As you can guess from the title, there's a pretty good chance that you've read, watched, or played some version of this story before. My Isekai Life: I Gained a Second Character Class and Became the Strongest Sage in the World! doesn't leave much to the imagination, and yes, it more or less does what it says on the tin. Yuji Sano is, in fact, summoned to a fantasy world to begin his isekai life, and he does bumble into gaining a second character class to go alongside his initial “tamer.” But Yuji's completely unaware that this is at all weird in the world he's been summoned to, and that looks like it's going to cause some problems for him.

Yuji himself is a bit different from the run-of-the-mill isekai protagonists. He's a working adult, which in itself isn't that unusual, but he's also remarkably blasé about the entire situation he finds himself in. There's no real sense that he's anything beyond tangentially aware of isekai stories, much in the same way that someone might be aware of Spiderman movies without having ever bothered to see one – he knows they exist, but he's never been particularly interested in consuming them. In fact, what he's most invested in is his job, even though he knows it's not good for him or allowing him to live a healthy lifestyle. In fact, he spends the first part of his new fantasy existence worrying about waking up to get home to finish up his work; that he's been rescued from it never even occurs to him.

If he has in fact been deliberately “rescued” from his life, there's no real indication of it yet, although it remains a tantalizing possibility. Mostly this is due to the manner in which he was summoned: a pop-up on his computer while he was working like a dog. As such, there is a good chance that he is summoned by some deity who was watching him work himself into the grave – Yuji notes that if he's collapsed from overwork and is in the hospital dreaming, it wouldn't be the first time. If the pop-up, with its warning that failing to click either “yes” or “no” would result in silence being taken for consent, is in fact an attempt to save him, it could have been triggered by his excessive amount of time working and a hedged bet that he would do precisely what he did – assume that it's a virus and ignore it to reboot his computer, resulting in him being forcefully removed from his current life.

In any event, Yuji's initial reactions to his new situation are somewhat extreme. After he concludes that he must be dreaming and notices a status window floating in front of him, he decides that he really needs to get back home to that paperwork, and that the easiest way to do it is to die “in-game.” It's a somewhat logical but also rather upsetting decision on his part, because he absolutely sets off to find a way to die. What's unsettling is that he doesn't seem to care if he's wrong, and that if he really dies, that's just how it goes. More than anything else, this shows us why some unknown deity may be going to so much trouble to save him, because Yuji's already reached the point where it doesn't much matter to him if he lives or dies.

Fortunately for both Yuji and the continued story, he instead finds himself adapting to his new life, even as he recognizes that the “game mechanics” seem very, very broken. On the downside, with Yuji setting off to tame slimes, use slimes, and find a way to earn money for food, the story gets awfully familiar very quickly. Even the slime angle is hardly novel, and when you add in an adventurers' guild and Yuji's awesome new powers, everything starts to reek of the overfamiliar. Yuji's attitude is something of a saving grace, because he's just so remarkably unconcerned about how things are playing out that it makes him interesting by virtue of being so apparently bored with the entire situation. They can make him live an isekai life, but they can't make him like it.

For the most part, Yuji is the only character in this story. He has his many, many slimes and he meets a nice, burly adventurer, but generally speaking he's just puttering around interacting with isekai staples, like the guild girl and the guild examiner. On the one hand, this shows how totally uninvested Yuji is in his new life; on the other, it can make for something of a slow read. The manga is adapted from the light novel of the same name, and there is a slight feeling that it may have worked better in novel form, if only because the actual action of the story might start a bit sooner. The book is a little dull; not boring, because there's certainly enough happening, but just not as interesting as it could be due to a paucity of actual story events in the volume.

It is, however, perfectly fine reading. PONJEA's art is good enough (although the goofy faces during the guild exam feel a bit out of left field comparatively), and Shinkoshoto's text is marginally more interesting than in their other work to see an English release, the manga version of The Strongest Sage With the Weakest Crest. Then again, based on both of these works, it also seems fair to say that building tension isn't one of their strong suits; it just works better here than in the other series. But it does beg the question of how invested we can be in Yuji's story when he barely seems to care about what happens to himself.