Outer Ragna: Volume 1

I ended up dropping it a few chapters in. The constant POV switch between the real-world MC and Kuroi gave me tonal whiplash and made it hard to get into. This story would have been much better if it focused entirely on Kuroi, and instead just implied that she's being controlled by a higher power (even keeping it as a guy playing a videogame in another world). The potential for that would be greater I think, because the concept of a character becoming a devout Apostle while she's a character in a game would be really interesting. My eyes glazed over every time it swapped back to the MC explaining game mechanics and hamming it up for his livestream audience, because it would come right after Kuroi killed a bunch of monsters or whatever.

Finally, another factor that led to me dropping it is that the writer has a very slow release schedule. Volume 2 came out all the way back in 2020, and he has kids and it's not even clear if he's still writing at a regular pace. I'm not gonna wait years for another volume of a series I'm only vaguely interested in.

The art is top notch, though.