Reviews for The Invincible Reincarnated Ponkotsu

A little girl on a tricycle is slowly coming at you. You jump to the side, and gets hit by a truck. "Truck-sama strikes again!" Story: This is a parody of isekai. So even though we are all fu*king tired of isekai, this story might just be enjoyable. It's so exaggerated that it's hard to even imagine, it's completely and absolutely absurd. But a great parody. The plot is three heroes of a fantasy world were spiritually replaced by people that died in "a foolish way", to make it easier to kill these heroes. I mean I hate isekai but this plot is a masterpiece. There's noheavy build up, no hero summoning. The world itself is typical isekai, but our characters are so silly that it's feels new and fresh. The monsters, skills, and everything else "isekai typical" has been made to make you laugh at it's stupidity. So, if you like parody, this is truly a great story. However you actually like serious isekai, then this manga is a huge slap in the face.

Art: The character art is surprisingly good for being a parody manga, cute characters and ugly monsters. But the backgrounds are minimalistic. Sometimes you can't see if it's a desert, or a rain forest...

Characters: The three main characters and their respective skills are very well made as parody. So exaggerated that it makes KONOSUBA look boring. But surprisingly we have normal and likable sub-characters. So it's obvious that the creator want the main characters to be ridiculously stupid.

Overall. As comedy, it's good work. But if you can't laugh at this stupidity, it will probably suck. The story is weak, but the humor is strong. So in the end, the question is, do you want to laugh at the stupidity of isekai? If so, this is truly the manga to read.

Also, some isekai have sex scenes for fan-service. A parody of that would be...? Grotesque rotten zombies, making love to each other. Imagine that. Zombie x Zombie = true love.

tl;dr: An isekai comedy centered around successful stupidity. This manga is about a trio of three friends who end up getting reincarnated into another world after dying together in an absurdly dumb way. This manga is a spinoff of another manga that as far as I understand it simply features the trio living normal lives as high school students, though it hasn’t been translated into English so I haven’t read it and thus I can’t say all that much about it. This spin off isekai manga went on for longer so it was probably more popular and also has what feels like a proper ending, soI don’t think it’s necessary to read the other manga to enjoy this one.

Anyway, the way they reincarnate is actually pretty interesting. They essentially take over the bodies of a trio that already existed in the isekai world. That’s not unheard of when it comes to isekai, but this is the first time I’ve seen it done with a trio together. That results in some pretty interesting dynamics. See, the three that got reincarnated, Shota, Sanae, and Kana, essentially had a love triangle going on in their previous world, and seeing as they all got isekai’d together that persists in the new world. However, the people whose bodies they took already had their own stories. And that included romances and even marriages with children. So when they run into people that already know their bodies original inhabitants, it gets really awkward. Thankfully, this is a comedy manga so it is able to play it all off in a pretty amusing fashion. The ending got kind of bizarre trying to force this to work out in a nice way despite all the issues, but ultimately I’d say I was still pretty satisfied with it.

Beyond that, the plot is a pretty generic isekai story where they have the goal of gathering up heroes to defeat the big bad that’s trying to take over the world or to destroy humanity or something like that. The plot is weak, but it really doesn’t matter because this is a purely comedic parody manga. It’s a bit different from most isekai parodies, in that it’s really not trying to be witty in playing around with tropes or mechanics. Rather, it’s just trying to be as stupid as possible with them. The epitome of that is Sanae, the titular ponkatsu. A ponkatsu means useless junk essentially and in this context it means someone who screws up so often that screwing up is their primary character trait. Sanae is really dumb and is constantly doing dumb things, but somehow it all magically works out. Usually in completely ridiculous ways. The rest of the cast isn’t as extreme as Sanae, but even with them most of the humor is centered around them doing things wrong but them somehow succeeding. This does get kind of repetitive, but overall there was enough variety to the absurdity for it to be at least somewhat interesting and funny all the way to the end.

The art was decent enough but nothing special. It’s pretty generic in terms of style and designs and doesn’t lend itself well to visual humor. It gets the story across clearly enough but that’s it.