TL;DR: Contrived and uninspiring, as well as more pretentious than detailed. It can also be weirdly arbitrary and inconsistent, to the point where you have to double-check what you just read because something just feels wrong. EDIT: The main problem that spawned most failures, in my opinion, is that the author can't read the room. = While I appreciate elaborate stories, this LN quickly descends into plain mundanity, and one such example is the cooking scene. The issue isn't the need for sustenance itself, but the disproportionate amount of time devoted to preparing and partaking, where the only memorable detail is the MC using chopsticks made of ice, despitehaving a perfectly functioning knife in a forest with a copious variety of flora.

Slow life or not, thoughtful pacing is of utmost importance in ANY kind of media. If the goal is absurd sparsity over actually showing people the joy of simple things – then I don't need it, that's just rubbish. Furthermore, the slow life MC keeps going on about ad-nauseam is just a checklist of cliches that don't weave into the story so much as merely overlap with his immediate needs, nor do they contribute to verisimilitude you'd expect from a fertile mind – it's purely performative. The core ideas are confused.

While I'm at it: wasn't it stated that MC is bad at cooking? So not only did MC manage to prepare two cups of rice from scratch, but he could also cook it properly on his first attempt, in a way and environment he should be unfamiliar with? Okay, I'm just nitpicking, but the pattern repeats itself when it turns out he has no trouble cooking fish as well, and it's a piranha, not exactly a novice-friendly species (but they're cool I guess).

All of this holds little meaning individually, but the whole smarmy "overcoming challenges" shtick seems to have been forgotten just as quickly and just as completely as the fact that MC can't cook. Whenever established rules and limitations get this treatment, it only makes me wonder if the author is being sincere at all.

"That’s right! There was nothing wrong in putting off a problem for later! It didn’t mean he was giving up!" – The mysterious narrator full of personality is hard at work again.

I don't understand this obsession with ideas you can only deliver by spoon-feeding, rather than letting the story speak for itself organically (show, don't tell), as if you just want to hit the "MC never gives up" checkbox. Delivering explanations in a cheerleading, chirpy, and smug tone doesn't make it any better (jarring narrator intrusion).

Despite having studied water magic for less than two months (as confirmed later), and despite making significant progress each passing day, the main character – described as an optimist – somehow convinced himself that he couldn't do it. He firmly assumed that he could not cast the spell simply because he had failed to do so yesterday and the day before it.

The progress is already exceptional, but then he frames his inability as a "mental block" that he himself manufactured just so he could overcome it, patting himself on the back for conquering this grave "challenge," all while repeating cliched mantras like "I can do it" and "I'm not the same old me" with the dramatic intensity of a hero saving the world. My God, articulating this circular self-sabotage in its entirety into English is hard.

To be clear, this embarrassing display had nothing to do with survival at all, and the entire "survival" arc concluded quickly and uneventfully anyway.

If there's anything I enjoyed, it would be the encounters with the characters, rather than the characters themselves. That's because despite everyone having seemingly different dispositions, they have no compelling character development – whatever promise they show expires almost instantaneously.

That's why I'm not bothered by the quantity of characters, since quality would be too much to ask at this point, as silly as it sounds.

"Huh?"
"Oh, yeah? Huh..."
"Oooh!"
Call me a petulant snob, but I want much more stimulating writing and much more coherent mannerisms than that. Granted, interjections aren't inherently bad, and I'm not 100% sure who to blame, but the sheer amount per page contributes to my old suspicion that emotional communication as a whole is thoroughly neglected.

The lack of emotional awareness, as well as inability to clearly articulate emotional nuances, is probably why conflict at its extreme feels no different from casual cooking, since there's practically no difference in how the battles and cooking are told.