I get what Hell Mode is going for by having its protagonist—a 35-year-old gamer named Kenichi, who’s renamed Allen upon his waking up in this new world—reincarnated into this generic RPG world as a baby. Born into this new world, our protagonist doesn’t have to grapple as hard, if at all, with the logistical difficulties that come with being overnight shipped into a new world—all with the bonus of getting to up his stats as quickly as possible. In theory, going about a reincarnation story in this way makes a lot of sense. In practice, however, it results in an utterly exhausting and repetitive story.

Well, maybe I’m giving this plot device a bit too much credit. After all, you could shave more than a few pages out of each volume of Hell Mode if you took out the glorified fluff that is the fully detailed spread of Allen’s stats, EXP count, and abilities every time he goes to review them—which he does just regularly enough to make you wonder if author Hamuo is just desperate to hit a certain word count. As we learned in the first volume, Allen has to grind a lot longer and harder to boost his stats and levels. But with his being a baby and toddler for most of that volume, this meant that things moved at—well, a crawl. Even with a 30-something-year-old brain, you can only do so much for your skills in an infant body (alas, not that it stopped Allen’s efforts, of course). The good news is, Allen’s no longer a baby in these two volumes—so level-ups do happen much faster, and he can actually do and accomplish major things. The bad news is that doesn’t necessarily mean that Hell Mode’s any better for it.

In case you didn’t pick up on it, in a word, Hell Mode has thus far been tedious. It takes a while before you can even catch a faint glimpse of a story, has difficulty setting a good pace for itself, and regularly goes into unnecessary, granular levels of detail about Allen’s level grinding, stats, and other minutiae related to it—to the extent that entire chapters, plural, honestly could’ve (and frankly, should’ve) been reduced to a paragraph or two without losing anything meaningful. If anything, it probably would’ve helped keep things moving. Making things worse, it’s not until the end of volume two that you can even see the contours of a story in Hell Mode—let alone before the gears actually start moving in volume three. But even when that happens, that doesn’t inherently make things much better.

There’s a slight whiff of political intrigue in the background at times, and there are a few major events, but bogged down by the writing style, how long it takes to arrive at anything more substantial, and Allen’s lack of any strong feelings or a personality (more on that shortly), none of them feel like they’re really given the gravity they could’ve otherwise had. Even the biggest, most pivotal moments have a weird, muted quality to them that’s pretty pervasive throughout the whole series. Perhaps none of this would be an issue if Hell Mode were actually exciting or gave us a fresh take on the “I’ve been isekai’d into an RPG-type world” formula. But alas, as demonstrated by these two volumes, it’s apparently content to stay uninspired, monotonous, and over-explained by Allen’s incessant inner monologuing about his stats and how much EXP he needs.

And because things can somehow get even worse, Allen has no discernible personality beyond being hardcore about leveling up in video games, and such is the extent of this that I honestly wonder if that was intentional—as though he was an attempt at something akin to a single-minded battle shonen protagonist, except Hamuo forgot that single-minded doesn’t necessarily mean aggressively plain. Allen wants to level up in Hell Mode for the sake of leveling up in Hell Mode, but beyond that? He’s nothing. Were he not the protagonist, he’d be the most forgettable character in the series. Which isn’t to say the rest of the cast is much better, just that most of the main characters usually at least have one personality trait (and nothing but that; one-note personalities are pretty common in Hell Mode), which is one more than he does. Three volumes in, and I still feel like I know nothing about him because we’ve barely learned anything about him. It makes one wonder: Is he boring because we’ve learned nothing about him, or have we learned nothing about him because he’s boring and there’s nothing to learn? I’ve tasted boiled, unseasoned potatoes with more flavor than Allen.

As I’m writing this review, an anime adaptation of Hell Mode is going to be premiering very soon. It’s not hard to see how that anime could potentially solve the biggest problem being suffered by its source material: by removing the excessive detail into all things stats and level grinding—perhaps by reducing most of it to seconds-long montages—that would probably make Hell Mode much easier to stomach. But admittedly, even if the anime were to do that (and that’s already a big “if”), I’m not entirely sure that’d be enough to fix Hell Mode. It would make it considerably better, sure, but even beyond its pacing issues, you’re not exactly left with a particularly fun, interesting, or unique protagonist or story. As it stands, the Hell Mode light novels are a bland story told in a fatiguing way. But if it plays its cards right, the anime has the potential to simply be a bland story.