The Spring 2020 Manga Guide

Demon Lord, Retry

What's It About? 

Akira is logged in to the MMO he helped create when it shuts down its servers – and the next thing he knows, he's inside the game! Suddenly “awakened” as one of his characters, the middle-aged Demon Lord, he discovers that only some of his in-game powers are working – namely, anything that isn't his admin privileges. Figuring that he'll get them working eventually, the newly reborn Demon Lord rescues a young girl named Aku and sets off to see if he can get home to Japan, only to wind up being pursued by the forces of good. Somehow this game is not going the way he envisioned… Demon Lord, Retry! is written by Kurone Kanzaki and drawn by Amaru Minotake. It's based on a light novel, which is also available from J-Novel Club, and in 2019 it was adapted into an anime that is available from Funimation. The manga was published digitally by J-Novel Club in March and retails for $8.99.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

The manga adaptations of Demon Lord, Retry! makes a good case for reading the original novels, because there are some definite gaps in at least this first volume of the manga. In fact, most of the worldbuilding is done in the prose short story included in the back of the volume – explanations about the towns, the politics, and how Luna ended up going from orphan to holy maiden all happen off the page, so to speak. The main body of the book is instead concerned with hapless Akira's attempts to figure out what the hell is going on to have landed him in the game that just closed its servers as one of his characters and if there's any possible way he can get out of it.

Only not really. That only seems to last for one chapter, at which point he gets a tacky magic ring and seems to just sort of accept his fate, cleaning up Aku, the kid he picked up, and then occasionally whipping out his overpowered character skills, at least once in the service of spanking Luna, which is meant to be funny but didn't work for me. There's almost no explanation of character motives beyond “this is my one personality trait” and a lot of sort-of silly asides from Demon Lord as he tries to cope with his newly middle-aged appearance. He does seem to be the most entertaining piece of this volume, at least in part because he's so upset about Aku refusing to call him “bro” because he looks too old, but mostly because when he unlocks some of his old skills he's able to switch into a different avatar, a character he deliberately made embarrassingly over the top. Those scenes come at the end of the volume, and they really do help to end the book on a high note, because not only is this other guy completely ridiculous, but we can also see Akira screaming inside his head with embarrassed anguish. It also sets up what could turn out to be a very entertaining love situation, with Luna's f-bomb dropping older sister falling head-over-heels for Demon Lord's other persona and Luna stuck traveling with him as Demon Lord because he took all of her money, plus she's (justifiably) afraid of her sister.

Unfortunately, before that point, the story just sort of happens without any great impact. It moves a little too quickly to allow us to get into the plot or characters and feels very much like a manga intended strictly for those who are already fans of the novels. The art largely works and some of the backgrounds are nice, but the overall sense of missing something makes me think that those curious about the source material for the anime would be better served just picking up J-Novel Club's release of the novels instead.

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Faye Hopper

Rating:

Demon Lord, Retry! is typical. It is a typical isekai in that it lacks invention or even a substantial overarching narrative. It is typical in its mean-spiritedness. It is typical in how badly its protagonist treats women. It is typical in that the protagonist is so powerful, so competent that he faces no challenges and never grows as a person. It is typical in all the ways that make me so very beleaguered and so very bored, and wishing I was reading something, anything else.

But, even if is so thuddingly average in most ways, Demon Lord, Retry! does have more of a snide sense of humor than I am used to. I, at first, was struck by this, as I wasn't expecting the main character to crack wise and express disaffection toward most situations as opposed to power-tripping (there are even jokes I liked—like the main character choosing one of his alternate characters to save the town, and the character being an overly-heroic, completely-out- of-his-control shonen protagonist screaming about virtue and justice) The problem is how this smarminess is directed. For example: the main character is constantly humiliating and making fun of a priestess who stand in his way (at one point he even spanks her like a child). Instead of being used for parody, the snark is harnessed to disempower and mock a female character. It is this direction of jaded, underplayed humor to cruel ends that makes Demon Lord, Retry! such a tedious and bitter slog.

The manga also does a bad job clarifying what its core premise even is. For starters, the fact that the main character is not only a player in the MMO, but its architect, is poorly delivered. The opening sequence doesn't give that indication at all (not is the reason for why the game is shutting down elaborated on beyond ‘servers shutting down’ or feel in any way related to the action of the narrative), and when even that is revealed, it begs a whole lot of questions that are never given proper answers—like if his access to a character select screen later in the volume is due to this or some other unknown mystery. There's also a component where the demon ring eggs him on to do horrible things that, while a potentially fun idea done better in series like Jujutsu Kaisen, barely factors into how the main character interacts with the world at all. So much of the volume is ideas being introduced and then barely explored and its extremely frustrating. At the end of the day, Demon Lord, Retry! is as predictable an isekai as they come. Its video- game tropes, half-heated worldbuilding and mean-spirited humor disappear from the mind just as soon as they're introduced. In that way, it is so much of the genre in a nutshell. An insubstantial exercise in wish-fulfillment that leaves almost no impact.