What do you guys think when a manga/webtoon changes the story from the novel? I just finished reading chapter 2 of The Hero Returns. The mc and his mother fought off 3 wolf monsters without any powers. A normal wolf is faster than a human and their teeth can easily break bones. I cant swallow my disbelief that the mc and his mother could survive an attack from 3 monster versions. I found out in the comments section that it never happened in the original and the artist just did it to let the mc see his mother protecting him. I remember seeing everyone complain about The Archmage Returns After 4000 Years changing everything and how the story wouldn’t make sense. That’s why I dropped it.
Edit: I just read chapter 3 and it got even worse. The mc overpowered a wolf and then made them run away with his intimidating stare.
In theory it can be better but usually it's just worse. like over 9/10 times the adaption is worse, missing details, makes no sense, randomly change character designs, completely skip over important arcs, etc. Basically the only manga adaptions that are preferable over their original novels that I can think of are Re:Monster and Slave Harem in the Labyrinth of the Other World. Both are pretty tedious to read so the manga shortening them helps a lot with that. Of course there's still some details lost, but tbh you don't even want to know the details in Slave Harem because 90% is just MC internal monologue where he's whining, fantasize about having sex, being paranoid, etc.
For the Archmage return story the change at the beginning was in itself not as big. The manga artist just included the redhead into the story more instead of leaving her at the academy like in the novel. Because of this several scenes changed somewhat to include her but the story itself hardly changed. The majority of people just got butthurt that she got included, intrinsically hate her and complain the moment that she appears in a chapter. Personally, as I haven’t read the novel, I don’t have the same opinion as them. For me it seems that the artist tried to make the MC more human and less of a overpowered monster by including her, and I’d say it worked. At least for me.
For mangas that had bigger changes when compared to the original novels I can think of two. One is from the manga Maou Restart where the artist and either author or the publisher had a big fallout based on the designs of the characters. The artist, who had originally drawn the characters in the style they are shown in the novel, was supposed to start drawing them as they are shown in the light novel. But he didn’t want to because he found the new designs atrocious. Something I completely agree with, especially the MCs delinquent persona was butchered. Look at the anime that one used the Light Novel Art. In the end they came to a agreement and after a hiatus the artist had only to make minute changes to his characters and was able to continue drawing. Currently he has even added a completely new character and it works all very good. The other on is ID The greatest Fusion Fantasy. Unfortunately the publisher went bankrupt and a continuation hasn’t appeared so far. In this case the manga is better known in the community than the novel because the later got never really translated. But the changes here where to the relationship of three characters and to tell the truth it worked better in the manga than the novel.
They definitely change things when the date doesn’t line up. The author writes a web novel x years ago and puts setting as the current date. X years later a comic comes out and changes the date to x plus years.