Review Detail of rapibhousecat in When A Mage Revolts

As a big fan of the anti-hero genre I had decent hopes for this story. In the beginning I was patient and let the story slowly (50+ chapters) unfold before getting to the excitement. With only minor complaints about translation quality I was hooked for hundreds of chapters. I've seen people mention this has comedy but I've never noticed anything funny in the entire story. It's action with a couple failed attempts at comedy very early on. This is a story about a man that travels across time and space to suddenly wake up in a different body in a different world. Yea, that last sentence means almost nothing in this story. He wakes up confused then gets on with his new life. Author didn't even bother with a real back story. The Good: This story can be very entertaining at times. There are a lot of battles; sometimes with magic, sometimes wits, and sometimes just regular brawling. Our main character can be cold and ruthless for most of the story. Later on his personality changes a bit because his responsibilities change. Although I don't personally like how big the difference is but I do appreciate the author trying to evolve him over the story. Lastly there is a lot of different mysterious powers to keep you in eager anticipation for the first half of the story. The Bad: Almost every side character is completely 2D. The author does not spend any time fleshing out anyone besides the main character. The originally useless System (yes he names it The System) powers up over the story and kind of ruins the feeling that our main character is smart when every few paragraphs he's asking The System to think for him. After hearing The System explain to him and advise him he will tell it to repeat itself in ******r words. Then he will- A: Repeat exactly what the system told him to others around himself to sound smart. B: Still not understand, get angry and attack The System. C: Ignore it and do what he wants regardless of the danger or consequences clearly coming despite it being right every single time. The Ugly: The translation. The actual world geography. The number of enemies. The names of characters. The incompetence of every country other than the enemy. I wont go into spoiler details on the last one but read on if you want to know how bad this story gets in the later half. The translation of this story will lead you to question many things. In the beginning I was fine reading it but the later half has become broken sentences that you must think about to try and understand. Beyond the terrible sentence structure, the translators sometimes throws out things like "shallow yet deep" describing a cut. That's a real example to expect almost every chapter later on. I have to assume this is machine translated with a non-English speaking editor for the later half. The geography is confusing as distances and travel time seem to vary greatly as the story goes on. Sometimes it may take our main character days of travel flying at high speeds and other times hours to go to and from the same place. Other times it will seem that regular foot soldiers have the ability to teleport across the continent. Despite describing the countries directions I still have no idea the actual shape of the continent. We only get a vague sense of something being north or south, east or west. The number of enemies that our main character kills escalates quickly in the later half of the story. Thousands will die in seconds yet this never seems to actually effect the enemy. There are always many more enemies no matter how many thousands die. I'm talking about human enemies that have a special power that not just anybody has. They need to grow up and receive special training. Somehow they are in limitless supply to the point that they are best described as a never ending horde. Every country besides the enemy country is pathetic. They are powerless and only really concerned with making sure none of their neighbors gets stronger than them. The enemy will invade them repeatedly with only our main character able to stand against them. Last but probably the most glaring issue that I've ever seen in any Chinese web novel series is this stories characters names. This should go under translation issues but it is so bad that I made it separate. It's understandable to occasionally get mixed up or a new translator/editor makes name changes but this... From chapter to chapter the characters names will not only change but the wrong characters name will appear in place of it. You will often wonder how so-and-so suddenly is back in the story only to realize it's a different character but the translator or editor forgot/ didn't notice/ doesn't care. I say doesn't care because these have been pointed out repeatedly over months with no effort to fix. Overall I do recommend this story. I've enjoyed it enough that it was worth the read. Such a shame that poor translation makes the later half drop in quality. As of chapter 745 the author has kind of written himself into a bind and is just pulling out whatever to keep the story going but I recommend the first few hundred chapters for anyone looking to read a magical action story.