Is The Executed Sage Who Was Reincarnated as a Lich Worth Reading? Review

Overview

The Executed Sage Who Was Reincarnated as a Lich Started an All-Out War opens with its ending already written into the title: Dwight Harvelt, the sage who fought alongside the hero to defeat the Demon Lord, is suspected of becoming the next threat and executed for it by the kingdom he saved. Ten years later, having survived as a skeleton in the Valley of the Dead by consuming its miasma, he's become more powerful than the Demon Lord he helped kill — and he leads an undead army back to the surface, framing the invasion as a kind of world peace on his own terms.

What it does well

What makes this stand out from the usual 'reincarnated as a monster' isekai is how little interest it has in walking back its premise. Dwight isn't secretly still a hero waiting for the right moment to reveal his good intentions — he genuinely means to make the kingdom pay for what it did to him, and Karaku Yuuki's story (adapted here by Shoutarou Kunitomo) is confident enough in that framing to let the invasion feel earned rather than villainous for its own sake. That confidence extends to the scale of the conflict: Kunitomo draws the siege and army sequences with a clarity that keeps Dwight's undead forces feeling like a genuine military threat rather than a vague horde, and the manga spends real time on both his commanders and the humans trying to stop him, which keeps the war feeling like a clash of real perspectives instead of a one-sided power trip.

Where it falls short

The flip side of that moral confidence is that Dwight's war is still, functionally, a war on a lot of people who didn't personally wrong him — and the manga asks you to stay invested in his side of that without offering an easy out. If you need a lead you can root for without reservation, this will keep you at a deliberate distance. The large cast on both sides of the conflict also means individual characters beyond Dwight himself sometimes get less development than the story's emotional premise would benefit from, and as an ongoing series, where this ultimately lands — vindication, tragedy, something messier — is still an open question.

Verdict

The Executed Sage Who Was Reincarnated as a Lich Started an All-Out War is a dark fantasy that commits fully to its 'the kingdom made its own monster' premise, with real scale and a protagonist the story doesn't try to redeem on easy terms. Worth reading if you want a villain's-eye-view war story played straight. Skip it if you need to fully endorse your protagonist's cause.