The World's Strongest Witch Volumes 1-2 Light Novel Review

Lorna, the daughter of the powerful Guugelheit family, has been thrown out of her home at the tender age of fifteen. Due to a socially accepted misunderstanding of power rankings, Lorna's SSS skill is understood to be useless. Her father, a power-hungry noble, throws his daughter into the woods to die. Unfortunately for him and the Guugelheit nobility, Lorna's powers make her an untouchably powerful being. With access to “The Internet” and the words of the gods that play a game in her homeland, Lorna blasts her way through survival issues right to becoming a god herself. While she rights the wrongs her family has caused, she rewrites the horrors of the world to help the people around her live happier lives.

The World's Strongest Witch is translated by Phil Charbonneau.

Lorna, the daughter of the powerful Guugelheit family, has been thrown out of her home at the tender age of fifteen. Due to a socially accepted misunderstanding of power rankings, Lorna's SSS skill is understood to be useless. Her father, a power-hungry noble, throws his daughter into the woods to die. Unfortunately for him and the Guugelheit nobility, Lorna's powers make her an untouchably powerful being. With access to “The Internet” and the words of the gods that play a game in her homeland, Lorna blasts her way through survival issues right to becoming a god herself. While she rights the wrongs her family has caused, she rewrites the horrors of the world to help the people around her live happier lives.

The World's Strongest Witch is translated by Phil Charbonneau.

Author Mochimaru Sakaki talks about the premise of the series in an author's note – what if the protagonist is the only one who can see the strategy guide, the comments, and the entire Internet? And what if that character was otherwise an innocent, with little understanding of the world around her? This is exactly what we get when we enter the world of The World's Strongest Witch: I'm Starting My Free Life in a World Where Only I Can See the Online Strategy Guide. Lorna was obviously not a favorite child, even before her father's incoherent reading of her power.

So Lorna takes her ridiculous powers and just…lives. She saves the world, and its people, time and time again, finishing up Volume 1 unknown, but all-powerful.

Volume 2 does do one thing that I appreciated. If you've ever played any kind of game with timed monster attacks, you'll appreciate the horror that Wednesday has become for the denizens of the port town Aquas. Every Wednesday, monsters appear, which may be all well and good for adventurers entering the game who want a quick power-up, but it's a nightmare for the residents. Thankfully, Lorna can push aside the erogame ads on “The Internet” long enough to save the town from the game by beating it on its own terms.

That done, one cannot imagine much left for Lorna to do. Invincible, invulnerable, able to teleport and absorb MP, Lorna's a gag with nowhere to go. At the end of Volume 2, she heads off to the Royal Capital where, presumably, she might explain to someone in power that they've misunderstood the world's power rankings. Or maybe she'll just take over everything, everywhere. Who knows?

The art here is adequate but adds nothing to the story. It's obvious that fifteen-year old Lorna looking like a fetus in a frilly dress (or a school uniform, or a bathing suit, because a lack of imagination appears to be part of the joke here) means that instead of a smart but not clever teenager, we are shown a child with a round, flat face, open-mouthed and otherwise featureless. This meshes with the haha “humor” of underage sexualized references that are supposed to give the game and some of the less likable characters color. In fact, few, if any, of the supporting cast have more than a line's worth of personality.

This is a story that will definitely be more fun in serialized chunks or anime episodes. I imagine the voices of the characters will rise into dog-whistle ranges as the all-female cast at Aquas combines with Lorna's infantile aspect and the duplicated tsundere Dragon Princess is added to the mix.

This story is meant to read as a series of jokes piled on top of one another. Lorna's innocence means she takes everything on “The Internet” as the word of the gods, and, therefore, speedruns whole quests or, more commonly, simply jumps to the very end of the quest in one turn. As a result, she's overpowered and barely able to control her skills, which pile more power on her already-ridiculously overpowered shoulders. There's no real element of discovery or craft here—Lorna is not making anything new or understanding more than half of what she reads on “The Internet.” She's simply bumbling into a complex situation, misunderstanding the motivations of the people around her and brute-forcing the best possible solution.

On the one hand, it is very relaxing to read, as absolutely no emotional commitment is required of the reader. On the other hand, Lorna is powering up and gaining information, but not understanding. This makes the long-form light novel start to feel threadbare as the second volume progresses.

There is a definite audience in mind for this story, to be fair. That audience isn't interested in a character actually building something from nothing, or addressing societal ills in a way that lifts up the downtrodden. This is a story for folks jaded by game worlds, monster and artifact drops, who watch playthroughs and research the guide with an eye to just…being done. For that audience, I think The World's Strongest Witch: I'm Starting My Free Life in a World Where Only I Can See the Online Strategy Guide might feel cathartic and even amusing.

If you're interested in seeing whether the anime might be for you, the light novel isn't going to add much to the experience. And for folks who prefer the print, take the LN slowly, so you can enjoy the few clever moments without a long list of fish dinners filling you up and leaving you overfull with detail that goes nowhere