What I mean by that is it excels in one aspect but is bad in other?
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Sword of Kaigen is this for me! Some incredibly compelling and touching moments contrasted with some very amateurish elements (especially the ending).
Honestly any scene with Robin in it dragged down my enjoyment. Misaki herself kept me going in those moments. Otherwise an easy 5* book
The thing about scenes with Robin and overall everything adjacent to him is that all of the dissonance comes from Sword of Kaigen been a spin off prequel of her first published YA series which she not long after discontinued, because she felt it didn't work. As someone who actually read two existing books of that series, its clear how a lot of stuff that is kinda weird in Kaigen comes from connections to those books.
Yeah I recall reading about this in on her blog, but I never bothered touching those other books (too much to read nowadays!). Were they any good? SoK felt like a very complete story on its own, putting aside the Robin stuff at the end.
Honestly - and I wouldn't advocate for this normally - I think a rewrite and re-release of Kaigen with a more self-contained ending, removing the obvious EU lead-in, would be awesome for future readers. Thinking about it now, the flashbacks are'nt terrible because the huge contrast between Misaki's early love and (character spoiler for those who haven't read or finished Sword of Kaigen) is really interesting. But the ending could use a re-write for sure.
I was very generous to those books at the time of reading as I was fresh from Kaigen.
In retrospect, the first book should not have existed as a separate entity as it was a book long prologue to the real story. I could say a lot of good things about the second book, I liked it, I think a lot of people who enjoyed her later books could enjoy that one as well (frankly I think I enjoyed it more than her recent Magical Girl trilogy) but ultimately its very much not a self contained story and without at least a promise of more books been written, in the series I cannot recommend it.