The Spring 2024 Manga Guide

A Wild Last Boss Appeared!

What's It About? 

Lufas Maphaahl rules the land of Mizgarz with an iron fist. Mankind stands no chance of prevailing against the most powerful being in the world and her army of loyal minions—until a band of heroes bests her in an epic battle, sealing her soul away for all eternity. But this is just another day in Exgate Online. Lufas is a player's avatar and a legend among fans. She even outshines the official last boss, the Devil King. So it's no big deal to the boy behind Lufas when he logs off after his epic defeat—thankfully, it won't be eternity until he can play again. But he's met with a strange offer, and when he accepts, he's sucked into the game world and awakens...in Lufas's body! Two hundred years have passed since Lufas's defeat, and Mizgarz now lives under the shadow of the Devil King. How will our hero fix his mess? And can he save the world from the one being he never subordinated: the last boss?

A Wild Last Boss Appeared! is a manga by Tsubasa Haduki, adapted from a light novel series by Firehead and YahaKo. The English translation is by Lewis Williams and is lettered by Adam Jankowski. Published by J-Novel Club; PublishDrive edition (March 27, 2024.)

Is It Worth Reading?

I love role-playing. Part of what makes communities like dungeons and dragons so appealing is the ability to craft a specific role and slip into it. There are multiple stages of appeal in understanding a character on this basic level while navigating uncharted territory through the lens of said character. How would this character react under these circumstances? What does their alignment look like? A Wild Last Boss Appeared! is a book that perfectly captures that role-playing appeal using very familiar territory. Yes, this is another isekai where someone gets trapped in a fantasy video game world, but the setup makes it clear that we're going in a slightly different direction.

Well, there are a lot of generic elements here, like an overpowered character and a rather basic narrative structure, but it's the moments in between those tropes that I found the most entertaining. In most other shows, when someone reincarnates into a different character that already has a pre-established set of experiences, our lead usually acts like themselves. However, in this case, there is an interesting disconnect between how our average main character acts versus how they now come off as this new character. Seeing them try to navigate through other character interactions and research through such a lens was fun.

Plus, the fact that this is an original character that they created adds some extra levels of intrigue because as the series goes on, the question of which character we are following becomes a little blurry. If this series continues to play up the more psychological implications it sets up with our main character as he explores this new world, role-playing as a character he created with all of this informed history, then I think it might be worth continuing past this first volume. Combined with gorgeous art and scene direction, you can't go wrong with glancing at this one. There's just enough here to help things stand out.

Recipe for A Wild Last Boss Appeared!
You will need:
• 1 cup Overlord
• ½ cup In the Land of Leadale
• 2 tablespoons breasts
• 2 teaspoons harem
• ¼ teaspoon Sword Art Online
Combine ingredients in a bowl and mix slightly. Results will be lumpy. Pour into an enormous pan so that only a thin layer barely covers the bottom. Bake for three minutes at 350. The dish will appear underbaked.

In all fairness, it's probably very hard to come up with a new isekai flavor these days. Even if this series dates back to 2017 (2016 for the source novels), the glut was well and truly established by that point, and that means that now in 2024, even if a story invented some of the genre basics, they can feel so worn out by now that it almost doesn't matter. (Incidentally, all of the recipe ingredients are, in fact, older than this title.) So when something like A Wild Last Boss Appeared! shows up wearing its influences on its sleeve, it's hard not to grumble.

It doesn't help when the story's transition to manga makes you suspect that a lot is either being left out or poorly communicated. The entire opening is framed like a summary of events, making me wonder if the light novel opens with an extended flashback before diving into the protagonist's reality as a gamer; the narrative structure here even flat-out tells you that it's summarizing. This makes it hard to care much about Lufas and her player's concerns, and then when we get huge infodumps between chapters instead of solid worldbuilding, it just adds insult to injury. Nameless Gamer Dude's transmigration into the world of his game, Exgate Online, plays out like it was ripped from Overlord, with his thoughts and Lufas' words showing a self-aware contradiction based on who he is in reality and how he played his character. It isn't not amusing, but we've also seen it done better. That goes for Dina, Lufas' Albedo, and the whole “it's been hundreds of years since the timeline I played in” schtick, which feels cribbed from In the Land of Leadale. None of it is bad, per se, but it's also easy to see where it comes from, or at least to point to other series that used the same tropes.

I may be being a bit harsh here. There was some thought put into this, and the art is appealing with the artist even acknowledging their tendency to make Lufas' diadem bigger every time they draw it. The Nameless Gamer Dude being ready to just start over since he's maxed out Lufas feels pretty real, and I like the idea that the game came with a built-in novelization system to allow players to create canonical lore. But those aren't enough to lift this out of mediocrity. Maybe the novels are better, but after reading the manga, I can't say I'm all that eager to find out.