Hybrid x Heart Magias Academy Ataraxia

tl;dr: A very heavily H focused light novel series that does really well in that regard, but is also semi-decent beyond that. This is very clearly an ecchi series, but it has a decent amount of substance outside of that. With that said, most of said substance isn’t that great. The plot is kind of dumb, but within that it still has a lot of interesting concepts. Such as an entire world being caught up in a situation where they have to conquer another world and enslave its inhabitants just to survive and whether it’s morally right to do so. Or a character ending up heavilyattached to both factions in a war due to originally being born heavily involved in one but then getting amnesia and spending most of their life on the other until their memories suddenly return. Or gods having existential crises because becoming immortal and all powerful makes everything seem pointless. However, it doesn’t really explore any of these beyond a superficial level, and the resolution to everything is generally overtly easy to the point it feels pretty anti-climactic. The plot also suffers from the author deciding that he was going to make every single antagonist eventually join the protagonist’s side. While it likely was planned from the start that many would, I don’t think the author committed to having every single one join until a good way into the series. And at that point in order to try to make it work he does some crazy things with the plot that in addition to being somewhat inconsistent and having characters deviate significantly from how they were first portrayed, also just kind of make the entire plot up to that point kind of pointless. Having a structure where every beaten antagonist is switches sides immediately after also lacks the satisfying punch of having beaten a major foe, wherein it would definitely be fine on occasion, but it happening so much gets kind of repetitive and made the plot feel like it was lacking in variety. With that said, it’s kind of hard to think of who I would want to actually get beaten and disappear. The cast ends up pretty bloated, but at the same time the author manages to write pretty well around that by always giving everyone some presence even if he has to use bizarre gimmicks to do that, and the overall dynamics of the extended cast are pretty great. And though the vast majority of characters are incredibly flat including the main cast, they’re all written amusingly enough that they’re pretty likable. Some even manage to get pretty decent character arcs, mainly Nayuta and Gertrude. Things could probably be heavily rewritten with an improved plot and more depth given to characters, but it’s kind of hard to point at what I would want to change specifically. I’m not sure how to word this properly, but I suppose having a bad plot just works pretty well for this series because it’s more amusing that way. With that said, the tangential aspects of the story were pretty well written. There’s some pretty solid world building and how the pacing of progression in regards to that was also pretty solid. The action was also surprisingly pretty good and the system in regards to abilities and power ups was fleshed out pretty well, even if what was powering everything was completely absurd. And finally, getting into the ecchi, it has a tremendous amount, and a tremendous amount of variety to it too that seems to hit in a lot of fetishes. It’s also pretty interesting how it starts out relatively light but slowly builds up to finally being straight up hentai in the final and epilogue volumes. And despite how much of a focus it was, it surprisingly felt well blended into the rest of the story. The art was also pretty great in general with pretty good designs all around, though I thought the upgraded mech designs were worse looking than the originals. The English fan translation isn’t all that great, but the prose in the original isn’t especially complicated so despite the translation’s issues reading it flows easy enough.

Disclaimer: if you don't like incest, S&M play, or any other kind of kinky sex play then you shouldn't read this (it doesn't have ntr though). Though if you can ignore those scenes or they don't bother you (like me), go for it. FYI: the mc might seem dense and the usual beta mc from the Japanese novels but trust me, this guy is amazing at his "job", just give him until volume 2 or 3 to judge his character. Review with some spoilers below: This Light Novel has a generic story where you have a guy with an ability that only women should be able to use,just like in IS: infinite stratos for example, and from there the story revolves around these machines that they can pilot and this energy that they need to be able to pilot them. Said energy can only be recovered through ecchi acts, of course. The plot is actually decent-ish for a harem/ecchi novel and it can be divided into 2 parts: Volumes 1 through 7 and Volumes 8 through 13. Volume 14 was written later just to tie everything together, which I think it perfectly did. The 1st 7 volumes talk about AU collisions that were happening on Earth (Lemuria). This collisions connected Lemuria with another world called Atlantis and that obviously caused war and troubles because of various circumstances. We get introduced to 90% of the characters in this long arc and get to know them as the conflict escalates. If you don't enjoy the story up until this point, then I think that you should stop reading, because the arc that coms next isn't that great in my opinion. Though volumes 4 and 5 also had some "weird" (to say the least) things happening that people weren't a fan of. From volume 8 to 13 the story moves to greater threats and goals and because of that the story gets a bit more serious, not much tho, aside from that at this point the ecchi scenes are also a bit repetitive in my opinion and although it didn't bother me much and I still enjoyed a lot of people were disappointed with them. I think the author finished the novel quite well, even though if he wanted to, he could probably still make 1 or 2 more volumes.