Welcome to Hell!WELCOME TO HELL!

A novel I’m enjoying a lot, enough so that I considering MTL’ing the rest.
Welcome to Hell, is not, in fact, set in Hell. There’s no demons to be seen here (so far). It is, however, a reincarnation story in which the MC is reborn as a monster in another world
Spoiler——
(a scorpion, which is refreshing!)

and has to serve out his ‘sentence’ given to him from Hell.
The novel combines perspectives from different characters to build the world on several different levels, from very on-the-ground and restricted understanding from our MC, to greater politics and movements from other characters. I’m not usually a fan of these kind of developments and use of perspective, but I always found the perspective was focused back on MC (which was more interesting to me!) before I got bored.
MC is a little bland personality wise, a real neutral-guy character. Kill the bad guys, won’t always save everyone because he’s practical, ect. It’s a little underwhelming to be honest, but I’m willing to overlook it as I’m starting to see some personality development in the later chapters.
Fight scenes were written incredibly well. Well scripted and I was able to visualise it very clearly as I read. Fantasy story fights on here often fall into the trap of characters yelling spell names at each other and limited descriptions such as ‘I dodged the strike then attacked.’
Welcome to Hell!’ does a great job of painting environments and utilising said environments in its action. Combat is pretty brutal and powering scaling is a done pretty satisfyingly, since everything relies on actual skill and not “Skills” or “Levels”.
World building, especially religion had me eye-rolling at the beginning where
Spoiler——
one of the main antagonistic forces is a cult believing in a single ‘superior’ god

For reincarnated as a monster fans, you’ll find this series fairly satisfying although suffering from the usual trope
Spoiler——
of MC eventually getting himself a human form. In this case, it’s still pretty alien though, and it wasn’t by choice.

At the time of this review, the series is still ongoing on Syosetsu, with a bunch in the backlog to be translated (about ~150 chapters) so I’m looking forward to where this is going. <