I had a conversation with someone a while ago where I likened “A Returner’s Magic Should be Special” to an airplane endlessly taxiing on the airport runway but never taking off. I said this when about 100 chapters were out. 58 chapters later and I still feel the same way. A Returner’s Magic Should be Special has a lot of potential to be an interesting series, but endless, draggy arcs and very slow progression towards the main point mean that it’s probably never going to fulfill that potential. The pacing is just too bad.
Summary
“Now that I’m back, I won’t allow my loved ones to die again!”
The Shadow Labyrinth – the most catastrophic existence humanity has faced in history. Desir Arman and six survivors attempt to clear the final level of the labyrinth but ultimately fail, and the world comes to an end.
However Desir is returned to the past, back to the time when he enrolled at the nation’s finest magic academy He is reunited with his precious friends, and is prepared to change the past to save the world and his loved ones…!
The good part of A Returner’s Magic Should be Special is that it has a nice team of main characters and a few memorable supports. The core team of Desir, Romantica, Pram and Adjest comes together quickly and has stayed together solidly through 160 chapters (as at time of writing). Pram is a shota who is not annoying. Adjest is an ice princess who is also not annoying. The story is not bogged by romantic subplots (!!). It’s bogged down by a lot of other things, but romance isn’t one of them… yet.
I also like the colorful, slightly goofy art style. The action is also easy to follow, though the battles can be interminable. So the art is nice, the characters are nice, the story is promising. Despite all that, the problems are so many with no solution in sight that it will probably take A Returner’s Magic should be Special another 160 chapters to unravel everything and finally start getting somewhere.
- There are too many parties and characters that don’t get enough attention for us to care about, but they still show up here and there. Too many factions even in the real world, so I can’t keep track of all the kingdoms and different parties working together.
- It’s natural that as a poor commoner Desir will have to spend some time building up enough influence to change the world, but it’s still a tedious process to read through. All that whining about discrimination between commoners and nobles, the tragic backstories, the comically evil noble villains who never amount to much, etc.
- Desir’s time travel advantage is very quickly negated when a third-party called the Outsiders show up who didn’t’ appear in his last lifetime. So now instead of preparing for the Shadow Worlds like the premise suggests, almost all of the time in the real world in the series is spent on fighting the Outsiders, then, maaaaaybe one day, we’ll eventually possibly get closer to the secrets of the Shadow World invasion.
- Even after 160+ chapters there is a lot left unexplained, with no sign that they will be explained any time soon. Things like the Shadow World which are a mystery in the series as well, but all things like Circle Magic and how exactly magic works. For a series called “A Returner’s Magic should be Special,” the author does precious little to explain the ins and outs of the magic system. What’s a first circle magician, second circle, what’s the difference, what is vision magic, what makes Desir so special that others can’t imitate him, what what what. So many questions.
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Since we’re the good guys, we are automatically right, so there’s no need to try to understand the other party. - Because there are so many questions, it’s painful to have so many chapters wasted early on on petty academic squabbles, cheap discrimination plots, etc.
- The arcs drag on way too long. Any arc where Desir and friends enter a Shadow World should be a cue for the reader to sign out for 30 chapters and come back when things pick up. Because there’s still no clear answer to the relevance of the shadow world or why they later posed a threat to the real world, everything that goes on right now in there is 90% filler which could be entirely removed for faster pacing. Maybe eventually, way down the line it will all make sense, but again it’s like I said. The series takes forever to get anywhere.
- Speaking of forever, I hope you like long drawn-out battles against irrelevant enemies. Like most of chapter 160 was Adjest versus some random guy who was introduced two chapters ago, hyped and quickly disposed of. And then after battling another enemy for several chapters, only now is Desir Arman getting round to “part two” of the battle. Ridiculous.
TL;DR maybe one day it will be good, but for now A Returner’s Magic Should be Special is not special at all. It’s a long series of chapters, a lot of fillers, some charming characters and some intriguing ideas that are not explained. I kept reading because I liked the main party and their interactions, but that can only take you so far. It’s something I’ll have to come back to in about five years to see if/when it ended. Either that, or I’ll have to read the faster-paced novel so I can see things happen before I forget who did what or why. But really, it’s not worth my time when there are so many other faster, more tightly-plotted series out there.