Note: the title pages for the series list the title as “The Necromancer of White” and may be listed as such in some places.
Toru Kuromine died at only age 15 and found himself reborn in the world of the game he played and he intends to keep going from where he left off. Starting off as a simple villager, he plans to level up, learn magic, and eventually become a necromancer, just like he was in the game. But that plan will take years so he’s happy to live a quiet life in the village, surprisingly free of the siege attacks he remembers in the game, and make friends who may join him in his adventures one day.
If you aren’t already a fan of isekai-with-game-mechanics flavoring, this is unlikely to be the title that changes your mind on it. I’m not the biggest fan of it myself, but at least this time Toru, now Alec, seems to have reincarnated into an actual game he played, an RPG strategy game with a huge branching system of job classes and cycles where you defend your town from attacking forces (which, as someone with limited experience with JRPGs, certainly reminded me a bit of the Fire Emblem series). That at least explains why he and everyone else can determine their level, change specialities etc. Of course, in true power fantasy fashion, Alec is also considered ridiculously talented for his age and that does take the zing out of things when you know that 99% of the time he’ll do just fine, no matter whatever the circumstance is.
But entertainment-wise, I found this story a bit less than “fine,” really it felt more staid than anything else and I believe that the author is a first-time writer which could explain the lack of originality. There are also a few oddities with Mangamo’s release of it: the aforementioned inconsistency in the title and in the review copy I received (which may differ from what is shown on the app) some speech bubbles were cut off by the sides and bottom of the page which isn’t an issue I regularly see in digital manga releases (there’s also no credit as far as I can tell for the translator, letterer, editor etc. who worked on this localization). These instances weren’t frequent but they were jarring, causing me to jolt out of the story and fiddle with my iPad to make sure that nothing had gone wrong on my end.
In the end, while plenty of things have happened to Alec and his friends in these nine chapters, ultimately nothing exciting enough to keep my attention happened. I can be a sucker for fantasy isekai stories, reading them sometimes feels like eating an entire bag of potato chips, but even if I was presented with more than nine chapters I felt pretty done by the end of this. It’s a forgettable title and I’d recommend that people check out a half-dozen other isekai-with-game-mechanics stories first instead.