Reincarnated as the Piggy Duke: This Time I'm Gonna Tell Her How I Feel! - Reviews

There are a lot of isekai stories. This is by no means the worst, but it's also nowhere near the best. It's okay. It's probably worth reading, especially if you're just addicted to the genre itself. My biggest complaints are the character's name (Slow) and the fact that fe literally oinks.

An anime-watcher is reincarnated into the body of an anime character, named Slow, who is a self-entitled, fat jerk. But there are some nuances below the surface which made this character the most popular among anime viewers, and knowing these hidden details and also knowing how the anime ends badly for Slow, the reincarnated soul decides to try to improve femself/Slow. Losing weight is one of the primary goals, but fe also works to try to fix feir horrid reputation by being nice and helping people out. Beyond this daily-life type of stuff, there have also been two larger storylines so far, each introduced by the headmaster calling Slow into feir office. The first one involved tracking down a spy in the school (ch. 6-10) and the second one involves a selection competition to choose a personal guard for the princess (ch. 13-current). During both of these, fe uses incomplete knowledge based on the anime storyline to try to resolve problems. At the very least, they don't just have fem know all the answers because of anime or something. And they play up that the storylines might be diverging as well, so fe might not be able to completely predict what's going to happen.

[Reviewed at chapter 19]

The story loves to spend its sweet time on the most inane of events and I couldn't follow the progression. Sometimes, key characters are introduced in such a throwaway manner that their importance isn't evident until much later on, which seems ridiculous because you want your reader to root for these people. Sometimes, they spend so much time establishing a plot point in multiple panels but it's clearly unnecessary. They only want to hype up how cool or special or unique the ML is, which isn't necessarily a bad thing when done well.

I have little patience with stories that run along the same vein as this one so I'm giving up on it.

One good thing that I did enjoy is the fact that they didn't make the main character lose weight in 5 chapters or less. The author actually put obstacles that the ML had to clear with his own power and not because he lost weight and automatically gained the respect of his peers. For that, I add +1 to my character rating.

Dropped at Chapter 13.

[Completed]

This one was a bit of a mixed-bag. A disappointment even, because it actually had decent potential and did some things a bit differently to other manga in this genre, unfortunately, it drops the ball in a few places which made it an annoying read (for me), that I begrudgingly completed.

First, the good bits:

• ML doesn't lose weight immediately, unlike other manga/manhua of it's type, and he sticks mostly true to his character's archetype
• Even his willingness to change is shown gradually and realistically - for instance, he's tempted to cheat on his diet on several occasions, but still, he puts in real effort and struggles with his weight loss.
• ML is strong, sometimes even a bit OP, but isn't ridiculously OP
• No annoying/shallow villains who underestimate the ML.
• The story is actually completed (for now anyway), which is nice because you don't get left out on a cliffhanger.

Now the bad bits:

• Some of the arcs are long and drawn out, full of fluff dialogue - which is downright boring and annoying to read
• After the long and boring bits, the story sort of comes to an abrupt/rushed ending. Well, there's still room for a continuation and they haven't tied up all the loose ends, so I hope the author picks this up again sometime, but for now, the ending felt a bit underwhelming - I would've loved to see a proper ending.

Overall, it wasn't a bad read for sure, but there are parts which felt really slow and dragged on unnecessarily, and personally, I wouldn't want to read this manga again in the future (I would read a second part though, if it came out).

Would I recommend it? Probably, if you're into this genre. But maybe not at the top of your list, put it somewhere in the middle I reckon, after you've read all the good ones.