[aohige]

Originally Posted by sasuke706

Subaru states at a couple points he leans more toward the intellectual type, and everyone relies on him for his knowledge (gained through his Return by Death) than his nonexistent fighting prowess. That said, for someone who's died like over 20 or so times, he gets shocked by the most trifling things that he honestly could and should have figured out on his own at many points.

He said he's more about thinking than acting. Which is true, by comparison, due to the fact he's even more of a weakling than a fool.
Doesn't change the fact he's a fool, and the novel does a very good job at presenting him as a fool, including reminding us that he is a fool through dozens of times getting directly pointed out.

I swear, you seem to put more emphasis on single incidents rather than overwhelming counter examples. Do you skip through them or something?
I mean holy shit, he basically mulled over like a few dozen chapters crying about how stupid he is, after he made a fool of himself in front of everyone, and made terrible choices. If anything I figured THAT would get on your nerves, not the other way around!

Spoiler for :

The dark spell gets him out of like 2 situations and bought time for like 1 other, and was useless like 2 others at critical points. Which it should be useless, since he started out being unable to move after using it once and it barely got better before getting worse. This however leads to him breaking his gate, leading to the whole problem where he can't provide Beatrice mana for shit, not to mention using the dark spell to be even worse of an idea than it was already. And for the record, the dark spell helped him more after breaking his gate. He wasn't even able to pretend to be able to use magic for long before it got nerfed.
The invisible hand has helped him like what, twice? With Tigerboy and Greed, and it didn't even change anything with Greed and only made Wrath want to do questionable things to him. And each time Subaru notes that it's not something he should be using since it's an evil influence to him or something cryptic and greatly mentally fatigues him right after one swing. Which compared to its original owner, where each hand had far more power than Subaru's and the guy could summon over 99 more than Subaru's 1, it's a pretty shitty power up.
I didn't even bring up dragon blood, nor do I really care about it at the moment.
And Subaru spends a year learning how to use a whip and do parkour to essentially show he can beat a few nameless thugs and pretend to be Indiana Jones, and otherwise still be useless in a real fight.

Then we'll have to agree to disagree.
I feel they have helped great deal, but I guess if you're used to the hax cheat heroes around, the new skills not curvestomping enemies would feel useless. They aren't useless at all, and neither is the story about the hero being hax. It's precisely the opposite if anything.