The biggest shocker of A Wild Last Boss Appeared! is that it won a major award. In the author's note, Firehead expresses their surprise that this story they serialized on an amateur web novel site got a book deal—and a manga and anime after that. Believe me, I'm just as surprised. In such a crowded publishing field, it's astounding which stories get lauded while others get buried. Conceptually, I was on board with the gender bender premise of A Wild Last Boss Appeared! But I found it lacking when it came down to the execution.

Generally, this novel felt like a first draft. The hero started playing Exgate Online because “I kind of felt like it,” which feels like a huge understatement for a player who created Lufas: a character so powered up, other players call her “a wild last boss.” Conveniently, the world of Exgate Online is integrated with an amateur novelization website (much like the one this book was published on), so players are forever weaving their characters' exploits into the game's overarching story. Like the narrator's involvement in the game at all, the plot's central conflict also occurs just for kicks: Lufas and several other maxed-level characters play-acted an event in which Lufas happened to play the villain and the other players defeated her as heroes. Next thing our nameless MC realized, he was transported into the Exgate world—as Lufas herself!

From this point in my review, I'll refer to the MC as Lufas. But Lufas never misses an opportunity to remind us that on the inside, she's “spiritually a man.” I assumed this would lead to some interesting self-exploration. We almost get there when Lufas observes “ever since I became a woman, I stopped being interested [women],” as if lesbians don't exist, and later wonders “will I think that way about men now?” before immediately revealing the question as a joke to trick the reader. Lufas struggles to adjust to her female body (“I feel like I'm missing something between my legs”) but does not seek out gender affirmation in her clothing or demeanor. Though she's no longer capable of feeling desire for women or men, she revels in attracting both: “It's unfair how good I look without even any makeup… I make an idol after being photoshopped look plain.” Even though Lufas is impressed by her own looks, she explains that according to the customs of her mythical race, the Heaven-Winged, she's hideous because she has black wings instead of white; meanwhile, a “fatass uggo with acne… wearing an anime girl t-shirt would be considered a hot guy if he had pure-white wings." I'll avoid digging too deeply into that, but I'll say this: the same way Lufas is completely incurious regarding her changed gender, she is also not actually subverting beauty standards.

Even in the body of a beautiful (or is it hideous?) woman, Lufas cannot overcome her seething resentment toward women and couples. When she sees a middle-aged man with a young-looking elf girl she thinks, “In other words, he gets to have an eternally beautiful lover. Go explode.” In the most eyebrow-raising scene of the book, Lufas rescues several apparently mute women who have been kidnapped by orcs. They don't have any speaking lines and instead of asking the women if they'd been violated, Lufas's assistant Dina (more on her in a minute) inspects their private parts to ensure “nothing was done to them.” (Lufas refrains since she identifies as a man, though she no longer feels any attraction to women.) After an explanation that orcs need to woo the women they kidnap so they'll stick around and raise their babies, Lufas sides more with the orcs: “In the end, this game is all about faces, you orcs… No matter how gentlemanly you are or how gallantly you act, you'll never win against some hot guy that's just standing there.” The book is filled with asides about romantic unfairness and the fickleness of women. "It's a lot of work, trying to keep women happy,” Lufas reflects. This twisted view of women makes Lufas far less likeable.

Lufas's first task is acquiring a convenient NPC assistant, Dina. Apparently during her IRL gamer days, she designed a piece of background furniture to look like a cute girl; now Dina has a speaking role and hurt feelings about being just a decoration. (There is a metaphor at play here, and it's not very subtle.) Dina serves as a sort of travel agent, explaining how Lufas can join the adventurer's guild and forge documents to enter cities, while Lufas provides the brawn. And just in case you doubted how much strength Lufas brings to the table, never fear; there are formulas and stats lists that take up entire pages. (Lufas is level 1000, by the way.) Lufas frequently activates an ability called “Observing Eye” to list characters' HP, Agility, Luck, and maybe 15 other meaningless numbers besides. “A golem's strength depended on the creator's class level, the formula being: [character's overall level/2 + class level] with any fractions being ignored,” she explains. She also narrates her stat changes in real time: “as for my HP, I ate the other pieces of orc fillet, and now my HP is at 336100.” What's all this math doing here? I would be better off reading a Dungeons & Dragons manual.

My favorite part of the book was when Lufas and Dina traveled to a Venetian city full of canals and a magical monorail. Even cooler, the “water” in the canal is actually an enormous water elemental capable of defending the city. I felt like I could visualize the vibrance of this unique settlement. Generally, the book relies on fantasy world staples like orcs, elves, and the Devil King (which is at least slightly different from the Demon King). I thought it was a little strange that Lufas both speaks to and consumes orcs—it's hard to tell what the difference between a humanoid race and a monster is, exactly—but that's hardly original to this story. Neither is the conceit at the center: Lufas's entire goal is to save the world, but she is still universally reviled (yes, even 200 years after her death). I've seen this antihero plot before.

I don't always like the content of J-Novel Club books but I continue to read them because they never fail to produce smooth, well-translated prose. Until this book, it seems. A Wild Last Boss Appeared! is full of unnatural passive voice sentences (“the magic barrage unleashed by them”), bizarre repetition of phrases (“loosen up my speech a little but really only a little”), and the occasional head scratcher—when a water elemental has a type advantage over a fire elemental, the narrator observes “the relationship of their elements was really big.” Stranger still is that this light novel's translator, Kevin Chen, has previously produced excellent work with his translations of Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill and Knight's & Magic. Meanwhile this book is so strangely composed, there's a Reddit thread questioning if J-Novel Club used machine translation to produce it. (No, it did not). J-Novel Club did not respond to my request for comment before publication time, so I'll have to stick with my own theory: this is not an error, but the result of a translation that was far too faithful to a clunker of an original work.