When your Isekai Goddess has Zero Believers

This article is based on the webnovel version of Full Clearing Another World under a Goddess with Zero Believers, then I will do a comparison with the Light Novel version which has 4 volumes as of this review.

I think it would be proper to give you a warning: this article will probably be full of spoilers. So proceed at your own risk.

Takatsuki Makoto is a normal high school student and a hardcore RPG player. However, "normal" goes out the window when his whole class is involved in a bus crash and whisked away to another world!

Powerful gods rule this strange new land of magic and monsters, and every newcomer is blessed with strong stats and unique skills. Well, not quite. Makoto's stats turn out to be pathetic, and his skills are super weak compared to his classmates'...he's even stuck as an apprentice mage. Worse still, he's given only ten years to live!

Luckily, Makoto soon meets a minor goddess named Noah, who appears in his dreams and asks him to become her first believer. With the help of Noah's blessings and a divine weapon, Makoto seeks to become strong enough to rescue his goddess from the dungeon where she's been trapped. By training hard and using his weak skills in unorthodox ways, Makoto proves that, even when playing on hardcore difficulty, an RPG player always makes it to the end!

This is the premise of the webnovel and the light novel—Full Clearing Another World under a Goddess with Zero Believers.

Webnovel Version

Takatsuki Makoto is the protagonist of this story. He is, overall, a reasonable teenager, who is a gamer. He may be a bit more clever than most and he has a few quirks as well. He is not exactly a loner, he is just a bit awkward. He wants to be a hero, who fights for justice and saves the world.

After being transmigrated to another world, the protagonist finds himself in a temple, where the transmigrated beings have to go through a phase of training which will help them survive in this world. And, of course, because of the iron rule that the protagonist has to be an underdog, he turns out to be the weakest one.

However, by virtue of his gamer mentality, the protagonist takes his misfortune as hardmode game difficulty and continues to push forward. He learns what he can, and utilizes whatever method that is available to him.

But, things don't stay that way for long. After becoming a believer of the Goddess Noah, his stats begin to improve at breakneck speed like it is for most protagonists. I must agree that the protagonist himself plays a great part in his rise, but there's a good amount of plot armor at play as well. But, can't really call that a problem. I mean, what is a fantasy webnovel without the plot armor?

Makoto is pretty dense, but becomes super dense after getting the skill RPG Player and Clear Mind. RPG Player lets the user experience the world from a third person perspective. And, Clear Mind helps him stay calm in life threatening situations. That's also why mental spells don't affect him. He also enjoys the thrill and seems more like an adrenaline junkie with how he seeks out danger himself. He's practically living his life as if he's playing an RPG game.

He becomes overpowered after becoming a Spirit User and obtaining the Destiny, Transformation and Synchronization Magic. He practically turns into a weapon of mass destruction.

He has an almost fanatical level of faith in the goddess. But, don't misunderstand, he doesn't exactly love her. He is just servile towards her to an extreme level. Some people may think of the Goddess Noah as a love interest, but it's just a platonic relation as far as I can see.

The character-interactions are generally good, though they become a bit repetitive by the end of the story.

The side characters are also quite unique in their attitude towards the protagonist. Yes, there are some people who make fun of him for being weak, but no one goes out of their way to bully him, like we see in other novels. The protagonist does feel a bit sour about it, but it isn't at the level where he feels the need to think of them as enemies and take revenge. Also, he has proper friends who look out for him. Most of his classmates are quite reasonable.

The plot of the story has well-defined arcs, with properly foreshadowed twists and a couple of really interesting developments. The pacing of the story is great at the beginning, though it gets progressively worse in the later arcs. Though it never really gets bad, it just gets kind of annoying because of all the cheesy comedy.

Cons

Now for the cons. In fact, I have many problems with this light novel.

The first one being, why did the author decide to make the protagonist a static character, not allowed to grow in any way by the plot? While almost all of his classmates were getting at least some amount of character developments. He starts out as a socially awkward virgin who can't read the mood and gets pushed around by all the women around him. He is extremely dense and indecisive when it comes to relationships and he remains that way even after several years of adventuring and becoming so overpowered that he is able to fight with the strongest of enemies, even demigods. His herbivore personality sometimes makes it painful to keep reading his interactions with other characters.

The second one is the author's insistence on keeping the protagonist a virgin, while most of his other classmates were allowed to have sex. I would have no trouble at all if all the characters in this novel were asexual, but they are far from that.

For example, the hero of light, who is a childhood friend of the protagonist, is treated as a stud horse, which he agrees to by the way. He marries more than 20 women and spends a night with a different woman each night.

I don't appreciate the author deliberately forcing the protagonist to stay as a virgin, even though there are girls practically throwing themselves at him. To make matters worse the protagonist is a closet pervert. He'll stare, touch boobs and sometimes kiss, unintentionally. But, he ends up getting cock blocked in some way or another. This becomes a running joke throughout the entire novel. I know that the author is doing this because they think it's good comedy. But it's really not that funny. At one point it becomes a constant stream of the author just blue balling the protagonist every chance they get. It's like they are going out of their way to forcefully add unnecessary comedy into the plot. I don't find it funny when the author forces the plot. It disrupts the overall immersion of the story. Anyways, as I've said before, I will never get the Japanese sense of humor.

My third problem is the over-inflated harem. There are girls falling for him left and right, but as he is extremely dense, he doesn't notice their blatant show of affection and aggressive sexual advances. Even if they tell him straight to his face that they love him he neither accepts nor rejects them. He just ignores the entire thing, or the author just forcefully makes it that way. All this just ends up adding unnecessary drama into the story.

The romantic interactions between the protagonist and the love interests may be quite well-written, but unfortunately they ultimately lead to nowhere, at least during the entire main story. The two starting love interests have it the worst, as after a time-skip arc, they stop being characters with their own motivations and become reduced to mere comedy punchlines. I think at some point they become closer to each other more than they are with the protagonist. And, it's more or less the same for the rest of the love interests. And yes, the author also introduces a trap character and he is considered a semi-love interest. You just have to take that with a grain of salt.

Most importantly, the personality of most of the love interests are far from being delightful. I feel that the protagonist would fare better alone playing his RPG games than having them as his life partners. Spending days with them would be exhausting. This is the first story that managed to make me feel this way about the love interests of a novel. I guess that is an achievement in itself.

Honestly, I feel that the harem is totally unnecessary. It has more demerits for this story than merits.

My fourth problem is with the story arc about time travel. It's kind of foreshadowed from the start that the protagonist might have some prior connections with the various kingdoms and important characters in the otherworld. Later in the story it becomes clear when the protagonist has to travel to the past in order to save the world. Now, that is where the confusion begins.

It's revealed that after saving the world, the protagonist has been in cryo-sleep the entire time, even before the event where he was summoned from to the other world. So, that would mean that there were always two Takatsuki Makoto present in the same timeline.

So that creates a question: Is the storyline after the time travel arc an alternate time-line? If the history of the world had changed so much, then what happened to the past storyline?

For example, if the Moon country after the time travel arc is developed by the Furiae, then what happened to the past Moon country before the arc? Did the storyline just vanish?

Then wouldn't that make the time travel arc impossible and impractical?

The author doesn't explain a thing and it becomes very confusing. They don't seem to have any concept of the Butterfly Effect.

The fifth problem is the inconsistency in the mood of the story. The story seemingly has a serious and dark premise, as it tries to paint the horrors of dungeons through frequent deaths. Yet the author throws around comedy punchlines at every chance they get. It sometimes seems really serious, but the vibe is ruined through the constant use of cheesy comedy. It would be alright if he was skilled enough to create a balance between the two, but unfortunately he fails to do that, resulting in severe inconsistencies in the overall mood of the story.

There is not much world building as the story mainly focuses on the protagonist—the things he does and the places he goes to. Initially it seems like this is a world with its own set of metaphysics and religions, and the various goddesses are responsible for maintaining it. However, it's later revealed that the goddesses are actually responsible for governing the entire universe, parallel universes, and branching timelines. Now it seems that they were far greater than we had initially thought, yet why are they having so much trouble with this one tiny conflict on this one tiny world. Furthermore, despite them all being millions of years old, they all act like immature teenagers.

Last but not least, there are no details of the power levels of the characters. And their leveling system is not clearly explained.

I kind of feel like that the author is probably just trying out different things and playing with a few ideas. I hope the best of them end up in the light novel version.

To sum up, this is a classic example of a webnovel with a pretty good beginning, going a bit stale at the end.

If the author wants to make the Light Novel version a bit more readable then they have a lot of work to do. It can't be fixed with just some small changes.

Light Novel Version

As of volume 4, there haven't been that many differences from the webnovel version. If I had to say, then the most major change is the author introduces the love interest Furiae a bit later than the webnovel version.

I also want to see how the author handles the time travel problem.