Four stars.

The story introduces a seventy-year-old master machinist who’s on his last leg as a professional, having to deal with corporate punks that intend him to accept unreasonable conditions.

He suspects he’ll end up on the streets soon, old and alone. How would he spend the rest of his life? Thankfully he doesn’t need to worry about it, because he suffers a heart attack and dies.

This story is one of the apparently millions of isekai out there. What’s an isekai, you ask? For whatever reason, the Japanese created a genre based on the notion of a Japanese person getting transported to a fantasy world, where they’re bound to enjoy a cooler new life. I don’t know what that says about Japan, but in my case, I love stories about exploring bizarre new worlds filled with colorful people and monsters, going along with a protagonist generally so overpowered that they might conquer the world if such were their preference.

Our seventy-year-old protagonist finds himself as a young man with vastly enhanced skills related to his decades of experience as a machinist, allowing him to surpass even the fabled Dwarves of legend (hence the title). For whatever reason, his workshop also gets isekai-d along with him; that’s a new one. Anyway, first fantasy person he comes across is a one-handed, scarred gal who was dismissed from a party of adventurers (a relatively common trope). A healer by trade, she has no choice but to train her offense if she’s to honor her late mom, one of the former heroes of this world.

The protagonist, charmed by her determination, asks her to lend him her magic staff. She’s a pushover, so she accepts. A couple of weeks later she finds out that the master mechanist has turned her staff into a futuristic gun capable of one-shotting the worst monsters around, and is even capable of healing for some reason. The protagonist’s overpowered skills allow him to gather and process the most hardcore materials easily, which he proceeds to turn into weapons of a quality that his new world has never seen.

One of the main joys of this manga series, apart from its art style and character designs, involves following a self-assured, old Japanese artisan that’s having the time of his life in this fantasy playground, to the dismay of the locals that he ends up dragging to face monstrous horrors.

Character work is quite strong so far, with a couple of redemption arcs that I enjoyed a lot. As in plenty of if not most other isekai, the protagonist and his team are gearing up to kill the demon king, whatever it’s called in this story. I don’t recall having actually seen such a feat achieved in any of the isekai I’ve read in the past few months, unless the story starts with the protagonist having already won. Oh, well; joy’s in the ride.

I recommend this one if you enjoy peculiar protagonists, cool designs, and having fun.