Mushoku Tensei is a fun read with great characters, great world building, and breaks typical manga norms and story moulds in a mostly good way. While there are many good things about this story, it also suffers from horrible plot progression.

The characters are great. Without getting into spoilers, many of them are memorable and go through real trials that are relatable. The biggest thing of all, that so many stories fail to deliver on, is real actual meaningful progress, in personalities, attitude, and capabilities, this manga does that well. Overall it is very enjoyable to watch these characters and follow their growth.

With one one good point down, let's talk about the bad. The most frustrating thing about this manga is the amount of time spent doing things that have very little to nothing to do with moving the plot forward. It can be a good thing to take a small chapter break or two here and there for some extra world building or character development that has nothing to do with the plot, but when close to 50% of all the chapters are side missions and stories that don't actually move the main plot forward that we began the story with, it is bad.

Another thing that is a bit off putting is the pedophilia vibes that are common early on. I don't believe the bad of reality should be removed from stories, in fact it can be a great story element when handled properly. With that said, the story doesn't necessarily handle it properly and it is a bit cringe at times.

Back to good elements. It is hard to find good fantasy and action stories that also include strong romance elements, this is one of those stories. The story doesn't shy away from romance like other manga with the infuriating clueless characters. Not only does it embrace romance interests between characters but it isn't scared to take those elements past beginning stages.

There is a lot of world building with cool races, political systems, history and much more that really immerse the reader in the world. Power scaling in the series is done well so far, from the beginning we were introduced to levels of power and the characters are slowly climbing that stationary ladder, the ladder isn't being changed and added to on the fly to meet story needs as you see in a lot of action stories.

Overall a very enjoyable series, could be a 9 or 10 from me if the story was better at cutting useless content and focusing more on plot progression.