's an odd balance, but it does work.

The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows is, on the whole, a surprisingly good series. It doesn't break the mold, but it does stretch it in positive ways, and Zenos is easy to get behind as a protagonist. Add in a total lack of status screens and some interesting side characters and you have a series that feels better than it has any right to be.