The Fall 2022 Manga Guide

I Kept Pressing the 100-Million-Year Button and Came Out on Top

What's It About? 

Allen gets such poor grades at Grand Swordcraft Academy that his fellow students have dubbed him the “Reject Swordsman.” But one day, he is granted a mysterious button that, when pressed, will give him one hundred million years to train in an alternate reality. With an ungodly amount of practice under his belt, the world is about to see what this underachiever can really do!

I Kept Pressing the 100-Million-Year Button and Came Out on Top is based on the light novel series by Syuichi Tsukishima (story) and Mokyu (art). The manga is drawn by Yutaro Shido, with English translation by Luke Hutton and lettering by Arbash Mughal, and Yen Press will release its first volume both digitally and physically on October 18.

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Is It Worth Reading?

MrAJCosplay

Rating:

I Kept Pressing the 100 Million Year Button is a story that has some really interesting ideas that it likes to undercut at a moment's notice. I like the idea of a story about how hard work can overcome talent if given enough time, as well as one that explores the potential benefits and trade-offs of being a self-taught practitioner. Unfortunately, the book never really sticks to any of its ideas for more than a chapter at a time before it introduces a new idea for the sake of expanding a plotline that is supposedly growing in the background. It's tricky, because every time I think the manga is going to do something interesting with its premise, that moment is over and never brought up again. For example, you'd think that training for 100 million years in complete isolation would completely screw up a person mentally, but that's only lightly touched upon.

Credit where its due, 100-Million-Year Button does manage to keep me on my toes with all of these constant shifts in direction, and when you take a step back, it's very easy to piece together the missing bits on your own. However, it's hard to say if the book is rushing things because it trusts the readers to figure stuff out on their own, or if it's hoping that those unexplored threads will just fade away unnoticed. Maybe I'd be more inclined to go with the flow if the manga's presentation was a little more engaging. While some of the spreads are very nice, for a manga about sword combat, there isn't a lot in the way of choreography. There's a lot of setup behind some of the flashier moves, but not much else outside of that. Overall, there are a lot of interesting ideas present here, but unless some of the fat is trimmed, I don't think this book is one that deserves your attention.