Young swordsman Alvin has put together a near-perfect adventuring team with his best friend Renka and the adorable priestess Milis. Things are going pretty well, until they recruit a wizard named Shinji. Now they're on the road to becoming the best team ever! There's just one catch--little does Alvin know, but Shinji is quite the Casanova, and he's not just tangled up in his teammates' sheets. He's finding his way into the beds of companions and enemies alike! Will Alvin remain blissfully unaware of Shinji's lecherous ways or is the steamy truth destined to come out?

The Cuckolding Wizard’s Adventure has story by MAZIKARI and art by MASAHIRO ITOSUGI. English translation is done by Wesley Bridges with an adaptation by Annie Bowers and lettering by mono. Published by Seven Seas Entertainment (December 2, 2025). Rated M.

Content Warning: Sexual assault

Lucas DeRuyter
Rating:

The Cuckolding Wizard’s Adventure really cannot figure out its tone or its relationship with infidelity. Just as I thought it was about to be a more considered, if still somewhat surface level, exploration of how sexual relationships outside of a main partnership can benefit all involved, the titular cuckolding wizard busts out a horny hypnosis spell and this manga loses whatever chance it had to say something meaningful. That leaves this work feeling deeply sophomoric, as it's clearly informed by longstanding social sentiments around infidelity — and the presence of “cuckolding” rather than “NTR” in the title makes it feel like it's explicitly trying to play into the dynamic's recent rise in American culture — but it's not actually saying anything. The end result is an exercise that's only masturbatory as an edgelord fantasy, rather than a sexual one.

The basic plot of The Cuckolding Wizard’s Adventure is that a capable, but secret dirtbag wizard named Shinji joins a fairly novice adventuring party where the preexisting members are all childhood friends. While he lays the groundwork for a relationship with the party's ranger and big sister figure, Renka, most of the sex that actually takes place in this work is between Shinji and Charlotta, the innkeeper's daughter. Charlotta's motivation for hooking up with Shinji comes from her anxiety over not being sexually experienced enough for her partner Morse, as well as not being sexually fulfilled by him. Just when I think this work is about to say something about what can inspire a person to have sex outside of their monogamous relationship, Shinji hits Charlotta with his non-consent macguffin and the most interesting part of these kinds of stories is completely undone.

To add insult to injury, the main non-smutty story beat of the first volume of The Cuckolding Wizard’s Adventure is a retread of the opening of Goblin Slayer. The main party enters a dungeon, finds a bunch of women being sexually assaulted by goblins, then has to kill those goblins in an excessively gory fashion to save them. Beyond being a deeply gross depiction of sexual assault, this blatant copying of Goblin Slayer's infamous opening makes this work feel redundant and unnecessary. There's nothing here that hasn't been done better elsewhere.

As for the more technical aspects of this work, either the writing or translation is strange. At one point the work makes clear that this new party has risen from “low-intermediate to mid-intermediate” in rank, and there has to be a better way to communicate that growth than dividing a category like intermediate into further sub-sections. Intermediate means middle! Something can't be high, or low, or middle middle! That's a ridiculous categorization.

As for the art, it has a sketchier quality that's maybe not the best suited for erotic illustrations where facial expressions and small details can make a big difference. However, it is evocative of a common look in turn of the century anime and manga and that engenders a fondness in me. Also, while sound effects are not replaced with their English equivalent, those translations are added to the page in an appropriate font, rather than in just a notation.

In brief, there's better, far more informed and interesting, NTR hentai out there than The Cuckolding Wizard’s Adventure and folks are better off reading those works.

Bolts
Rating:

It's been a while since I followed a protagonist that was this blatant of an asshole. There are definitely people out there that really want to be the protagonist of this story, someone who is cold and calculating just for the sake of emotionally manipulating people to get in their pants. I am particularly not a big fan of cheating, which is why NTR has always been a weird genre for me to explore lately. This one in particular at least makes it very clear that our protagonist is not exactly somebody that we should root for. The intrigue lies more in how exactly he'll be able to go about his conquest of the girls that he has targeted, one of which is already in a relationship, and what that means for the dynamic of the party that he has wormed his way into.

This is a story that is going for the long haul because the volume doesn't even really end with any definitively new conquest. In fact, the book needed to add a side girl that our protagonist can bang just for the sake of exposing he is an asshole that gets off on stealing girls that belong to other people. If that character wasn't there, there wouldn't really be any sex scenes in this book which I find very funny. This is a specific type of self insert character, especially when it's clear that he's not taking these girls against their will. He is slowly manipulating and subtly influencing them in order to steer them in a particular direction that just happens to be his pants. Dude is framed like some kind of demon lord but in some cases, all he is doing is just analyzing the wants and needs of a particular girl so he can hone in on exactly what that person might be missing from their lives. It would almost come off as caring.

It's a very fascinating story that really wants the conquest to feel worth it from both a physical and emotional standpoint. Physically the few sex scenes that the book has are titillating, even though I'm not a big fan of how they are framed. This does get made up for in the dialogue and the emotional buildup that goes into them. This might be a similar setup to what goes on in other NTR stories but there's a lot more layers and details to it. There's a part of me that's curious about what the next volume will be about, just how badly everything is going to fall apart when things go wrong and how the girls might change as a result. I'm fascinated by this story even if I don't particularly like it, so take that as you will.