The Iceblade Magician Rules Over The World

My review, as of chapter 26
3.5 stars

It’s interesting, but it does suffer from poor pacing. And entire story arc gets completed within the first 10 chapters. Sorry for the rant near the end but, the magic system annoys me.

The story. It’s a decently laid out story with some intrigue and actual plot twists that you don’t see coming half the time. The main problem is that it all goes by too fast except when there’s a fight. It’s as if the author didn’t want to focus on the characters themselves and instead focus on the action aspect. It would explain why most of the character development happens during the fights instead of outside them.

The art. It’s pretty decent half the time. Though it does from a lack of perspective shots sometimes in action sequences and that can confuse the fights. However the visuals are very distinct and impressive, but it can also get a bit too simple at times too especially in the calmer moments.

The characters. The ones we get in this series are fairly enjoyable but they do suffer from the pacing so they don’t often get the development they need. This leads a lot of the characters’ personalities to be their personalities. There’s only really been a couple of characters who have interested me so far and only one of them are even in the main cast and it’s not even the MC. Speaking of, the MC is more or less another “optimistic yet troubled soul” and tends to get very edgy. It’s harder to talk about him because despite completing about 3 arcs in the 26 chapters I read, they’ve given be surprisingly little to work with with him.

The action. Again it sometimes suffers from a lack of knowing where things are, but the fights themselves tend to be really neat to watch when you get down to them. However the biggest problem is the dialogue about magic that really holds it back.

The magic. A very rare topic for me to have to bring up but I feel like this needs to be addressed. Unless you are FULLY committed to understanding the magic system in this series, you will have a very hard time understanding what they’re talking about when they “talk shop”. I use that phrase because that’s essentially what it is, they go into the technical aspects of their magic and use mainly terms relating to this worlds magic.

Now this may not sound too bad, but picture this scenario. You go to a mechanic because you’re car is acting up, they finish fixing it and you ask what happened. Some mechanics will tell you “part broke, we put a new one in, should work now.” while some others will attempt to go into detail of the entire inner workings of your car, why it stopped working, how it stopped working, everything they did to get it to work again, and how it works better now after they got it working again and they usually speak in terms relating to the job they do. Despite listening to what he’s saying, understanding the words and even recognizing the names of many of the parts, you are completely and utterly lost because this is a completely foreign knowledge base to what you may be used to. This entire series’ magic explanation is like that second mechanic. It’s great for people who are really interested in it but terrible for people who aren’t.

I guess it’s interesting enough to read, can’t say I’d recommend it but I wouldn’t tell you to stay away either. It does have some legit good moments in it.