The Spring 2023 Manga Guide

A Cave King's Road to Paradise

What's It About? 

In a world where crests grant powers that decide one's fate, Prince Heale is born with Cave King—a crest just as obscure and useless as he is. Deemed a disgrace to his family, he's exiled to a barren, deserted island without a single living thing in sight. Alone and miserable but determined to survive, he reaches for a pickax to expand the cave he takes shelter in—and uncovers the true power of his crest!

It turns out Cave King makes mining and building within caves as easy as breathing. Useless no more! Instead of a life in limbo waiting for rescue, what Heale finds on this island are otherworldly discoveries and life-changing encounters!

A Cave King's Road to Paradise has story by Hajime Naehara and art by Takao Demise, with English translation by Zihan Gao, lettered and touched up by Jamil Stewart. J-Novel Club released the first volume digitally on March 22.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Well, at least it's not isekai. Other than that, this one ticks all the boxes: a hero undervalued by his homeland, a mysterious skill that comes complete with stat screens and is overlooked in favor of flashier magics, goblins, a slavery system disguised as “taming,” and a cute girl who worships the ground the hero walks on. Or digs in, in this case, because Heale, the seventeenth prince of his kingdom, has the “cave king” skill, and that makes him a miner and geologist extraordinaire. At least that's a bit creative.

After Heale is summarily banished (in the guise of being granted his own land to rule), he discovers the true power of being a cave king, which is pretty much what you'd expect. He even gets a slime right off the bat, and before too long he's figured out how to make the most of being able to dig up magical minerals. If I don't sound enthused about this, that's because it's simultaneously by the numbers and a little too fast-paced. While it wouldn't have been much fun to read about Heale grinding, things still move a bit too quickly for the story's own good, with three goblins washing ashore on the shoal Heale's been marooned on in short order. The author makes no bones about goblins falling under the “monster” heading that allows Heale to tame them, which frankly feels a bit unpleasant because they're clearly an intelligent race nowhere near as evil as humans have painted them. It simply feels like a way for the writer to attempt to circumvent the strictest definition of the word “slavery” while still making sure that Heale has a way to get them under his direct control, something they of course are eager to do. When he and goblin princess Riena begin to fall for each other, she isn't released from her tamed status, because then she'd lose access to all of Heale's shared skills. It feels like the book wants to have its cake and eat it too.

It's not all bad – Riena is very cute in both pre-and-post evolved forms, and Taran the giant spider is just the right combination of creepy and adorable. Starkers, the revived naked dwarf, is surprisingly fun for such an occasional character, and I'm sure that Heale's father won't be thrilled that he's turned his crummy inheritance into something of a literal gold mine. But ultimately this doesn't do enough to distinguish itself and is really only worth it for the genre faithful.

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

The ridiculously-long title might make you think this is another isekai, but Cave King is just another fantasy series about a guy with a weak power that turns out to actually be godly. It would have been an interesting set-up, with our hapless prince Heale sent to an abandoned craggy island in the middle of nowhere, until it turns out that not only is his secret magic all about The Masculine Urge To Dig Holes™.

Then the crest activates and brings up a Dragon Quest-style message box. It was then I knew I was in for a rough time.

Nothing, but nothing, kills a fantasy series quite like the magic system being literal video game mechanics popping into people's heads. I'm surprised that this isn't a Minecraft manga because everything about Heale's abilities basically makes it one, from his uncanny ability to store rocks in hammerspace to his ability to dig really, really well. Oh, and because the Kool-Aid man is red, he's swimming in mana stones so he's the strongest wizard alive now. It doesn't get better when the goblins show up; credit to Cave King for making the goblins actual people, but Heale goes and uses his monster-taming ability on them. So, great: not only is this a video-game-prompts-as-magic series, but it's also a “slavery for fun and profit” series where our dear hero goes so far as to “grant” his charges new names. Even though they already had names. Oh, and he evolves the one goblin princess into a sexy elf-girl so it doesn't look as weird for her to be his girlfriend.

Cave King isn't an isekai, but it sure feels like one from its dumb title to the I-can't-believe-it's-not-slavery plotline. Isekai fans probably already have this earmarked, but for anyone else? Man, there's so much better fantasy stuff you could be reading.

Christopher Farris

Rating:

A Cave King's Road to Paradise features signifiers from a variety of modern, fantasy-adjacent genres. It has a hero with seemingly weak inherent power that turns out to be super-strong, game-styled narrated navigation and skill/inventory management, and a decent lead who cultivates a society of friendly, adorable iterations of slimes and goblins. But amidst all that, the manga's defining direction remains pretty clear: watching someone cruise through a Let's Play on their custom Minecraft server. Knowing that there is an audience for watching such playthroughs, I can imagine that some people would find something fulfilling reading Cave King. Nonetheless, at least game recordings on YouTube don't come saddled with the pretense of a story that this manga never really gets around to fulfilling.

Much of my issue with Cave King stems from how it's cut from the same cloth as many in the emerging fantasy farm-life, town-management genre. It presents to the reader, through the main character Heale, all the rewards of cultivating and crafting while bypassing the actual hard work involved in procuring such things. It's not enough that Heale has magical mining endurance, rendering the activity as breezily as sitting and clicking in a Minecraft game. Even instances that might require proper resource management or logistics are regularly resolved by Heale tripping over a batch of magic rocks. The plot heaps things on Heale, like a ship full of goblin citizens/laborers or a special stone that ages up his indebted goblin child-princess into a beautiful adult humanoid for him to romance. It's a purely acquisitional approach to wish fulfillment that just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

It doesn't help that the adaptation's visual draw mostly lands at "serviceable". Setting things on an all-rocky desert island means that Takao Demise doesn't have their work too cut out with backgrounds. The characters can look good, especially the range of cute to cool gobbos. However, once any sort of action attempts to get going, we're treated to a mishmash of mismanaged panel-size priorities. Things generally look best when Demise busts out one of their page spreads to show broader action or simply the spectacle of Heale digging a big ol' tunnel. Besides that, there's also an odd tendency to place word bubbles over characters' faces, which, once you notice it, you can't stop. If you really, really like Minecraft or other similar building and management games, you might find something to latch onto here. But in that case, you might as well have more fun playing on your server than zoning out to someone else's account.