Manga 95012 Kumo Desu Ga Nani Ka

I adore Kumo desu ga, Nani ka? (KumoDesu), though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why I enjoy it so much. At the start, it was the inhuman protagonist struggling to survive that kept me going. Then you learn that there’s more to the world than meets the eye, and that the weird things that are happening are there for good reasons. Then the story shifts, and it’s the diverse cast of characters with interesting interpersonal relationships and conflicts that drove my engagement. In this way and others, there are multiple disparate arcs in KumoDesu that naturally lead into each other, and that might be the ... thing I enjoy most about this story. I also enjoy the characters and the worldbuilding, and most of the story. Read more about those below!

KumoDesu has a large, diverse cast of interesting, multi-faceted characters. And if you’ve read the synopsis, that may come as a surprise. But it’s true! One of the coolest things about the story is how many chapters are told from alternate perspectives, which all give different insights into the world and the people in it. On top of that, there’s a wide variety of character interactions throughout the story, from funny to serious to slice-of-life. These people feel realistic and grounded despite the fantasy setting, although it would be misleading to imply that the setting isn’t also realistic and grounded.

Because it is both of those things. Not that magic is at all realistic or anything; just that everything about the setting makes sense, given the initial assumption that magic exists. You probably won’t believe me when you start reading. The initial arc has “LitRPG” written all over it, after all. But some of the best parts of the story for me were when things clicked together, and I was like, “holy crap that makes sense!” This happened a lot, and I loved it. I'd be happy to provide concrete examples here, but almost anything I could provide would spoil a lot; you'll just have to trust me. KumoDesu’s world is thought-through and carefully put together, and that’s great.

The story, as it happens, is similarly well-constructed, despite a few pitfalls. The plot is driven largely by the world and the characters, and as such, events feel natural when they unfold. Because part of the plot is a world mystery, some of this is not evident until later, and this is compounded by the fact that some side stories are set at different points in time. I enjoy the story greatly despite and often because of this. However, some story beats won’t tickle everyone’s fancy—they differ wildly in the long run. If you’re only in it for the action-packed first arc, some of the later bits won’t satisfy; and if you don’t care for that first bit, you aren’t even going to know about the very different later arcs. An even bigger pain point might be the abrupt ending. The web novel's ending was revised a bit in the light novel to make it more palatable, but this also increased the pace of the already brisk finale. I like a good denouement, so this was disappointing, but at least there is an epilogue.

Everything so far has been mostly praise, so let’s take a minute to talk about the prose. While grammar throughout KumoDesu is nearly impeccable, the style doesn’t always come across very flatteringly. From reading the WN, I understood that the main character has a habit of repeating things in a more incredulous tone. Something like, “Oh, I’m screwed. [two line-breaks] I’m screwed!” In the LN, it doesn’t always come across this way, and will sometimes manifest as a second paragraph simply rephrasing the previous paragraph. This does make some sense, because the main character is also a very careful thinker, and doesn’t make important decisions lightly. But it can give some portions of writing a slower feel than they perhaps should have. There are a few other quirks, which I’m certain are artifacts of translation from Japanese to English, and it’s hard to fault them for this. A lot of the translation is very good, and it’s not very noticeable at all except for the character names, some bits of culture, and pop-culture references being obviously Japanese. I only found a few translation errors, and only for minor skill names getting mixed up or translated differently in different spots.

The cast and world are great, the story is good, and the writing is ok. What else even is there in a book? The illustrations? They’re lovely! I highly recommend checking out some version of Kumo desu ga, Nani ka? if it sounds at all interesting. The LN is good, the WN is free, the manga has more pictures, and the anime has color and sound.
(Maybe don’t watch the anime unless you are allergic to paper or something, though. If you need music, my soundtrack for KumoDesu is Neighborhoods by Blink-182.)

Up untill the very end of the series it was an absolute 10/10 to me. I liked the way the story was structured, how complex it got with time without turning boring. In my opinion, characters were nicely written, had their actual personalities rather than being common tropes that can be named with one word. I can absolutely recommend this book to everybody who likes this genre. Ending however was really bad. For some reason everything happened faster than usual by the end of the series, it felt rushed a bit. Also I'm really dissatisfied with epilogue. It was really simple, to the point of ... lacking minimum required details to give a sense of closure. Sure I'd love to see some short stories later down the line, but with ending like this this it will be necessary to get an actual conclusion to this beautiful mess of a story.

Regardless of anything else, I have to start with saying that this is a good series, even if I have a few gripes about it.
The title's pretty self-explanatory, and if you've seen the anime you know what to expect. The only things I'd point out against this story is that I feel the non-linear storytelling hurts it a bit (I remember getting to the point the anime left off, only to have to go through volumes of the years in between the timepoints that I didn't really care for. The end is also... kinda rough. It's not bad, but it breaks the expectations in a ... way that might not sit well with everyone.
In any case, this is an isekai that you can read regardless of if you're tired of isekais or are new to the genre. Again, despite the gripes, it's a pretty good series.