Personally, I think it's way more interesting and realistic than the AI somehow giving him perfect instructions on how to live as a weak human with no advantages. Like in real life, the AI is just giving what it thinks are the best solutions and information on how to survive, however, the MC has to rely on his own instincts as well to properly utilise the knowledge the AI provides. Giving him more power makes it way more plausible for more athletic feats he might need to pull off later on rather than just making MC a normal human who somehow has enough athletic ability to pull off crazy stunts and ideas the writer might come up with later. There's too many stories where MCs just overcome a power gap with "pure skill" when realistically it would be quite hard to do so.
The thing is, if the idea was to have a normal protag aided by next level AI, he shouldn’t have been thrown from the very start into a situation that requires superhuman power to be dealt with. That’s my point: the author announced he was doing Super Gimmick Isekai AI Mode, and in the end, he can’t seem to offer more than a rebranding of
Solo Leveling or
IRL Quest. There doesn’t seem to be a moment when they ask themselves “OK, how do I make it so my protag can rely
only on the gimmick, how do I make it work, what are the limits, what tropes
cannot exist in my universe.”
