Chrono Alkon doesn’t think that he’s particularly great at being a demon although everyone would disagree with him — after all he blew everyone else out of the water during the class designation test on the first day of demon school and hasn’t stopped exhibiting a knack for magic since. In fact, his powers have caught the eyes of the current Demon King and she’s asked Chrono for a favor: to join a group of students and faculty exploring dungeons left behind by previous demon kings and to collect the treasures within to fund the school!
I do wonder if this series needed all of the tropes it smashed together for its premise. “Exploring old dungeons” is a perfectly fine set-up to start with but adding in “while we’re at a school!” feels like an odd combination and then stacking “dungeons are created through a video game RPG-like set-up” seems odder still; at this point in the story I think that original author Shiroichi Amaui could have created the same story with a slightly more graceful set-up, because half of those details don’t affect the setting very much. On the other hand, this wordy-to-summarize setting also isn’t negatively impacting the story so far either. At the end of the day the setting just feels a generic, RPG-inspired fantasy.
“It’s fine” is a fairly good summary of this entire first volume to be honest — it doesn’t do anything spectacular, new, or gripping but it also doesn’t do anything bad either, except that this is another series with Weird Magical Slavery. What annoys me here is that, like the premise, this is an unneeded detail that Shiroichi Amaui could have easily cut out; the two characters that Chrono has accidentally made his slaves so far, Sofia and Yukino, both seem genuinely interested in being his friend (and possibly girlfriend) and joining his dungeon raiding party even before accidentally becoming his slaves so I’m puzzled why it’s even a thing. The only significant change it makes to the story is that, according to the rules of magic, if a master is unconscious for a certain amount of time their slaves will be teleported to them, which means Chrono is going to need to get a larger bed.
Again, if Shiroichi Amaui simply wanted a pillow party then there were far more graceful ways of making it happen in the narrative.
Despite the issue of being sometimes overwrought, Self-Proclaimed “Mediocre” Demon falls into what I would call my “fluff” category of reading: something I would be happy enough to check out from the library but would probably forget it exists until I actually see a new volume on the shelf. I’m also not that interested in the original light novel series, as there weren’t any moments where I felt like something important or interesting had been cut from this adaptation (which is an extra good thing since the light novel is currently unlicensed in the US).