A guy burdened into becoming humanity's champion to fight against monsters coming out of dungeons, finds himself the sole survivor of the human race and then is killed. He reincarnates into the body of some other boy, years before the apocalypse and sets about trying to save humanity again. The beginning is kind of choppy, I dunno if there are pages missing or what, but there were a couple instances where I was left wondering if there was a scene missing. Exposition is not dumped on the reader in huge amounts of text, there's less of it and the plot keeps you engaged. I wouldn't say this stands out among all the other series that feature reincarnation and game-like worlds. Although perhaps the cast of characters so far is mercifully small, something I sometimes find gets a bit out of hand with other stories like this. There are some plot threads that get set aside and take time to get resolved, which made me initially uneasy because I was afraid they would get abandoned. They didn't! So it's all good. So far, there's no romance annoying or otherwise, which also means no harem, for those who hate that genre as I do. MC's new mother is only there momentarily and is otherwise pretty much written out of the story. This usually annoys me, because why introduce family if they aren't going to do anything interesting with them? However I do like the way the mother was utilized in this, even if her presence in the story is short. The emotional connection and motivation she provides is well done, and her being left out of the plot soon after feels more natural than the author running out of ideas on how to make use of the character. It still bothers me a little, but only in the way that I would like more character moments where mc sits and talks to people and relaxes and lets the story breath for a minute. Sometimes stories like these fall into non-stop action, and this ends up exhausting the reader. But I don't feel it's gotten to this point here... yet.
I got up to chapter 61 and am annoyed with the turn of events that ends up introducing us to a new character. But that's just me.
If you like this sort of stuff with an OP MC, than this is definitely for you. The mc isn't an asshole and is actually pretty nice, though not to the point of being a cinnamon roll. There's no fan service or cheesecake, people aren't sexily losing their clothes in battle. The art is good, and the english is good barring minor grammar hiccups here and there. No word salad chapters here, thankfully! Though I think there may have been one chapter with some pages out of order, but while it was noticeable it didn't hinder reading the story. All in all? It's fine, I'm not inclined to drop it. there's the main goal the Mc is working towards, but there's some fun little side quests that are fun and not presented as check list fetch quests. I would like more emotion and connection in this story (there's so much hinted, but largely unexplored, angst!!), but it's alright for what it is. There's better out there in my opinion, but there's also plenty that's much worse.
The Hero Returns