Literature / Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody

Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody (Death March kara Hajimaru Isekai Kyousoukyoku), is a Japanese novel series by Hiro Ainana. Originally a Web Novel which was first released on the website Shousetsuka ni Narou in 2013, it eventually received a Light Novel rewrite with illustrations by shri in 2014 and an English translation by Yen Press starting in 2017.

Due to a co-worker suddenly disappearing without notice, 29 year old programmer Ichirou "Satou" Suzuki has spent the last month on a programming "Death March", an endless stream of coding and debugging over 80+ hour work weeks, to put out a new release of a mobile game his company was contracted to finish. After finally pushing the release out of QA, Satou curls up under his desk to get some well-deserved rest... and wakes up to find himself in a fantasy world still in his casual clothes but 15 years younger, with a screen telling him he's currently at level 1 and has a 3 time use spell called "Meteor". Satou soon use out this meteor spell in self defence, only to watch it accidentally destroy an entire civilization of dragons and gain him untold amounts of experience and loot in an instant.

With no idea what he's doing there and enough power that seemingly nothing can threaten him anymore, Satou decides he might as well go on a much needed vacation, and begins a sightseeing tour around this new world. Now Satou and a growing menagerie of companions try to see the sights, while stumbling onto wars between gods and demons, medieval political intrigue, and more along the way.

Also has an ongoing manga adaptation by Ayamegumu and a 12-Episode Anime adaptation that aired during the Winter 2018 anime season.

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Tropes in series

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: The Holy Sword Excalibur. It's so sharp it amazes even Satou.
• The Ace: Lady Ringrande Ougoch, grandaughter of a Duke, a Master Swordswoman and a Child Prodigy who finished her education by age 12, became a magic researcher who rediscovered two lost magics (explosion and destruction) at age 15 and earned an honorary baroness title. Small wonder she's such a Living Legend. The only 'flaw' she shows is being overprotective of her sister, Sara.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Satou does multiple things that he only finds out are impossible afterwards.
• Action Girl: Lady Ringrande, the follower of Hayato, as well as most of his party. The girls that follow Satou are slowly becoming this as well.
• Actually, I Am Him: Someone from the Adventurers Guild asks if Satou has any pull with the leadership of the Adventurers School... that Satou created.
• Altar Diplomacy: Many nobles seek out Satou to get him to marry their daughters.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Subverted. The weaselkin tribe is found constantly causing havoc across various kingdoms. That's because they're spies specifically dispatched to destabilize foreign powers. Inside the weaselkin empire itself, it's actually generally nicer to live in and with considerably less Fantastic Racism than other nations — provided you aren't a member of the clergy, that is.
• Amazon Brigade: The Hero Hayato's party are all women. Satou's party also develops into one.
• Ambition Is Evil: The assistant Viceroy of the Kuhanou County seeks to claim the Forest of Illusions for his project to build a new town. To that goal, he and his lieutenant seek to disrupt and destroy the regular shipment of three hundred potions from the Witch of the Forest of Illusions to the County with hired bandits and sabotage. When it looks like he is going to screw the Witch and Satou by purposely delaying waiting for the sun to set and so claim the potions were "late", the Count personally intervenes and puts an end to his machinations because of the long standing friendship he has with the Witch. When his scheme is exposed, the assistant Viceroy tries to use the protective magics of the County to assassinate the Count, but the protective magics won't harm the true ruler of the land, and Satou knocks him out before blood is shed.
• Animal Eye Spy: The Shadow Owl that the Undead King uses to spy for him.
• Animal Jingoism: While not exactly animals, Demons and Dragons don't get along. In fact, the main reason heroes are summoned isn't because demons can't be repelled - Dragons can repel them just fine, but a battle between them would leave a devastating trail of destruction in their wake.
• Anti-Villain: At the end of the day, Zen's only purpose was to find a hero that could put an end to his unlife, and even warned him about the danger Arisa was in if she used her ability too much.
• Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: When Arisa discovers that Satou has no intention of using his slaves for 'night services', she is distressed to put it mildly. She thought she finally found her ideal man, only for him to have no interest in her.
• Author on Board: The author really loves to describe the food the characters are eating/preparing. The sightseeing trip the character are taking around the world could be more simply described as a culinary trip. Even when they meet Forest Giants and Dwarves, the subject matter will inevitably at some point turn to food.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Satou's Menu Skill leaves very little for him to guess. His battles are more about how he'll hide his strength than how he'll defeat his opponents.
• Awful Truth: The true nature of Unique Skills and Demon Lords.
  • Unique Skills are divine in nature and are not meant to be used by mortals. While a mortal can use them by being granted fragments of divinity, they usually have various limits, both hard and soft, for the safety of the user. Bypassing these limits or even merely long term use of unique skills inherently overstresses the soul of a mortal, causing damage to the "soul container."
  • Demon Lords are not in fact a form of monster, but are Reincarnated or Summoned humans who were given a Unique Skill and overused or abused them, causing their soul container to crack or outright shatter. There is no inherent evilness to Demon Lords, which is literally just a title that means "damaged soul container", and Satou meets several that are living in hiding and are perfectly reasonable, if a bit weird.
• Badass Adorable: Tama, Pochi and Mia are clearly the latter half of the trope, and work to become the former.
• Back from the Dead:
  • Much of the story is about the Demon Worshipers trying to revive the Demon Lords. Ultimately, the plan being to hasten the revival of the Demon God.
  • Sara died during the Demon Lord resurrection below the old capital. It's only by Satou abusing several of his unique skills in ways they were not meant to be used — storing her body in his time-locked inventory so her time since death was locked at mere seconds, "moving" her blood back into her body in the same inventory system the same way he can move liquids out of potion vials, using potions on her body inside his inventory to heal her physical wounds instantly, et cetera — that gave her a fighting chance, and even then he needed the assistance of a local divine artifact, which only worked after he cheated by brute forcing it's mana requirements.
• Boxing Lessons for Superman: After struggling to defeat the Demon Lord in volume 5, Satou goes out of his way to learn more high end spells since they were the only thing that affected his enemy.
• By the Power of Grayskull!: Various holy swords require a cry of some sort to activate their special abilities.
• Can't Catch Up: Played with. While none of his harem are able to come anywhere close to his power, Satou is very conscious about making sure they train as much as they can, often intentionally sitting out of fights to ensure they gain skills and experience. As several antagonists intentionally try to abuse the "he can only be in one place at once" thing, this proves to be prescient.
• Cheap Gold Coins: Averted. One gold coin is viewed as an exorbitant sum^*most of a year's wages for the average commoner, which is about right for the medieval time period. A sentry in Labyrinth City mentions that one could live half a year on several silver coins.
• Chekhov's Classroom: Tama and Pochi learning about the power of steam thanks to the kettle gives Satou the idea of provoking explosions in the lake to stop the salt avalanche coming for him.
• Chekhov's Gun: The play Satou attends with the girls about a sorcerer who became a necromancer after a noble had him killed ends up being all too real - for Zen the Immortal King is that necromancer and kidnaps Mia.
• Chekhov's Gunman: If a character is given a name they will be brought up again, even if it's several thousand pages later.
• Chekhov's Skill: The ability to pull objects he's not touching into his Storage and the Item Box's cooling of what is put within allows Satou to save the potion flasks from the assistant viceroy's thugs.
• Clark Kenting: Reconstructed. Satou utilizes elaborate masks to prevent himself from being recognized. Additionally, his abilities allow him to see through most disguises. However, anyone who knows two of his alter egos for long enough inevitably realize from their abilities and shared goals that both people must be Satou.
• Color Motif:
  • Each of the 7 gods (8 including the Demon God) has a specific color associated with them; for example Parion is cyan, whereas Zaikuon is yellow. The odd god out, the Dragon God, is unique in that literally every time color is referenced about her (her hair color, her eye color, etc), it is specifically brought up over and over, and changes at random with each mention.
  • Reincarnated people all universally have purple hair. In Japan, Purple is known to be associated with death. In the new world, Purple is associated with the Demon God, so the Reincarnated are also known as cursed or unlucky children.
• Complete Immortality: The gods themselves as well as demon lords and some heroes can't be killed by traditional means, and will even eventually revive as spirits given enough time. Though anyone with the Hero or Demon Lord title can kill their physical form and anyone with the Godslayer title can steal pieces of their divinity till they lack the power to physically reincarnate.
• Confronting Your Imposter: Satou, as Kuro, meets 'Viscount Pendragon' while at his firm, 'responding to a marriage proposal' of the manager.
• Cool, but Inefficient: Subverted. Satou thinks his Storage is better than the Item Box that Arisa demonstrates for him and thinks he'll never have any use for it, but then changes his opinion when he discovers that are things that his Storage will not do but the Item Box does. Satou realizes one aspect is his Item Box will keep super-heated materials at their temperature indefinitely, the Item Box will change the temperature of items to the local ambient temperature instantly without any drawbacks to the products that super-cooling might inflict.
• Cool Mask: Satou uses various masks while taking on different persona, be it a classic face-covering mask or an outright synthetic skin one. In the case of his Hero Nanashi persona, he does both at the same time.
• Crazy-Prepared: Subverted. It's not that Satou is always prepared for anything, it's just that he has so much loot on his inventory that when he does need to make something, he already has most if not all the materials on hand. This openly exasperates at least one character, who lists insane items such as "a philosopher's stone" and "a branch from the world tree" as needed for something, only to have Satou pull them out as fast as she can list them.
• Crystal Ball: The Yamato Stone is used to determine a person's status.
• Cult: The Wings of Freedom, a cult of Demon Worshipers that is the source of much of the antagonism in the early parts of the story. Similarly named cults with similar goals are in just about every country; having different names makes it difficult for Satou to track them down using Menu.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Most of the battles where Satou does not hold back. He didn't even had trouble killing the Demon Lord and most of the fight was him trying to figure it out a way for him to stay dead.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique:
  • The unique abilities granted to reincarnated people and summoned heroes are this. Using them once in a while is fine, but abuse leads to loss of sanity and eventually transformation into a Demon Lord as the soul start to collapse. Having too many of them will similarly cause the soul to collapse as it cracks from not being able to hold the excess divine power.
  • Satou's learned version of Meteor Swarm. The limited use version explicitly wiped out an entire map including multiple ancient Dragons and a god. The fully upgraded reusable version is based on Satou's stats (i.e., way stronger), so Satou seals it away, lest he accidentally destroy a kingdom. Similarly, Satou tends to leave "Fear Resistance" turned off, as with it on he tends to be significantly more reckless.
• A Day in the Limelight: Other characters occasionally get their own POV chapter in the novels. Arisa also has a Spin-Off one-shot manga, Princess Arisa's Otherworldly Struggle, depicting part of her previous life and early childhood after reincarnating.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Slavery is often viewed by the enslaved as a reasonable alternative to being homeless and destitute. While some people react with disgust, what appalls them is usually the treatment of slaves and not the lack of freedom or Questionable Consent that inherently comes with it.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: Most of the Armor and Weapons used by Satou's group are created by him, since he can learn and master various crafting skills pretty effortlessly.
• Draw Aggro: Satou has the skill 'Taunt' to do exactly this, and is trying to teach Nana the same. The Hero Hayato has a skill that attracts the attention of the monsters, too. Nana eventually masters it, however, her odd way of speaking interacts weird with the skill, which requires her to shout out an insult at the target.
• Dungeon Bypass:
  • Satou attempts to get past a Riddle Inscribed Wall through this, but fails and has to rely on obtaining a new skill.
  • Later on in another dungeon he does this simply by teleporting away from every trap on the dungeon increasingly frustrating the Dungeon Master.
• Dungeon Crawling: The summoned labyrinths, which spawn around the demon lords corpses, are places where adventurers explore for a living.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In early chapters, Satou uses magic guns (which later become Lulu's preferred weapon), despite switching almost entirely to holy swords and magic for the rest of the story. Similarly, the Once per Episode "Satou here" opening section doesn't show up for several chapters at the start of the web novel.
• Encounter Repellant: There's an powder used in campfires that makes the monsters nearby go away, but it is expensive and only used in emergencies. Later Satou designs a Holy Stone with the same properties.
• Establishing Character Moment: In the first anime episode, before coming to the parallel world, Satou is eating lunch on a public bench when a little girl nearby starts crying. After looking around and concluding she's lost, he approaches her to calm her down and bring her to the nearest police officer, although the girl's mother finds them first. Satou's internal monologue expresses relief that the mother doesn't suspect him of being a pedophile. Then he reflects on how hot the mother is. Despite his preferences, he seems to be cursed to attract mainly teenage or preteen girls into his Battle Harem.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: One villain later in the series has a wife with teleportation powers, who he is very desperate to settle down away from all the chaos with.
  • The denouement is kicked off when one of the Demon God's harem, an innocent little girl with pink hair, betrays the rest of the harem and seeks out Satou to beg for help saving him. Despite being irredeemable, the Demon God still has people who genuinely love him.
• Evolving Credits: From episode 10 on, the opening sequence is altered to include shots of Mia and Nana.
• Exact Words: Arisa sexually assaults Satou despite being a slave thanks to the phrase attend to my master day and night when the slave contract was made.
• Fantastic Racism: Common against demihumans. For example, Pochi, Tama and Liza are not allowed into inns in Seiryuu City (though that was to such a extreme because they used to be at war).
• Fictional Videogame: Several at the beginning of the story, since the main character is a debugger for these games. When he's first transported to the other world he thinks he's dreaming a mash up of several different games at once.
• Flight: Using Wind Magic and his Skyrunning skill, Satou can literally run on air. He also made a Hang glider out of monster parts. Later on, he even starts creating airships professionally as part of his Echigoya Firm business.
• Food Porn: Seriously, there's so many types of different foods described in the story that its hard not to get hungry when reading it.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The Intermissions are rich with information which both hint at what is to come and add information to a past event.
  • The reveal that there are several alternate Japans that people are drawn from and Arisa is from a different one has hints early in the series.
    • When describing the science of boiling water to Tama and Pochi, Arisa explains that when water becomes steam it grows to "one thousand" times the volume of the water. Satou believes this is mistake as he knows it to be sixteen-hundred times the volume of the water evaporated. However, it shows that Arisa's mind is using a different form of measurements with different values than Satou, much like if one describes something in inches over centimeters.
    • Arisa reacting with outrage to being called a "Parsley Girl" hints that She is not from the same Japan that Satou is, as that was a horrific insult for unmarried women in her world but complete gibberish to Satou.
• Gaming Stat Tropes: All the standard ones exist, but they are rarely brought up. Satou himself has all of his maxed out in the first five minutes of the story.
• Geas: Arisa and Lulu are under a geas that makes really difficult to free them. It can be lifted either by one of the rare geas skill user (only two are known) or by sacrificing one's own lifespan to use the Wish skill.
• Genre Deconstruction: The Labyrinth City is one long running example of how an RPG dungeon would affect a medieval society. Massive poverty and wealth stratification? Huge groups of orphans left behind by dead adventurer parents? A corrupt economy twisted around the dungeon, its drops, and the exploitation of its resources? Check, Check, and Check. Most notably, Labyrinth City is one of the few situations Satou can't just easily fix. The best he can do is start some very basic reforms, including starting an adventurer school for children and an orphanage. Even this is cited as revolutionary by other Nobles.
• Giver of Lame Names: Satou. He names himself after his grandfather's dog, which is the name he uses for his characters in online games and which sticks with him in the new world. Then, in order, he names the lizardfolk girl Liza (a shorted version of her lizardfolk name, which is unpronounceable by humans), the dog-eared girl Pochi (a common name for pet dogs in Japan), the cat-eared girl Tama (a common name for pet cats in Japan). Later, he names Homonculus Number 7 as Nana ("7" in Japanese), and the black dragon he befriends Hei Long ("Black Dragon" in Chinese). Arisa is visibly dismayed at all of this.
• God of Evil: The demon god who created the demons and warred against the others.
• God Was My Copilot:
  • The Dragon God has been engineering Satou's rise to power, summoning him to her world, letting him kill her current physical form at the start of the story to raise him to an absurd level, and then giving him loot that lets him steal power from the Demon God by killing various demons. All so he will become an immortal god like her, and she no longer has to watch him die and be reincarnated across eternity. Also she's apparently been his friend and/or lover in every universe he's ever existed, shows up now and then as the little girl [Unknown] to assuage his various fears about other gods controlling him, and a joke curse she put on him is the reason most of his party is flat-chested girls.
  • All the demons were empowered by the Demon God, who wishes to be worshiped as the sole god of the fantasy world, and destroy the 7 gods most people currently worship. Every reincarnated person with purple hair was summoned into the fantasy world by him too, which is why some like Zen ended up as Demon Lords.
• Gratuitous English: All the Spells are named in English, justified by his translation skill rendering them that way.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: Satou's ever-increasing list of accomplishments (such as taking out demons or working as a blacksmith) are never accredited to him, with Satou going to great lengths to avoid any credit being attached to his name. This comes to a head when Satou has to choose between his cover and saving a large number of innocents on a crashing airship. He could easily save them all using his cheats, but there's no way he could hide doing it. He hesitates trying literally any other solution first, up to and including having every one of his teammates using their own considerable abilities to help, but in the end he realizes his cover isn't worth the lives of innocents and steps up.)
• Guide Dang It!: In-Universe, Satou has no idea what his Unique Skills can actually do, so he spends his downtime experimenting with them.
• Hammerspace: Some characters have ways to store and carry multiple items.
  • Bag of Holding: Able to stack 30 varied types of up to 30 items, [30 Holding Bag].
  • Hyperspace Arsenal: Heroes have an infinite storage. Satou (like always) takes it to the extreme by stopping the item's time too.
• Happiness in Slavery: Most of Satou's party enjoy being his slaves, though mainly because he doesn't treat them like slaves at all, and instead like siblings or children he is acting as a guardian / surrogate father to. Arisa even wanted to be Satou's Sex Slave due to her proclivities. Some people also prefer slavery to starvation.
• Healing Potion:
  • They exist, but are expensive; higher-grade potions are worth several gold coins. Satou is an alchemist, so he has no qualms about mass creating them.
  • Satou takes great pains in re-inventing a lost, albeit weaker, healing potion that can be made out of common weeds around the Labyrinth City. He then makes sure to hide away pieces of the recipe with samples of the potion throughout the labyrinth so it will be "rediscovered."
• Hero's Slave Harem: Satou saves a trio of demihuman slaves from an abusive master, and they choose to stay with him. Later, he purchases two sisters because one looks Japanese and the other speaks Japanese. Even later still, he saves nine gynoids who also pledge themselves to his service (one of whom repeatedly tries to sleep with him). Satou, however, Has a Type and Likes Older Women, meaning that almost of his slaves (whose ages range from very young to mid-teens) are too young for him. Later in the story, however, they manage to trick him into saying he will marry them if they're available in ten years or more.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The Muno City Demon Lord's plot becomes self-defeated when the carriage carrying chaos jars to a nearby shrine city is assaulted and the cultists slain by some of the bandits created as a result of the Demon Lord's plans to spread misery and suffering in the area to fuel the chaos jars.
• Horse of a Different Color: In addition to normal horses, there are other animals such as Hexapedal Boars, used as mounts.
• Hot Springs Episode: During their travels, Satou creates an open air bath for the girls when they make a stop near a river. Hijinks ensue.
• Human Sacrifice:
  • The Religion of Evil tends to kidnap priestesses to sacrifice and turn them into demons as it'll let the demon god steal the power the 7 gods gave to their priestesses, and thus shortening the time for its resurrection.
  • Sacrificial rites were also performed in Kuvork Kingdom to revive a labyrinth.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Zen the Undead King is a former necromancer who seeks to be Together in Death with his wife (and be destroyed before he becomes a Demon Lord), but cannot die unless a Hero strikes him down with a Holy Sword, so he obtains a Holy Sword and then kidnaps Mia in order to attract a hero (or even create one if he has to). When Satou proves himself to be a hero, Zen gifts him the Holy Sword he has and lets Satou put an end to his unlife.
• I Have Many Names: It all started when Satou chose the name Pendragon as his family name, then the Black Dragon Hei Long named him Kuro as a sign of friendship. After that Satou gave himself different names depending of what he was working on so that his works couldn't be traced back to him. Some of these names come from the famous people from his previous world, such as Michaelangelo (when making ornaments or accessories), Trismegistus (when making artifacts) and Echigoya (the fake name he uses for Kuro as the director of the Echigoya Firm).
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All the anime episodes have the structure "X that began with a death march".
• Irony: Satou is a 20-some adult who likes older women, is transformed into a teenager and has a party formed mostly by young girls. When he meets Hayato, he turns out to be a 20-some adult who likes young girls and has a party formed mostly by older women. Increasing the irony, both of them are age-swapped in ways that complicate this; Satou is physically around 15 years old but mentally closer to 30, Hayato is physically closer to 30 but mentally around 14.
• It's Raining Men: Satou likes using his Sky Drive skill to drop in from space if he wants to travel places quickly.
• Kill the God: The Demon God's ultimate goal is to destroy the 7 world pillar gods to the point he gets every reincarnated human to swear a magically binding oath to kill any god they meet. He's also fairly amused when the future Weasel Emperor promises to kick the crap out of him too, leaving him with an encouraging Bring It.
• Leaked Experience: Satou uses the fact anyone who attacks a monster will get an equal cut of its experience to level up his comrades quickly: Either they perform a surprise attack on a much higher level monster which he then kills, or he stuns an enemy, then lets the others kill it with a Death of a Thousand Cuts.
  • This is considered an offensive thing to do in the Labyrinth City, to the point that Baggage Carriers that do it are labeled as "Stone Throwers" and blacklisted.
• Ley Line: Flowing streams of magical energy that gives life to the land that can be found dungeons, cities and other places. The cores are known as Earth Veins or Dragon Veins form dots on the land.
• Loophole Abuse: The aide to Count Kuhanou, when it turns out that Satou and the apprentice witch brought the potions required by the pact, attempts to delay signing the acceptance of the potions beyond the deadline so he can then claim the potions were not brought in time. Fortunately, the Count returns in time to sign the contract and put the aide in his place.
• Loved by All: Most everyone Satou interacts courteously with likes him. That includes everything from Forest Giants to innkeeper helpers.
• Magically-Binding Contract:
  • The slave Contract skill binds the participant to a master and causes pain if they disobey.
  • The Demon God forces all reincarnated beings to swear an oath to kill any gods they meet. This comes to a head in a latter book when one encounters a god, and helplessly goes berserk against it, using every spell and unique ability in their arsenal to try and murder it.
• Magic Kiss: On two occasions, Satou inquires the Dryad's assistance to open a teleportation shortcut while in the Cradle, but she first needs to receive mana by kissing him on the lips.
• Mana Potion: They exist and are even more expensive than Healing Potions. They also have a very bitter flavor, which can be eliminated with honey but this slightly diminishes the recovery.
• Mark of the Supernatural: People who have purple or lilac hair are reincarnated from people who died in Japan, signifying their otherworldliness and acquired abnormal powers. In some places there is discrimination against them due to the color being associated with the Demon God; Arisa goes out of her way to wear a blonde wig because of this.
• Medieval European Fantasy: The setting is completely based around Fantasy Europe, with sprinkles from other cultures for flavor.
• Medieval Stasis: Enforced by the local deities via declaring certain things to be "God's taboo." Anything that would risk introducing modern technology to the world, or risk the faith in the gods, is dealt with by "Divine Judgement" — massive amounts of natural disasters. Examples include radio, trains, the printing press, and certain types of agriculture. Usually the people involved are given massive amounts of warnings from the local priesthood through the Oracle skill, however.
• Meteor-Summoning Attack: First conversed, then played straight. Satou is introduced as a video game developer who adds an ability to summon a meteorite storm three times per character as an Anti-Frustration Feature following beta testers complaining about the difficulty curve early into the game. After he unexpectedly wakes up from a nap in the game world, he triggers the ability in a blind panic when he's attacked by Draconic Humanoids and accidentally wipes out their whole civilization.
• Mouth Flaps: How Satou realizes that Arisa must know Japanese, because she enunciates his name correctly, contrary to everyone else calling him "Sa-too".
• Mugging the Monster: Whoever tries to steal from Satou.
  Real professional bandits came after us, too. They must’ve robbed some knights or something, because the two leaders were decked out in impressive full-body armor, armed to the teeth, and mounted on warhorses. This was good luck for us, since we needed more horses to enter the large forest. We acquired both their horses after we’d taken care of them.
• Mundane Made Awesome/Mundane Utility: Pretty much everything Satou makes and/or does is a combination of the two. Need a kitchen knife? Make it of magical metals used to make the Holy Swords. Making Pimped Out Dresses for a ball? Make them from the ultra rare philosopher's stone and twigs of the world tree. What about the Magic Edge skill that only the strongest knights of the kingdom know? Have the 10 year old learn and use it as easily as breathing, or better yet, learn how to use the advanced variants that almost no one knew even existed. And finally, remember those Holy Swords that only Heroes can use and are one of the most effective weapons against Demon Lords? Use them as magic batteries? Yeah, why not. Even Satou's more insane Unique Skills are thanks to the Dragon God exploiting his mundane [Indestructible] Unique Skill, which just allows his soul to heal from any damage to it: bits of his unchanging soul were slowly shaved off over countless lifetimes and then reconstructed into a single soul big enough to hold near endless divine power.
• Mutually Unequal Relationship: Much to the chagrin of the girls, Satou only sees them at best as little sisters/daughters, since they don't have yet womanly curves.
• The Namesake: Satou was the name the main character used when he was testing a game. After being transported to the new world he adopts it as his own. It turns out that Satou was a dog's name from his childhood.
• New Life in Another World Bonus:
  • Any summoned heroes are given a bonus by Parion, the goddess that facilitates summonings, usually in the form of a Unique Skill and powerful equipment. Summoned heroes are specifically summoned to kill a Demon Lord, so they tend to be focused upon combat. People summoned without Parion's blessing do NOT get this or any other bonus, nor are they taught the local language, which tends to leave them quite screwed.
  • Similarly, any reincarnated are similarly given a bonus by the god that reincarnates them, often a Unique Skill or two, while they are also universally given purple hair. Reincarnated are seemingly not brought forth for a specific reason, so their skills tend to be somewhat random.
  • Satou, having traveled to the new world while unconscious and not having met a god, doesn't seem to fall under either category. He does have a strange game-like AR system covering his vision, as well as some game-like elements including a powerful JRPG style menu and inventory system and some powerful one off scrolls meant to go in the video game he was developing. He does discover he has 4 unique skills (an unheard of number) — "Menu," "Indestructible," "Unit Arrangement," and "Unit Creation," but outside of presuming Menu is what gives him his video game like AR system, he has no idea what any of them do.
    • Related, Satou uses his one off scrolls immediately upon entering the new world to destroy an entire Draconic Army, nearly wiping out several races of dragons and dragonkin, as well as killing the local Dragon God. This event single-handedly gives him a near infinite amount of loot and power due to the Role-Playing Game 'Verse like level system, but leaves him Unskilled, but Strong in the extreme.
• Nice to the Waiter: Played with. Nobles tend to be quickly outed as being good or evil based on how they treat their "lessers," with the occasional Innocently Insensitive situation popping up. Contrasting this, Satou treats everyone like an idealized Japanese businessman would — stoic in the face of criticism and hostility, empathic, and exceedingly polite, patient, and professional, even to his "lessers" such as commoners and beastmen — which has him mistaken for nobility on several occasions.
• No Kill like Overkill: Meteor Storm is special item that can't be blocked, can't be interrupted, can't be dodged, and instantly kills everything in range. Satou has only used it twice.
• No-Sell:
  • Demons can only be hurt by magic, magic weapons or holy swords. Depending on the demon they can even No-Sell lower tier spells cast by Satou, who overcharges them to the point they are mistaken by high end spells.
  • Satou, not being a Hero, cannot use a holy sword, which makes fighting a demon effectively impossible for him. However, having killed a god, he *is* a God-Slayer, which means he can equip a Divine Sword, which works just as well. and he would later gain the Hero title anyway after defeating his first demon.
  • When the viceroy assistant attempts to use a spell on Count Kohanou, he nonchalantly disperses the spell.
• Not So Above It All: A one-off gag later in the series sees Satou transformed into the age and races of his various followers. (For example, an 12 year old catkin Satou to match Tama.) All of them, even the ones that are typically not involved in attempting to romance Satou, are immediately fascinated with his new forms.
• Not the Intended Use: Satou flat out abuses certain spells, items, and relics in ways they absolutely were not intended to be used for. Some examples include a worthless joke spell to heat up a forge (a useful, if short ranged, flame thrower), massive amounts of gold coins (useful if you need gold ingots for crafting), and magic swords that get stronger if magic is pushed into them (useful as a form of mana battery).
• Oblivious to His Own Description: The King and Prime Minister of the Shiga Kingdom eventually realize Satou must be a dragon or the avatar of a dragon due to him consistently getting in the way of both the demons and the seven pillar gods. Satou thinks this sounds ridiculous, even though he is the Dragon God's Chosen One and was granted a sizable portion of her power.
• Oblivious to Love: Satou repeatedly explains away in his head — and to openly exasperated friends — the rather blatant attraction that various people express towards him with justifications such as "they're nervous" or "they're afraid of men" or "they got confused and misspoke."
• Older Than They Look:
  • When Satou arrived in the new world, his body reverted to how he looked when he was 15, but he's really 29.
  • Arisa was reincarnated as a baby, so although she looks younger than Satou, but she's actually older than him - implied to be in her 40s or 50s.
  • Mia, because she's an elf, also looks like a elementary school girl even though she's actually 130.
  • And then there's Aialize, a High-Elf who has lived over 100 million years while looking roughly in her 20s. And being a complete airhead. This is in part to her archiving her memories, leaving her perpetually mentally youthful but avoiding the downsides to such a long life.
  • The calculator literally breaks down when considering the Dragon God, who looks like a young girl roughly on par with the rest of Satou's harem, but is really older than the universe.
• One-Man Army: Heroes with Unique Skills can typically take out entire armies on their own.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Originally an Always Chaotic Evil Long-Lived race, they were destroyed and the survivors are now living peacefully in secret. They were also ones who created the [Travel Gates] .
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Hayato, along with all his party, at around level 80, is a bonafide Hero in this world when the most powerful warriors of the kingdom barely get to 60, but when compared to level 310 Satou...
• Papa Wolf: The foremost thought for Satou is that his girls be safe, so if he has to go around their camp at night and kill anything that might give them trouble, then so be it.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Zig-zagged. While the Golden Knights use really elaborate identity concealment artifacts and golden full armor to conceal their identities, those that know them personally immediately realize that they are the Pendragon party. Similarly, those who interact with more than one of Satou's alter egos in person for any length of time are pretty quick to notice they're the same person, despite the extensive lengths Satou goes to conceal his identity.
• Point of View: Satou is almost always the narrator and the point of view character, although the occasional chapter or segment dips into other people's viewpoints.
• Poverty Food:
  • Gabo and lulu fruits, which are low-maintenance crops that most find repulsive and Even the Rats Won't Touch It (until Satou finds preparations that make them delicious). Gabo fruits are a staple food in orphanages and lower-class districts while lulu fruits are typically fed to livestock.
  • In times of famine, nobles often resort to legumes and potatoes.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: The anime adaption moves around several parts of the light novel in order to end the season on a proper ending, which roughly corresponds with the end of Volume 2. Similarly, the authors notes of the light novel are quick to point out that the light novel is almost completely rewritten from the original web novel, containing roughly 90% changed or new material.
• Properly Paranoid: During the Witch of the Forest Arc, Satou makes sure to keep everything safe every time there is the slightest chance things will go wrong. His paranoia is well founded, as the local count's aide is deliberately trying to prevent the Witch from fulfilling her pact so he can steal her lands and build a town there.
• Puppeteer Parasite: The main antagonist of volume four is a Doppelganger who can do this.
• Red Baron: Some characters are known by titles; the divine-enforced mechanics of the Role-Playing Game 'Verse also apply titles to people. Many have effects, for example a "X Slayer" or "Natural Enemy of the X Race" can cause emotional reactions in certain species.
• Reincarnation:
  • Some characters are Japanese people who died and then were offered reincarnation in the fantasy world by a God, signified by they purple hair and eyes and their Unique Skills. This is due to all of them being given a piece of the Demon God's soul when he reincarnated them.
  • Satou's dream early in the story also suggests that as long as your soul isn't destroyed, everyone reincarnates eventually anyway. Although only Satou reincarnates as a nearly identical version of himself in each lifetime.
• Religion of Evil: Several religions try to draw out demons.
• Role-Playing Game 'Verse / RPG Mechanics 'Verse: The world Satou awakens in. The natives do not talk about the Mechanics very often, but there is the occasional mention of levels, skills, or titles; whereas the non-natives — Satou, the Summoned Heroes, and the Reincarnated — see it as much closer to the latter.
  • Character Level: Anything that is alive and/or can fight has a level.
  • Experience Points: People and things can gain points through doing activities, such as simply reading books to engaging in combat.
  • Point Build System: Summoned and reincarnated people can allocate a maximum of 10 points to a skill. Satou has more points than he knows what to do with, so he maxes out pretty much every skill he comes across, giving him instant mastery after his first attempt.
  • Skill Point Reset: As shown by Arisa, one can reset and reallocate skill points though with a slight decrease in points regained.
• Running Gag:
  • Any time Satou does something affectionate with any of the girls, the others will line up to have him do the same thing with them. This includes headpats, hugs, helping them off a carriage (to the point that the girls will climb back into the carriage to get helped down by him), wiping rice off their cheek during dinner, dancing, holding hands, et cetera.
    • Also, anytime Satou is near or thinks about any other female, especially ones that are older, pretty, and/or well endowed, Arisa and Mia, dubbed the "Iron Wall" by Satou, will immediately berate him and/or try to pull him away. They also jump in between Satou and any fanservice, preventing him from seeing anything.
  • Arisa is a serious otaku, meaning she's often dressing herself and the other girls up in cosplay, alongside referencing various animes, singing various anime theme songs, reacting to buzzwords and slang from various shows, et cetera. The catch being, Arisa comes from a different Japan than Satou (and the audience) and is hinted at having been around 40-50 years old when she reincarnated, meaning the references she makes are often complete gibberish to Satou.
  • Nana will immediately attempt to adopt anything cute, such as children, small animals, stuffed animals...
• Self-Proclaimed Love Interest: Arisa and Mia towards Satou.
• Sequence Breaking: During the Cradle incident, Satou tries to ask the Dryad to send him to the boss room, but she can't so she sends him the highest she can, twice.
• Sentient Phlebotinum: Raka, the Pendant used by Lady Karina, introduced during their travel through Muno Barony.
• Serial Escalation: Zig-zagged. Satou defeats a greater demon fairly early in the series, and shortly afterwards defeats a Demon Lord (in secret). It takes a fairly significant amount of time before anything else comes close to the same power level, but they often come with other complications than mere strength that Satou has to deal with.
• Shout-Out: The web novel is chock-full of these.
• Showy Invincible Hero: Satou becomes several hundred levels higher than almost anything out there and gains an entire hoard of Infinity +1 equipment by accidentally defeating a "Dragon God" in the first chapter, meaning his battles usually don't come with any suspense over whether he'll lose, but are rather about finding interesting ways around an enemy's magic or unique skill protections using his absurd resources. Or winning the fight without causing too much collateral damage. Or figuring out a way to defeat powerful enemies without witnesses realizing that he's way stronger than a traveling merchant has any right to be.
• The Siege: The defense of Muno City in volume four, besieged by Goblins and Demons.
• Slave Collar: Generally used on unruly slaves or when as punishment. The first thing Satou did when he bought the girls was remove them. What he actually wanted was to free them but because Tama, Pochi and Liza as beastfolk would be ostracized they felt it was better for them to continue as his slaves, and Arisa and Lulu because they are under a Geas that forces them to live the rest of their lives as slaves.
• Slow Life Fantasy: Ichiro Suzuki, a chronically overworked game developer, takes a nap in his cubicle after a long shift and wakes up in an endgame area of the MMORPG he had just been working on. Despite maxing his character level by wiping out the map with a cheat code he'd just added, he chooses to take it easy as the traveling peddler Satou, only getting involved in the world's problems when they interfere with his business and/or sightseeing.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Nana's sisters. In the original web novel, they were all killed when Trazayuya Maze collapsed. In other adaptations, Satou manages to save them all, though they are Put on a Bus shortly after.
  • One of the first things the web novel epilogue does is fix the above, by having Satou research a way to recreate them.
• Stat-O-Vision: Those with the skills such as [Appraisal] can often identify items and see the name, level, title, and skills of others.
• Sympathetic Slave Owner: Satou technically owns the majority of the girls in his party, but he actually sees them as his family.
• Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: Satou goes to great lengths to study his abilities, testing out the various capabilities of his items and abilities. His lack of "common sense" allows him to catch several incorrect assumptions that the people of the world make.
• Summon Every Man Hero: Often someone from Japan is summoned to be a hero to defeat the demon lord in the world. Justified when it's revealed the Dragon God, who has been in love with a man who is seemingly born in Japan in nearly all his reincarnations, is the creator of the summon magic.
• Summoning Ritual: How the Heroes are brought to the world. One interesting twist is that there are multiple alternate Japans, and summoned people come from various different ones. Even Arisa and Satou only share around 70% of each other's history and culture. This only becomes obvious to Satou once he meets two other summoned Japanese people, who try and figure out if he's from their Japan or a different one.
  Yui / Aoi: "So, which Japan are you from? Are you from this kid's Great Rich Japanese Empire? Or are you from my Southern Japanese Federation? ... You aren't from the Northern Japanese Republic, are you?"
• Summon Magic: Mainly used by the Demons to summon others.
• Team Dad: Satou, to no huge surprise. He explicitly starts considering the girls under his care to be "his girls" and takes a father / older brother style role with them, seeking to make sure they grow up well, keeping them away from bad influences, and ensuring they will be safe and able to survive without him if he's suddenly called back to Japan.
• Teleportation: Space magic allows for a recall-like teleport to predesignated locations, Satou and Arisa both can use this magic to return to magic circles that Satou leaves in various areas.
• Those Two Guys: Pochi and Tama are hardly seen separated.
• The Three Certainties in Life: Taxes from city to city are substantial, causing Satou to consider bypassing them through the use of his storage.
• Through Her Stomach: Many are introduced to Satou via his max-level cooking, and have such a positive impression, they end up wanting to marry him or have him marry their daughter(s).
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Gabo fruit for goblins
  • Meat for Liza, Pochi and Tama.
  • Sara likes Satou's consommé soup.
  • Marquis Lloyd and Count Hohen are notorious gourmets who love Satou's tempura and endlessly debate whether the shrimp or pickled ginger tempura is superior.
• Tragic Villain: Zen was a sorcerer who was Happily Married with Liltiena, but Marquis Muno wanted her, so he had him and his entire family killed and kidnapped Liltiena, who committed suicide shortly thereafter. When he was revived as an undead necromancer, Zen went into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge to destroy the Marquis and all of his allies, but then, when he sought his own death, he was denied, so he waited until he could find a hero that could kill him permanently.
• Trapped in Another World: Most people who get summoned to the fantasy world can never go back home, either because they died and were reincarnated or were otherwise summoned by a god who has no interest in sending them home. Even Parion's heroes will only be sent home after they kill a Demon Lord for her. Not that Satou minds, because he figured he needed a vacation.
• Two-Timer Date: Satou has to attend an event at the royal capital as both Chevalier-> Viscount Satou and the Hero Nanashi.
• Utility Magic: The life line of magic in general are like this, with functions such as drying clothes, preparing a bath and cleaning objects.
• Universal Universe Time: Averted, time runs differently in the game world
  • 1 year is only 10 months long, and one month only 30 days long.
  • A day is divided in 24 "hours" as in Earth, but it took Satou two novels and change to realize that each local hour is in fact 70 minutes long. This messed up with his biological clock a little before getting used to the 28-hour day length cycle.
  • There are no weeks, the months are instead divided into 10-day "minor months" called upper moon, middle moon, and lower moon.
• Unique Protagonist Asset: "Unique Skills" are powerful unique abilities granted to reincarnated or summoned humans, as well as demon lords. the Unique Skills further come from pieces of divinity the gods have granted their chosen champions.
  • Satou himself has 4 extremely powerful unique abilities, due to the most powerful deity in the setting, the Dragon God, granting him 4 fairly large portions of her soul as part of her plans, [Menu], [Unit Arrangement], [Unit Creation] and [Indestructible]. These grant him:
    • Pseudo omniscience through [Menu]'s [Map] and [Analyze] functions.
    • Pseudo control over space and time through [Menu]'s [Storage] function, which allows any non-living thing to be stored in a pocket dimension, indefinitely frozen in time, and [Unit Arrangement], which provides cost free teleportation to any location he can see or has claimed ownership over.
    • Pseudo power over the act of creation itself through [Unit Creation].
    • A soul that won't break or warp no matter how much it's damaged due to death or the effects of divine entities through [Indestructible]. This is actually how the Dragon God managed to give him 3 more skills and why Satou doesn't suffer the Dangerous Forbidden Technique downsides of Unique Skills: by collecting pieces of Satou's soul across thousands of lifetimes where his soul remains exactly the same, she was able fuse them into a single soul big enough to hold more power from her and other gods as well.
• Unwanted Harem: Both Satou and the Saga Empire Hero Hayato sport this - the majority of girls in their party do not suit their taste in women. Satou is surrounded by young girls when he has a preference for voluptuous older women being mentally around 30 years old; Hayato is surrounded by voluptuous older women when he has a preference for young girls partially because he's really only 14 years old.
  • Note that Satou does care for his Harem immensely, however it's purely platonically.
• Walk on Water: Satou does this to escape the salt avalanche in Episode 9. Several of his party members can do it before too long as they become stronger.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Zen only kidnapped Mia because he needed to find if there was a hero that could put an end to his unlife so he can be Together in Death with his wife and avert becoming a Demon Lord.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: When the homunculi use Rock–Paper–Scissors to decide who is going to join Satou's party, he finds himself bemused.
• Younger Than They Look: Nana, aside from her appearance, is technically one year old. Justified in that she's an Homunculus.

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