Is How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga (shōnen)
Run	2015–present · ongoing
Community score	AniList 6.6
Content	Fanservice, ecchi content, violence
Where to read	Seven Seas Entertainment — official

Overview

Takuma Sakamoto is exactly the kind of person isekai protagonists usually aren't: an ordinary, socially withdrawn gamer with no interest in being anyone's hero. When he gets pulled into the world of his favorite MMO wearing the body of his own character — the demon lord Diablo — he doesn't suddenly become confident or charming. He just doesn't know how to talk to people, so he keeps playing the only role he's ever been good at. Two girls who try to enslave him with a summoning spell end up wearing the collars themselves instead, and the three of them are stuck figuring out how to survive together while Takuma never quite drops the act.

It's a broad, comfort-food premise, and How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord knows exactly what it is — a heterosexual harem isekai built around fanservice, easy power fantasy, and a running joke about a guy too awkward to be normal.

What it does well

The central bit works better than you'd expect for how simple it is. Takuma isn't secretly cool under the demon lord act — he's genuinely just bad at being a person, and the gap between how intimidating he looks and how little he actually knows what he's doing produces some legitimately funny beats, especially early on. The game-world rules are laid out cleanly too: levels, skills, and power gaps are explained plainly enough that fights have real stakes you can track without a lecture.

Fukuda's art carries a lot of the load. Action reads clearly, with a good sense of where everyone is and what's actually happening, which is more than a lot of manga in this genre manage. And the pace never drags — chapters move, so if you're here for a quick, low-effort read between other things, it delivers exactly that without wasting your time.

Where it falls short

The two heroines, Rem and Shera, don't get much beyond their designs and their reactions to Takuma. They rarely drive a scene themselves, and the manga leans on their bodies for a lot of its visual interest rather than giving them much to actually do. If you want a harem cast that feels like people rather than set dressing, this isn't going to satisfy you.

The bigger issue is that the joke runs out of new places to go. The premise — awkward guy stuck performing intimidation — is funny for a stretch, but the manga keeps returning to the same beat instead of building past it, so later chapters feel like variations on a joke you already got. Combined with a pattern of fights resolving in similar ways arc after arc, the later chapters read like they're coasting on a formula that worked once.

Verdict

How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord is a competent, unambitious entry in a crowded genre — it's never actively bad, it just never pushes past what it set out to be on page one. If a fanservice-forward harem isekai with a decent running joke sounds like exactly what you want, it'll do the job. If you want your isekai comedy to grow into something more, this one's happy to stay right where it started.