Thoughts on Tsuujou Kougeki ga Zentai Kougeki de Nikai Kougeki no Okasan wa Suki desu ka?

I’ve only read the free sample pages of Tsuujou Kougeki ga Zentai Kougeki de Nikai Kougeki no Okasan wa Suki desu ka? provided by Fantasia Books and don’t intend to read any more, but that was enough to form a general opinion. The intention of the free sample is to help the reader decide if they want to read any further, after all, and 70 or so pages of a book is a pretty substantial freebie. This post will contain a few spoilers, so read chapter one and two if you haven’t already.

On to the meat. We all know other world/isekai light novels are all the rage these days. Every other LN features a hero ending up in another world somehow where he somehow becomes overpowered and a chick magnet and all the other otaku fantasy wish fulfillment tropes that the genre is so well-known for. Other world stories are so common these days that’s it’s hard for new books to make a dent – unless they either subvert or deconstruct the genre (getting increasingly common these days) or add some kind of spin or gimmick.

Enter Tsuujou Kougeki – Do You Like Moms Whose Normal Attacks Hit the Whole Enemy Party Twice? The twist here is that the main hero Masato does not go into the game world alone but is accompanied by his doting mom Mamako and it is Mamako, not Masato, who becomes the overpowered hero. It’s pretty funny how he gets so worked up and excited about being the Chosen One… then his mom just walks up and snags the two most powerful weapons in the game. Not only that, but the in-game guidebook suggests there might be other such overpowered mother-son pairs in the MMMMMORPG game. It would be interesting to meet them and see how things go.

So the unexpected swerve is an intriguing one, enough to get even a light novel avoider like me to read it. The problem is, it’s not quite what I expected. I should have smelled a rat when I saw the cutesy, fanservicey picture of Mamako on the cover. What I was expecting was a normal mom, late 30ish early 40ish soccer mom with the dignity and gravitas to match. Putting a regular, realistic everyday person into these kinds of situations is always much funnier and more interesting to me anyway.

Mamako is just annoying. Ditzy, clingy, manipulative, always ready to use tears to control her son if nothing will work. Doesn’t know jack about what’s going on, won’t share what little she does know, won’t listen to common sense advice but charges ahead without a thought in the world. Is this really a woman in her late 30s? How did she survive long enough to breed? The worst part is her fake crying to weasel her way into or out of situations. That’s just plain dirty. The excessive focus on her young appearance and on Masato’s brief moments of attraction to her are just pig-disgusting icing on a pig-disgusting cake.

Masato is no paragon of virtue either. He’s whiny and too cranky and rude towards his mother. I’m sure we can all remember times when we were a little sharper with our moms than we had meant to be, but to snap and snarl at her all chapter long is just… ick. And all that whining and crying just because his mom has better weapons instead of creating a build and learning skills to make the best of what he has. I blame Mamako for bringing him up wrong, that’s what. Plus he’s 15 years old, what can I say?

I didn’t read enough to get to know the loli merchant and the tsundere sage better, but I doubt they’ll be any better than the already-low level established. The tsundere in particular killed my desire to read any more. You know she’s just going to argue with Masato and beat him up all the time but she’s still going to “win” his affection over any better girls in the series anyway. Just thinking about it gives me a headache.

TL;DR – The premise was interesting, but the ditzy personality of the mom and the whiny, cranky personality of her son ruined the whole thing for me. If they make an anime I might try an episode or two, but the interest I had in Tsuujou Kougeki is gone and probably isn’t ever coming back.