It’s the rare manga that prompts me to seek out the web novel. And not just that but to read all the chapters available in English and go beyond to the original author’s page and keep reading for several more chapters. The Other World Doesn’t Stand A Chance Against The Power Of Instant Death (Sokushi Cheat ga Saikyou Sugite, Isekai no Yatsura ga Marude Aite ni Naranai n desu ga 即死チートが最強すぎて、異世界のやつらがまるで相手にならないんですが。) managed to hold my interest much longer than most of the other stuff I’ve read this year, and for that the author Tsuyoshi Fujitaka should be commended. Buuut, I still dropped it after roughly 60 chapters and I’ll tell you why in a bit.
Story: High school senior Yogiri Takatou was on a school field trip when he woke up to a dragon assaulting his sightseeing bus, with the only ones still on the bus being him and his female classmate, the panicking Tomochika Dannoura. Apparently the rest of his classmates had been given special powers by Sion, a woman who introduced herself as a Sage, and escaped from the dragon, leaving those that hadn’t received any special powers behind as dragon bait.
And so Yogiri was thrown into a parallel universe full of danger, with no idea of what just happened. Likewise, Sion had no way of knowing just what kind of being she had summoned to her world.
Turns out Yogiri has the power of Instant Death. And he didn’t learn it in the new world either, it’s heavily implied that he had it all along. Anyone he tells to die will die. Anyone he even thinks about killing will die. Heck, not just “anyone”, anyTHING in existence – if it moves, if it works, if he wants it to die, it will die. If you play video games, imagine a boss with an unblockable one-hit kill move that he uses at the start of the battle before you can get a hit in. That’s Yogiri Takatou.
On the plus side, he’s a lazy slacker who doesn’t want to kill willy-nilly. He usually makes an attempt to reason with people before ending them. It just happens that he’s been summoned to a world where magic makes people crazy, so the opponents he faces can never be reasoned with. Since his power is so devastating, there’s not much room for fighting or lengthy battle scenes once he uses it, so eventually the web novel devolves into “How much time can we waste with other characters and unnecessary scenes before Yogiri inevitably ends everything with one word?”
That’s the problem all stories with way overpowered characters end up with. Either they have to nerf the character to make it interesting or they have to take him/her off-screen and fill the time with other people and stories to delay the inevitable. You can see it in One Punch Man where Saitama only appears very rarely these days. When he does he rarely fights. When he does get into a fight, he stands around and gets hit for a while just to prolong the inevitable.
So it is in The Other World Doesn’t Stand A Chance Against The Power Of Instant Death, especially the further along the web novel goes. You have to read about boring side characters like Aoi and Hanakawa and Raineel for lengthy periods of time and you have to suffer through a loooong sequence of Yogiri and his team traveling through some boring tower. Once the tower was over I called it quits because these days I’m getting better at spotting dead-end series.
I’ll still read the manga because it’s amusing but there’s too little Yogiri doing actual stuff or making actual progress in the web novel to make it worth suffering through the author’s mediocre, unengaging writing style for it. He has a good idea and an interesting premise, he just has ZERO idea what to do with it. The way the story is, he really should have planned it as a short three to five volume series with the battles and opponents all prepared before starting. Then he wouldn’t need to stuff a web novel with filler right from the second volume.
BTW, you may have noticed a busty brunette featuring prominently in the art for this series. Her name is Tomochika Dannoura. She’s ostensibly the deuteragonist – the second protagonist, as it were, so a lot of chapters are given from her perspective. But that’s just her cover story. Her real role is to look good on the covers to make it more attractive to buyers and readers. That’s why she never does anything of note in the story. That’s why Yogiri only brings her along because her boobs were soft. Yes, really. But don’t expect any romantic scenes because of that. It’s not that kind of series, at least as far as I read.
Don’t expect any detailed world building either. What you should read it for is how funny it is in the beginning when Yogiri kills stuff. And the vague hope of Yogiri killing the crazy Sage (who is later shown to be not so crazy but we don’t care because Yogiri is probably going to kill her anyway. The series suffers from a lot of that). The early chapters are the best before the author starts rationing his powers. I’d say check out the manga and given the web novel a miss unless you’re really into web novels.
TL;DR – The Other World Doesn’t Stand A Chance Against The Power Of Instant Death is great at first but stops being good pretty quickly.
