Emperor of Steel

I wanted to like this one, but I could not continue (Stopped at chp 30~). While the art is good, and the premise was interesting (who doesn’t love fantasy mechs?) the execution on story and characters is… ugh.

The main character is fine, although some of his power progression is nonsense, but there are too many dumb people that make no sense.

The first questionable actions I saw was from the “loyal” butler after the MC returns from making a shit ton of money as many reincarnated MCs do, by devious and silly means. The MC (lord) begins to build up his kingdom and starts helping out the people by selling old historical doodads and artifacts that aren’t functionally worth anything, and the butler’s thoughts are “this goes against the honor of the family, he must have turned evil” and the art makes it seem like he’s going to do rebel or leave or turn coat, something.

Guess what? Fucking nothing. He see’s the MC helping more people and he goes “oh, our lord is good to his people” and believes in him. Okay… But that’s what he was doing in town already, so wtf is different now?

This wasn’t a big issue, but it did make me question my own sanity.

But the worst offenders still have yet to come:

As much as I want to defend the ideals of the female love interest (she is kind and wants to help all those who are trodden upon) she is unwilling to come up with any realistic strategies or plan of action to actually help her people (refugees). Each time she is on screen it is only to show how badly she is getting treated by other powers. She is not willing to raise a rebellion, she is not willing to sacrifice herself to the evil lord (which should have been the 1st thing to do as soon as her people became refugees), and she is unable to do anything but wait outside of another duke’s palace and cry.

She gives philanthropy and human compassion a bad name.

Then you have said refugees getting rescued by the main character before they are about to be slaughtered, and after he does so, the immediate reaction from one nameless rando is “oh, your magic is eerie, we can’t trust you” even though all of them have been told that the plan is to exodus to his kingdom, even though he just saved all of them from a literal genocide, even though he has shown incredible power in saving their princess in front of them.

That is pure absolute nonsense.

Although some of the characters were enjoyable, none of them have shown any sort of uniqueness or special quality for me to get interested in. The main character is the only one so far that seems even some what level headed, but what’s the point of reading a story where all the other “good guys” are dumb as bricks?

As much as I can suspend my disbelief about magical mechs, demon races, magic, portals, dungeons etc, what I cannot deal with is characters that do not act human.

The characters in this feel like props to progress the story rather characters living within a cohesive world. They are purely a facade of what human interaction seems like to an AI. No that’s insulting to AIs. AIs would write better characters.

6/10 If you like fantasy mechs that badly, you should just rewatch or check out the manga for Knights and Magic. At least that one made some amount of sense.