Reviews of I Left the World as Villager A, but Suddenly Became a Mecha Pilot. by UnliMegane - Webnovel

This review is part of a review swap and valid as of chapter 16. This is a reversed transported to another world / reincarnated in another world story. It adds the extra spice of both characters involved in the transit retaining their memories, even though it seems to be one entity rather than two conflicting souls sharing one body. This is a story I'm sad to review, because the whole is less than the sum of the parts. Part by part it's a solid five stars all over, but when put together there are cracks in the picture. It all starts out as a campfire tale, the kind where you, the reader, have to envision yourself sitting at a campfire listening to a wizzened greybeard telling the tale of his youth. Sure there are tense errors that can't be chalked down to the taleteller wavering between the tale in the past and his comments about that past, but they're minor and don't disturb the flow. And it's all wonderfully told from that very special first person point of view. Then we have the transit. Suddenly story-snippets in third person point of view are inserted, and for me this is a big no-no. Deciding to run a story in first person allows the author some leeway when it comes to tenses. As an author you get close and personal with the reader, but it comes at the cost of a smaller world, one limited to what can be experienced by the narrator. Adding third person snippets is cheating. The world transited to isn't modern Earth. It's our far future. So kudos for a great setting. Fantasy land goes visiting space opera. Then things get horribly confusing. Flashbacks all over the place, long sections of third person narration just occasionally interspersed by what the main character experiences, back to the now, next flashback, back to the now, next flashback, and after I while I suffer from temporal car-sickness. Stars. Writing: Four stars. Near perfect langage accompanied by mixing first person and third person point of views randomly inserted in the story. Updates: Five stars. Perfect. Story: Three stars. Each and every single part is a rock solid five star chunk, but when joined together we have an unholy mess. Character: Five stars. No discussion. Superb characterisation. World: Five stars. Same here. Superb depiction of the setting, or in this case, settings. Lastly, this is a tale that should have been told straight for the sake of coherence, but readers should give it a chance, because as soon as the temporal chaos is taken care of you'll be reading one hell of a Sci-Fi story told in all but perfect native English where the very language used have a personality of its own.