The Spring 2023 Manga Guide

Now I'm a Demon Lord!

What's It About? 

I'm a demon lord?! Blessed with unlimited freedom in this new world, it's time to live the good life building the perfect dungeon!

Reborn in another world as a demon lord, Yuki plans to use the incredibly handy online store that is the DP Catalog to create a super sinister dungeon where he can live the easy life! But the moment he starts his new life, he encounters the unimaginably strong Supreme Dragon. Just when he thinks the end is already nigh, things take a bizarre turn in his favor! The Supreme Dragon, who turns out to have a major sweet tooth, transforms into a lovely young girl hell-bent on freeloading off him. And she's not his dungeon's only new resident. Within days, he summons an adorable slime and rescues a sweet little vampire girl too! While taking care of his new family, Yuki experiments even more with the Catalog by learning how to create his own weapons. Their idyllic days don't last long, though, as an unexpected menace appears...

Now I'm a Demon Lord! is created by Ryuyu, with original character design by Daburyu, and art by Note Tono. English translation is by Kashi Kamitoma with lettering by Adam Haffen. J-Novel Club will release the first volume digitally on May 10.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

There's one unequivocal positive I have for this volume: teenage protagonist Yuki is in no way sexually attracted to the two pre-teen girls he's living with. There's a bit of implication for you if that's not positive on your end; vampire child Iluna's bloodsucking causes an involuntary reaction in Yuki, and the fact that she feeds on him means, in vampire culture, that they're married. But Yuki makes it clear that he sees her as a child he's caring for. Lefi, the human-shaped dragon, is much older than Yuki but has chosen a child's body for some reason. Still, there's no mistaking his interactions with her for anything remotely romantic.

The plot itself is what might be charitably called bog standard. After dying in Japan, Yuki wakes up in a fantasy world and is reborn as a demon lord, which, in the story's world, is a type of demon who specifically watches over and expands a dungeon. He's overpowered, although he doesn't realize it at first. Since he received a version of the online grocery power from another isekai story, he's set for life, or at least for this volume. We do learn that there's a human settlement not far away, and Lefi has been raising some alarms. So there's a decent chance that this won't proceed as smoothly as it starts, especially with the actions on the closing pages.

Of course, that would require readers to care about the characters, and right now, that feels up in the air. Yuki is fine, Iluna is cute (as are the pet characters), and Lefi is obnoxious. But none of them have any intense personality that might make them stand out in any way. It's just dressing on cardboard, and while that might change going forward, this book is something you pick up when you want a stress-free reading experience rather than something you might get invested in.

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

I want to give a moment to give translators their due. Not just with this manga, but with a lot of the manga I've read this season (especially isekai), a lot of modern-day slang has been injected into the dialogue. And while a lot of hot gas has been expelled about this being wrong and unethical, I appreciate it. It's been used very effectively and it helps these mangas read a little less like literary styrofoam.

Anyway, Now I'm a Demon Lord! is literary styrofoam. It doesn't even bother telling us anything about Yuki's life in the real world, he just wakes up in a dungeon and brings up his RPG menu. Bribe a dragon girl with sweets, check. Rescue a vampire girl so she's basically his daughter, check. Constant RPG mechanics, check. I can't even give the manga any credit for its character interactions, because we've seen all this before so many other times and handled so much better. It's not even that I'm A Demon Lord is bad, it's just trite. Yuki as a character has nothing going for him, and every other interaction in this series is hobbled by him just being a dishrag.

Do you love isekai? You've probably read better isekai than this before. Do you want to start reading isekai? There are way better manga you can try than this. Do I recommend this? Very, very lightly, if only because nothing is offensively horrible about it. But man, is this styrofoam ever so styrofoam-y.

Christopher Farris

Rating:

You know, part of me almost admires the creators continuously putting out this kind of isekai content. Any number of us could fantasize about exploiting an RPG system for superpowers and girlfriends while we were just hanging out, bored out of our minds. But these folks actually have the wherewithal to sit down, type it all out in excruciating detail, and throw it online in exchange for notoriety and money from desperate nerds. On some level, you have to respect the hustle. That's really about all the goodwill I can extend to Now I'm a Demon Lord! here, though: It exists because someone was willing to make it.

Beyond that, what do you want? The supposed gimmick of this one is that our cipher of a protagonist winds up the master of his own small dungeon, meaning the story doesn't even have to bother exploring or expanding on the other 99% of the bog-standard fantasy world it takes place in. But even then, the writing spends a frankly embarrassing amount of time padding its content by having the various setting, mechanical, and magic elements explained by or to our main character. He's not even a stirring host, barely remembering to tell us his name is Yuki twenty pages in, never demonstrating much of a personality beyond being kind of a nerdy whiner. Lefi, the dragon girl roommate he picks up in the first chapter, might be marginally better, but even she's reduced to video game tutorial dialogue for the majority of this first volume.

Wish-fulfillment fantasies of this stripe can work if they're able to lean into making the iyashikei vibes palpable or the characters we're spending all this down-time with interesting, but Now I'm a Demon Lord! has none of that. It's a series where things threaten to happen mostly to rouse you from dozing off while you're reading it. Why, in the middle of a bit about Yuki exploring the forest, do we suddenly flash back to an argument between him and Lefi over her eating all the food in the fridge? Why does the story tease us with the possibility of an arc about trafficked tiny vampire Iluna only to have Yuki simply trip over her and bring her in with little fanfare? Are all the oddly outdated meme references to things like 300 and "All according to keikaku" actually from the source text, or just thrown in by the translators to prevent themselves from falling asleep while working on this thing? These are questions not worth answering, as Now I'm a Demon Lord! is not worth spending your time or money on.