An isekai so committed to telling the reader details about its derivative, bland fantasy world with RPG elements that it barely has time for its other favourite topic: Arel winning. I like Arel quite a bit, he's a decent way to write the now stereotypical OP MC, but he's really getting fucked over by his surroundings needing to change with whatever mountain he's climbing in a day. His friends exist only to affirm how strong he is, explain how ridiculous what he's doing is, or fill the 2.5 page tsukkomi quota mandated by Japanese law.
This in itself isn't actually a problem with the vast majority of isekai. Well, they tend to have far more glaring problems, anyway. The problem is that there is nothing else in Mushoku no Eiyuu. The powerlevels Arel is gaining are painstakingly documented chapter by chapter as he achieves them, but they're so easy, so what do they even mean? The first arc had characters with actual motivations and backstories, but I don't even know what the names of the current set are, they're so forgettable. It feels a bit like I'm being gaslit by the publisher seeing them on the colour cover, am I missing chapters? Do these guys actually do anything? These are rhetorical questions but it's perplexing that the author would just pull every background character and replace them this early in the story. Don't get me wrong, isekai in general absolutely loves this sort of thing, especially (in my experience) the ones with a lot of unfounded faith in how cool their main character Definitely Not Kirito is and how interesting they are as a person. At the very least you get a decent early story out of it until the author runs out of ideas and decides to just reset with the same hero and different characters.
It is extremely strange to see it happen this early, and the lack of characterization (by isekai standards, so the bar's already fairly low) given to the new arrivals just compounds this feeling of emptiness. It doesn't feel like a manga. Reading this manga feels like watching someone's 300+ part playthrough of the latest Bethesda RPG as they painstakingly max everything and 100% the game in front of you. Except they started with a max-leveled character, so they're just doing their best Saitama impression while oneshotting things.
The strange thing, again, is that this is actually the draw of a lot of isekai. This illusion of progress through an ordered hierarchy (POWERLEVELS BRO) with the security of never actually having to face the fear of failure keeps me happy reading quite a lot of works on the same level as Mushoku no Eiyuu. However those other works almost never make me feel like the power fantasy itself is boring. Mushoku no Eiyuu has done that. I don't know how to feel about this. I like it? It's 6:37 AM. All I can think of are words on words to express just how strange this manga feels to read in comparison to other shitty isekai manga, even the ones I hate. Even the harem slavery warcrimes etc. isekai have something that isn't just the level up sound effect repeatedly dinging.
I don't know. Maybe I'm not a true gamer.