放开那个女巫

RELEASE THAT WITCH

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
Not Available
RELEASE
March 30, 2025
CHAPTERS
695

DESCRIPTION

A modern-day engineer is transmigrated to a different world... where he becomes a prince.

His surroundings remind him of medieval Europe, but it's not quite the same.

In this world, witches actually exist, and they have real magic powers! Magic powers... that can be used as a productive force!

The witches must be saved. Their powers must be liberated!

We must open our map, fight off demons, solve the conspiracy, and climb the tree of technology!

(Source: Webnovel)

CAST

Anna Wimbledon
Roland Wimbledon
Veronica Gilen
Tilly Wimbledon
Wendy
Maggie
Leaf
Lightning
Edith Kant
Nana Pine
Soraya Zoen
Scroll
Lily
Agatha
Ashes
Isabella
Mystery Moon
Drow Silvermoon
May Lannis
Hummingbird
Summer
Lucia White
Evelyn

CHAPTERS

RELATED TO RELEASE THAT WITCH

ONA ActionRelease that Witch

REVIEWS

Drxcxrys
95/100
''Witches should not be used as consumables, but as the engine to stimulate the development of civilization.''
''Witches should not be used as consumables, but as the engine to stimulate the development of civilization.''

I don't consider anything I mention in this review a spoiler apart from the direction of the story. That aside, this is the longest manga/manhua I have read up to and it was indisputably worth the binge.

'Release That Witch' or 'Fangkai Nage Nuwu' (translating to 'Let go of that witch' from Chinese) is an ongoing manhua adaptation of the Web Novel version of the same name. The WN is completed with 1498 chapters and still remains a submarine Chinese fable. It was announced to get an anime project, for which I am hyped for.

The story begins with a well-educated engineer waking up in the body of the third prince of the royal family. He obtains the memories of the prince Roland Wimbledon but considers himself to be the former.

World building;
A typical medieval setting without magic with the monarchs in control. Existence of the Church is an immense element. More importantly, witches prevail in this world as you can make out from the title. Their presence is the core motive behind the progress of this story. The witches are the sole users of magic and are hunted down by the Church and the monarchs. Under the influence of the Church, the public is set to believe that witches are truly evil and have to be eliminated. The king of the Greycastle has launched a rivalry between his five children and divided the territories among them in order to decide the next Crown. Roland being the youngest son with a doubtful reputation gets an isolated territory along the border. This is where the politics kicks in. The ultimate human challenge is the goal of defeating the 'demons' in near future.

Main character;
One of the best built characters I have come across. His strength is limited to knowledge, in which he is unrivalled in the other world. Unlike the Realist Hero where the mc resolves to boring dialogues, Roland is an interesting man. One aspect which I adore is his boldness and an unshakeable mindset. It's thanks to him the manhua is quite interesting throughout each arc. He is an expert in almost all fields of science.

Direction of the story;
If you have made up your mind to consider this manhua then I feel you needn't read any more. Going ahead, the main character (the new Roland Wimbledon) will aim to protect and cooperate with the witches to kick off the Industrial Revolution in this world. Each witch has a unique skill or power which he makes use of admirably. Sooner or later he is to get involved with politics of his siblings and the war with the church. He aims to refine the crude and conservative thinking of the citizens and upgrade their lifestyle. There are a lot of unique elements present in the story.

Miscellaneous;
You might consider this a progressive harem as the mc surrounds himself with witches.
Well written war arcs.

Links and sources;
Read the web novel-
https://www.webnovel.com/book/release-that-witch_7931338406001705
Promotion Videos for the anime-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMU4bk9dsgI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E48chDoL9-8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noelrXCw4dY

I guarantee you a fun and long read. If you think this contains spoilers then please let me know directly.
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oliveirafre
62/100
An interesting idea that slowly turns into a mess of plot points
First of all, I have read this twice : once getting up to 415, the other time up to 662.... Dropped it both times. So my first note on this will be : it is WAY too long, this story should've ended at chapter 400 at most.... Read this if you REALLY have a lot of time to kill, because there is genuinely no good place to drop this story before its end, because things don't get resolved as much as they get a bandaid put on them for now at the end of each arc, and this story goes on forever with the translations (even official!) only getting worse as time goes on.
Secondly, pardon my horrible gramar, I am (sadly) from Québec, where we speak french.
Thirdly : welcome to my poorly organized schizo rant about this manhua that none of my friends care about. It is divided in 5 parts : art, story, characters, pace, random BS I didn't know where to put. Got it? No? I don't care, this is my review, so let's get into it.

Art

Let's start with the art : it's good. It has a nice mix of different styles, uses a wide range of colors which help set the tone a lot, the designs are also extremely memorable and distinct but not all that interesting. It isn't the most stylized or interesting, but it is very good until 419... At chapter 419, the artist changes, and wow is it noticeable, it becomes deviantart levels of quality at times, a lot of characters become unrecognizable, proportions are wayyyy off, eyes are always crossed, it's terrible...

Writing/Story/World

The writing is generally okay : most characters speak pretty much the same way, but the story (at the start at least) is interesting enough, the characters are fun, the adventure parts of this are genuinely very interesting, and I did want to learn more about this world for a pretty long time reading this. In short, it's generally written well enough, though some moments do feel out of place, like someone getting shot with exactly two pannels of characters caring, or multiple instances of very long passages of nothing but a Chinese military propaganda song.
It also sadly eventually kind of falls off... Don't get me wrong, it does have its good parts : it does have some really great characters (Zero, Leaf, Tilly), and even when I dropped this manhua, I kept being interested by its world and story, but so much of it feels cut short (blood association, Anna after a while, the dream world) and once the setting expands and we see more of the world, it starts feeling so flat and lifeless. A good example of this is witch hate : it is the premise of this whole story, we are constantly told that outside of Roland's territory, witches are hunted and killed and hated and abused and so on and so forth, yet, it takes 350 chapters for us as readers to be shown real explicit consenquences of this witch hate outside of things that happened in the past or vague "they hung 10 witches... Anyways". Another example of this writing creating a lifeless world is Roland's and the economy, at first, the economy plays a big part of the story, where the main character can't do a lot of things because he simply is limited by funds, but the author keeps using that line CONSTANTLY while we see Roland spend money on like 20 different research projects, welfare for refugees he keeps inviting even with the lack of funds, construction of megaprojects, construction of multiple cities, 3 wars, 20 golden pools, a giant laser used to piss on the moon, real-life catgirls... okay, maybe the last ones didn't happen, but the story does genuinely end up often being Roland going "If only I had more money" with no consequence for this of funds on anything after the first arc... For god's sake, the main character, while supposedly short on cash, spends money for an idiotic sex offender to be sent to another country as an amabassador to live a lavish life, while also building ships just to explore islands out of pure curiousity. But worry not dear reader, as these dumbass ideas always, for some reason, end up being beneficial! What is the point of being reminded money is an limited then? What do we gain from this? The same goes with knowledge, Roland will often go "Oh, if only I remembered about thing", but the moment he stalls and needs new weapons or technology, well, what a coincidence, he remembered how to make that thing 3 chapters ago. Again, I cannot repeat this enough : this makes the world feel unreal, and makes the story feel like a progression of plot point after plot point, which is sad, because I do enjoy a lot of the overarching narrative. I think that the things that do happen are interesting, the problem is that the world around said things feels boring in a way, and that there is so much stuff going on at once after a while that the story feels very disjointed.
Most aspects of the world end up slowly crumbling similarly to this : we are told that waves of refugees and rapid expansion of the main city will lead to issues like lack of housing and famines... yet we never see this happen. A problem will be brought up a single time and then disappear forever after it is "fixed" and by "fixed", of course, I mean after they mentionned it once or twice, without it having any real consequences. Demons! No one knew they existed, and we are told how "Oh boy, it's going to be so hard to break the news to everyone, this will cause so much unrest, fear and anger when the general populace will learn about it"; and then a crowed is told about it once, and everyone everywhere from that point on starts believing that demons exist with no hesitation and the issue is never again brought up.
Are you starting to get my point about the story? It has elements I think are really interesting, but a lot of it feels so bland because it is treated so lightly.
And though I enjoy a lot of the story elements (which I mostly don't mention because that would be entirely spoilers) a lot of them also start feeling more and more like the author pulling ideas out of is ass after chapter 300 or so. Vessels are genuinely nonsensical, yet we spend multiple chapters explaining them, and the whole explanation is irrelevant anyways! We are told about the Old witch associations and countries, and again, it is completely irrelevant except to go "Oh wow, this is so different from before" and to introduce some of the most bland characters imagineable who's purpose is simply to go either introduce new random plot points or to repeat for the 40th time the act of someone telling Roland "Well, the next threat is so much more dangerous than any of the last ones for real, pinky promise, on god, bestie!", and yet we spend multiple chapters exposition dumping about them. What this ends up doing is creating this weird dynamic where I am extremely interesting in some parts of the story like the romance between Roland and Anna, the dream world, Zero, the blood association, Nightgale's past, Lightning's relation to her dad, etc., but I cannot bring myself to read more of it, because the contexte it is presented in feels uninteresting at times and because there is so much random BS between those elements (best example is Lightning's dad not wanting her to know who he is for the stupidest reasons) that it feels like a test of patience at times...
Anyways, could you tell I'm a sucker for worldbuilding? It does have good things, the story itself is generally interesting, but it just overstretches itself.
Oh also, the jokes are ok I guess.

Characters

BUT that isn't to say I entirely hate this story, hell, I gave it a 6/10, which is, by my own rating system, good enough to recommend if asked, it does have some stuff going for it. For instance, its characters : I do like them. Most of them are quite fun and the witches' abilities are generally interesting. Yeah, the witches design feel completely out of place, but they are visually interesting, and the characters are expressive. I liked the dialogue for the most part even though it wasn't the best, it did have its moments (especially shining with the main cast and Zero). I also enjoyed the character dynamics, and I think a lot of the side characters are well written. I especially enjoyed the slow progression most characters go through, I really like how slowly we see most characters change and evolve in ways that feel real, that feel human, especially with Lightning. There are a few characters that are overtuned (especially antagonists) to the point where they feel like caricatures, but I can live with it, it's still better than a LOT of stories in that regard. In that way you could say that, though I didn't necessarly enjoy all the characters from the start, they tended to really grow on me as I kept reading and seeing them evolve over time, including character I didn't like at first, like the Ambassador. Though I do have to say a few story arcs did feel somewhat rushed (especially Nightgale's, considering her importance to the story!).
Though there is one persistent character I really didn't like : random citizens. This goes back to my point about the world feeling fake, but god damn, for people who are supposed to hate witches are say they hate witches and are spoken about like people who hate witches, they sure do love witches and learn to accept witches really quickly. Everyone accept the fact witches are not evil so god damn easily, I'm pretty sure we see more random citizens who appear in more than 1 scene who love or aren't scared of witches than people who believe them to be evil in a world we are told everyone has been essentially fed anti-witch propaganda for the past few hundred years. This isn't helped by the fact I could probably count on my fingers the number of times we actually see random citizens play any role in the story outside of being soldiers who love their country and really love that one chinese propaganda song. I guess I also feel mixed about Nightgale, cuck-in-charge (at least for 500 chapters), I like her, I think her backstory is great, I really enjoyed her interactions with everyone, but the repetitive bit where she plays the third wheel for Anna and Roland gets really tiring really fast and the author just WON'T FUCKING STOP BRINING IT UP. It got to a point where I started naming Nightgale "Nightcuck" in my notes on this.
Two last things : one, for how distinct and memorable a lot of the witches designs are, non-witches have really bland designs; also, NANA IS 16???? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN SHE'S 16?

Pace

The quality of the pace varies quite a bit in my opinion (and what a good pace is in my opinion is a question left for philosophy majors and the jobless). It kind of follows in the footsteps (you could even say paces I guess hehe) of the story, as it starts off (first 100 chapters), in my opinion, really good. Every time I finished a chapter, I would think "I have time for one more right?", it kept me glued to my chair the entire time I was reading it. It has a good mix of intense, laid-back, character driven, adventurous, action-packed, story-driven, etc. chapters, it does a really good job mixing things up to keep things fresh, while also moving the story without feeling like exposition dumping. This pace is kept up to the 200's, in other words : the story manages not to feel stale, formulaïc or rushed in the first 200 chapter (outside of a few bumps after 100 where it slows down considerably for a little bit).
However, when you start getting to the 300, it starts to slow down quite a bit. While up to this point, I felt most plot points were given satisfying conclusions in a timely manner, every aspect of the story just starts stretching on and on and on, as more and more things start happening simultaneously because we are introduced to new things and new characters and each one of them is given as much time, which means a plot point that might only last 10 chapters in content end up getting extended to 50 or 60 or 100... Don't give me wrong, it's not the worse, it does still have a nice variety in what we are shown in each chapter (as opposed to something like a 20 chapter long combat marathon), but the story feels like its slowing down as the author seems to want to keep introducing more and more elements and characters, making the story feel more and more diluted and pointless.
And, once you get to chapters 350+, it goes downhill, the author won't stop introducing people, ideas, new things, new places, the story is being stretched to its limits! It's not that the story or its elements stop being interesting, I do think most things in this story are still interesting in a vacuum, the problem really the pace, so the way (and speed at which) the story is presented : there's so much stuff going on all at once, it feels like its skipping around to try and balance everything, ignoring everything except one story thread, or rushing multiple things at times, which makes the story as a whole a lot less enjoyable. In other words, as the pace sinks, so does the story, in my opinion at least.

Random stuff

I like the romance... Outside of Nightcuck, I really think it is super cute, chapter 281 in particular made me squeak like a little girl, it just feels so genuine.
I would give it a low 6. It's really good to start off with, but the more I read this the more I think "When does this end?", parts of it stay interesting, but as a whole, it becomes a pain to read through with so much filler and random things happening... It just overstays its welcome. I would recommend this if it had a proper ending or a cutoff point, but sadly, it doesn't, there isn't anywhere in this story that feels like it would be a satisfying place to stop reading.
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