Hero Without Class Vol. 1

A Hero Without Class is the manga adaptation of the visual novel by Kuzo Shichio and Ueda Yumehoto. Set in a fantasy land where every 10 year old is blessed by the Goddess with skills, only the son of a legendary couple (a sword maiden and her mage husband), Arel, is seemingly abandoned by the Goddess and granted no skills on the day of his blessing. This doesn't seem to bother him much, given that he's trained against his skilled mother for most of his life and can still easily outfight those granted skills. He's ultimately challenged by Reiner, the child of the village security chief Evans. Though he loses his first match against the youth, he understands his mistake and trains doggedly for a rematch. When the day comes, he bests his rival and leaves Reiner on his knees. Only later does he discover that Reiner has left for Bresgia, the city of swords, in order to hone his skills, and ultimately, five years later, Arel takes the same path.

Arriving in the city, he's approached by a young woman named Lilia who pesters him to join her guild, Dragon Fang. However it's doing poorly and Arel turns her down, looking for better guilds to join. None of them are interested due to his lack of class, and so opportunistic Lilia reappears to lure him in, though tries to back out like the others when she knows Arel's situation. In a masterclass of coincidence it turns out that Dragon Fang is the guild Arel's mother was a member of, and who should also be a member but childhood rival Reiner. In a further plot twist, Reiner is actually a tomboy who has developed into a beautiful young woman.

All this happenstance could come off as trite, but it does serve to keep the cast light and the story focussed. Where it does suffer a little is in the time skips - they aren't very well signposted and I had to go back and try to figure out how much time had passed between each of the major encounters, especially the early duels between Arel and Reiner. 

So we have our setting and our mission - to regain the glory of Dragon Fang and rebuild the guild! Their first stop is a tournament, which in a stroke of storytelling brevity that Dragon Ball can only envy, ends in several pages with Arel single-handedly besting a bunch of A-list swordsmen. It's almost comedically brief and I can't decide if this is deliberate for comedic effect or not. In one sense, we get through a tournament arc in possibly the fastest time ever, but the downside is that we don't spend time with any meaningful antagonists and by book's end, the team are planning a dungeon crawl for training ahead of the Sword God Tournament.

I'm in two minds about Hero Without Class. I really like the characters, though they're not particularly unique. Lilia's mind to marry Arel to secure the guild's future makes his rejection of her less distressing because we know she's not chasing him for anything other than practical reasons. It makes the comedy funny rather than cruel, so that's a big plus for me. Arel isn't flustered by women, another big plus that our lead can control himself and not act foolish because there are breasts nearby. His no-nonsense approach to combat is in line with his focus on training, so everything about his character is consistent and admirable. Reiner is a typical tsundere, but hopefully we'll see her come into her own, because as things stand Lilia only really needs Arel. There needs to be a genuine skill gap for her to fill without being superfluous. 

On the other hand, avoiding tropes by simply skipping situations altogether, or making them so brief that they don't have time to develop into anything memorable, is a risky strategy. Yes, it removes the need for endless pages of combat and repeating other manga, but it also takes away some of the meat from the bone. This is a very fine line and I hope the author can create some situations and enemies of genuine interest. So far the charm of the ensemble is carrying it, but I'd like to see more use made of Reiner and a way to show the characters complimenting each other to create a genuine team.

Volume 1 is always early days, I'm intrigued to see more and I have faith that One Peace Books generally pick strong series to bring to the West (they haven't let me down yet), so I'll be keeping an eye out for volume 2. Let's see what lies in wait for Arel and company.