Tags: Adventure, Fantasy, Comedy, Romance, Drama, Slice of Life, Shoujo/Josei, Villainess

Third Time’s the Charm or in This Case Seventh Time’s the Charm!

Another day, another villainess novel to review, although this one really does stretch the meaning of villainess with her supposedly villainous actions only mentioned in a single sentence. 7th Time Loop follows a tried and true formula within the female fantasy genre starting straight off at the broken engagement scene, only for Rishe, this definitely isn’t her first one.

At the start of the story, Rishe has already led six different lives, all of which start at the end of her engagement and end on her twentieth year as war rages throughout the continent. For her seventh life, using all her knowledge accumulated over the previous six, she has a master plan to live a free and easy-going life determined to make it past twenty. However, her worst enemy from her previous lives has put a spanner in the works. Prince Arnold, a rumoured ruthless man, has asked for her hand in marriage. Seemingly a fate worse than death at first, marrying him will provide her with an opportunity to stop the future war at the source and perhaps even live a happy married life by his side.

Whilst the set-up of restarting from a broken engagement to save their life from doom is a rather played-out trope at this point, it is genuinely elevated by an interesting and intelligent protagonist. As a result of her previous lives, Rishe has numerous useful and unusual skills that help her get ahead in this life, from her apothecary skills of healing the sick to top-tier business acumen to land deals with up-and-coming international companies. It’s these types of skills that not only endear people of the setting to her but also to the reader as well.

Other than Rishe, both of the princes’ have pretty interesting characters and their dynamics with one another can come off as endearing by the end of the volume. Prince Theodore is the standout of the novel thus far given his tsundere nature and his overwhelming need to help people in worse circumstances than him even if he’s playing the antagonist of the volume. It’s too early so far to give my opinion of Prince Arnold as we don’t get to know too much about him by the end of the first novel aside from the fact that he’s not as cruel as the rumours would have you believe.

Given such great characters, it’s a shame that the plot of the volume itself doesn’t quite live up to the standard and comes over as underwhelming. It takes quite a while for the plot to actually get moving into the supposed schemes that the series is known for. Prince Theodore’s antagonistic scheme only really plays out within the last 50 pages of the volume and wasn’t exactly the most complex of problems to solve and whilst the rest of the story plot isn’t bad, it doesn’t blow you away either and I had a hard time resonating with it a lot of the time. The story just didn’t strike me with the good old “you must read this” and the “I can’t wait to read what happens next,” something I find to be crucial to this type of genre.

Overall, the story of the time-looping villainess has some great characters that have some pretty unique dynamics within the genre, however, they feel under-utilised given the general lack of interesting plot that’s meant to keep you guessing as to Prince Arnold’s motives and the potential bad actors surrounding the eventual future war throughout the continent. I might give the second volume another chance though since the end of the volume revealed some intriguing behind-the-scenes scheming between Arnold and Oliver.