The Otherworlder Exploring the Dungeon, Vol. 1 manga adapts the beginning of the light novel series of the same name. In this isekai title, a young man is hired to travel to another world and decides to do it for money. What should have been a job with proper planning becomes a mess the protagonist has to handle alone.
Souya is a young man facing financial difficulties due to paying for his sister’s treatment. One day he receives a job proposition: going to another world as part of an exploration team. With enough money to guarantee his sister’s welfare, he has no qualms about this dangerous job.
Though he has little time to prepare himself, there’s a team to back him up and cutting-edge technological tools at his disposal. Or at least there should have been, but once he gets to this other world, he finds himself in a dire situation. None of the other expedition members are present, and only one of the support robots is still working.
Alone in this place and with no means of requesting reinforcements, he will have to be cunning to survive and find a way to fulfill his mission: diving into the Tower of Legions and reaching the fifty-sixth layer of this dungeon. The circumstances behind all this are suspicious, but volume 1 diverts our attention to him getting to know the other world and the twists of his first interactions before dungeon exploration.
As a Heim (a human from the other world), he becomes unable to register himself in the adventurer’s guild for a single reason: he doesn’t have the blessing of any god. As a world with a myriad of deities, this is essential for him to explore the Tower. His initial search fails, which is when the series starts to throw a few twists.
One of the curious sides of this first volume of The Otherworlder Exploring the Dungeon is how it tries to sell the protagonist as someone who can act cool under pressure. At the same time, his attitude also has an understated fierceness that shows up during the climax scenes of the volume as he makes unexpected actions as payback to some people.
While it’s an interesting story overall, most of the setup feels unconvincing and less detailed than necessary to make it seem like a living world. The narrative having a few twists isn’t enough to make it feel different from the average isekai flair, and the story sometimes feels convenient and lacks details.
The same goes for the artwork, with characters frequently looking like their facial proportions are slightly incorrect. A few scenes, such as the appearance of an enormous monster in the dungeon and the subsequent panels of the adventurers facing them, look relatively impressive, but this is the exception in the whole volume.
The Otherworlder Exploring the Dungeon, Vol. 1, gives us a first look into a world of magic and gods the protagonist will have to live in for his mission. While the volume offers a few surprises here and there, it will still need to prove its qualities in upcoming chapters as it tries to be a little different from the usual isekai stories.
