The Hero Laughs While Walking the Path of Vengeance a Second Time, Vol. 1

I'm a bit unsure of how to rate this one. It started off great. Kaito is summoned to another world as a hero, only to get betrayed and killed off once he's no longer useful. After he vowed to get revenge on everyone who betrayed him, he got thrown back in time to the day of his summoning. It's a time reset story, but focusing on revenge. Maybe a bit excessively so, because Kaito turns so sadistic it goes beyond satisfying and lands in the realm of weird. For me, at least. It reminds me of those super shallow do-S in Rejet games.

Still, I love a good revenge story so that's not really an issue. The main problem for me is that after the initial revenge scene on the princess, the story turned into something... familiar. It feels a lot more like a standard isekai, with journey preparations, friend recruiting, dungeon crawling, and also fanservice. For a book that sells revenge, it kind of lost its focus in the middle and only came back to that towards the end. It would've been fine if only everything that makes the story unique didn't get shoved aside to make room for stereotypical isekai adventure template, which sadly makes it feel rather unoriginal. But when it gets back to the revenge plot, it's really good.

There's also a translation / writing issue, in which terms are used inconsistently. You can search the entire book to find the term “the mage” used exactly once, and I had to go back to find who the mage is because that wasn't what the book called him the first time. The original web novel also made it clear that the sorceress and the demon lord are the same person, but the nuance is lost in translation. If the translation is at least more consistent, it could've been a more pleasant read.