Four stars. The title translates to “The Heartwarming Slow Life of a Free-Spirited Production Worker.”

This is yet another title in the isekai sub-genre of “let’s contrast how shitty my life on Earth was by having a good ol’ time in this fantasy world.” When this series started, I expected it to be completely mediocre, but it surprised me with its character work and sense of humor.

The story follows an overworked Japanese salaryman in his thirties, who works at one of those Japanese companies that require you to wear a suit and tie, and to die inside. Wanting to remain human, he exercises his architectural talents in an online VR game. His buildings are so popular that they’re regularly used as backgrounds for wedding proposals by the kind of people who would propose to someone in a video game. Anyway, the godess of love or some shit contacts the protagonist through the game and offers to send him to a new world where he may be able to have a good ol’ time.

He finds himself in your average isekai fantasy world, based on Central Europe during the post-medieval period, but including monsters and sentient fantasy races of the Tolkienesque variety plus beast people. His abilities back on Earth have been turned into vastly overpowered skills: previously a crafty fellow, he’s now the most talented builder person around. He has also access to a warehouse-size inventory in some private dimension, along with the kind of Minecraft powers that allow him to dig through a mountain easily. Although initially he’s a bit freaked out, and tries to remove the VR headset in front of confused fantasy people, he quickly gets used to a life that won’t involve working at a Japanese company.

Like in many other isekai, first cute girl he meets, who is usually the first female at all he meets, becomes the intimate option. In this case, with the guy in his thirties even though his new body doesn’t suggest it, they establish a sort of father-daughter relationship with no incestual undertones. Because she helped him, a broke guy with no ID, to get around in that new world, he imprints on her (or is it the other way around?), and is happy to follow her on her adventures as long as he has the opportunity to make her comfortable. By that I mean stuff like cooking restaurant-grade food for her every day, or producing entire houses out of his inventory whenever they need to take a rest in the wild.

Still, she doesn’t fall for him, which may have to do with the fact that she has a questionable relationship with the older female receptionist at the adventurers’ guild; this girl even calls “dates” her outings with the receptionist. Oh well, can’t fix nature.

Plenty of the plot so far involves the protagonist wanting to enjoy a slow life in this new fantasy world, only for people to take notice of him because of shit like stacking the processed meat of eleven orcs on the guild receptionist’s desk, or earning about a year of his previous salary in Japan with a single quest. Soon enough he attracts the attention of the local duke, and a troublesome party of adventurers.

This story is fun, and I like to have fun.