The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

Hell Mode

What's It About? 

Kenichi Yamada, a single, 35-year-old businessman, has spent the majority of his adult life playing every MMORPG to hit the market. Tired of the constant cycle of repetitive, newbie-centric gameplay, he is immediately drawn in by the promise of a new game that, on top of being never-ending, offers up a “Hell Mode”—a difficulty level that makes it nigh impossible to level up but also promises uncapped growth potential.

Upon selecting the newly released Summoner class, Kenichi finds himself reborn as Allen, an infant in a serf family, with nothing but his wits and old memories to guide him.

Allen works diligently to level himself up despite Hell Mode requiring vast amounts of experience between levels. In doing so, he hopes to uncover the secrets the Summoner class holds. All the while, he dedicates himself to freeing his new family from serfdom.

Hell Mode has a story by Hamou/MO and art by Tetta Enji. The English translation is translated by Jason Muell and lettered by Rebecca Sza. Published by J-Novel Club; PublishDrive edition (September 20, 2023).

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Hell Mode covers roughly half of the first volume of its source light novel – just not the half you'd expect. The manga adaptation starts about halfway through the first of the novels, skipping most of the setup, world-building, and first five years of protagonist Allen's new life. It's not hard to see why; although the light novels need to provide all of that information, it's based mainly on stat screens, game mechanics, and Allen being too young to do anything but toddle around or sleep in his crib, and that's hardly the stuff of riveting image-based storytelling. The downside is that if you haven't read the novels, I think this may be confusing. The manga does its best to provide most of the skipped information on the between-the-chapters pages, but it's impossible to cover roughly one hundred pages of a book in single-page installments like that.

The result is that the manga feels more stereotypical than the books. Not that the original series is the last word in innovative isekai; the story is pretty basic for the genre: a thirty-five-year-old gamer signs up for a new game he intends to play on “Hell Mode,” creates his character, and is whisked away to live in the world of the purported game. He's got all his memories from his first life and is an adult in a child's body, thankfully in a very non-creepy way. The strongest part of the story, which does come through here, albeit truncated, is that Allen truly loves his family. He may be in his thirties on the inside, but he treats his parents (technically younger than him) as parents and loves them and his younger siblings as such. He only thinks about the “game” as something he's playing when he's working with his skills and hunting, which makes him a lot more likable than many protagonists in similar tales.

Although this is a relatively faithful adaptation once you get past how much was cut out and the art is pretty good, this feels like reading a story in fast-forward. Presumably, this is in service of getting Allen old enough to do more things and to move the story out of the village and rural town where it takes place in the early chapters, and I am curious to know if the plot will slow down once we hit a certain point. But right now, I advise reading the novels first (or instead) because this doesn't quite do at least the first one justice.