love this book

kept me up all night wanting to know what would happen. can't wait to read two.

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Honestly good

I got this book on a deal and I’m happy to say its a surprisingly a good read. This book seems to be underrated but don’t let that fool you, so far its a great series, in fact ive purchased the other two books. I don’t do spoilers so you’ll have to give it a go but. One thing I can say that will not spoil the book is, the entire real world in this book is completely under the control of an AI, so there is some pretty interesting story arcs both in game and in the real world. Dystopian? You be the judge

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Entertaining but massively flawed

Any MMO player is going to roll their eyes during the fights, massively flawed and inconsistent powers/cooldowns. A level 5 player killing level 30 to 40 monsters is laughable as any MMO player would know. I doubt the author is a serious MMO player or bothered to do much research.

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30minutes in and im almost in tears

amazing so far i am glad usually dont buy books shorter than 15hours this one was well worth it

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7 people found this helpful

Good story, narration is not great.

The story is good gaming-style fun, and put together in a fashion that is interesting instead of hokey and amateurish. The narrator does some voices very well, but the style chosen for the main character feels like it belongs in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Frustrating, but not enough to put me off the 2nd book, which says something.

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Great Story, Get on Discount

The story is enthralling. I found myself liking the characters and the conclusion was a long, well executed climax. The most annoying detail was the voice chosen for the main character, definitely an acquired taste.

The book is very expensive though for the short length and I wouldn't recommend it unless it's on a steep discount or money is something you've got in spades. I get that litrpgs in general tend to be shorter novellas, but still, wait for a discount.

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Standard RPG Lit, nothing to see here move along

If you have read any RPGLit, you have read this one. Unrealistic contortions to get the main character into the game so that when he dies in the game he dies in real life. This in a world where the US doesn't allow Kinder's eggs because they are dangerous, such a game could never exist. Actually it would be a more interesting story if they described a world where such a game, one that kills people, exists, the breakdown of that society would make a good story.. The "hero" flails his way from one situation to another and rather than planning anything just picks his skills on the fly when he needs them. He and his low level friends take down monsters that are 4+x their level in groups of twos and threes. If you ever played an RPG you know that you would last about two seconds. It does end with an interesting plot point but not enough to make me get the next in the series.

I never got used to the narrator' voice. It certainly detracted from me getting immersed in the story.

If you have never read any RPGLit, this is about the same as any of them. If you have, you can pass on this one.

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Awful, awful, awful... I highly recommend

Yes, both of those statements are true. Oh, what a rabbit hole you have discovered. This is truly a gem. But awful, and I still recommend? Oh yes, dear reader. Stick around and let me tell you a tale.

This book is bad. It is the abandoned love child of Tommy Wiseau and Sword Art Online. Have you ever seen that 200th episode of Stargate SG-1? Or any self mocking episode of a franchise really. Add some of that to the pot and this is what comes out. This book is either so aware of itself and doesn't give a F*** or is so unaware that it travels through dimensions and becomes hyper-aware. Sorry, let me explain.

So, the book is basically your generic Harem-Isekai (see sword art online for the uninitiated). And the writing, wow, it is on par. But here is the thing. Books this bad I either don't finish or if I can suffer through them to the end, I return because I will never listen to them again. But this one, I couldn't finish it, but I don’t know if I should return it. Its the writing. It is fascinatingly bad. The pacing is bad. The dialogue is bad. The characters, aren’t. I actually think I might finish this one at some point. And a note on the narration, it is meh. Nothing good, but also nothing memorably bad. I mean, it was certainly bad at points, but not so bad as to wake me up at night.

Anyway, here is the hook. The writing is like something out of a parody. Anyone who has ever read “John dies at the end”, this is basically a full version of the stories Big Jim wrote, but taken even more seriously if you can believe it.

The writer seems to make every mistake you can make as a writer. This book’s main strengths are lines you read in books that make you groan, or the ones that are so painful you can’t believe they didn’t even try to come up with something better. If Ernest Hemmingway were the protagonist in a video game, Phil Tucker would be the end boss. And he would be poorly written. Just tacky, awful, onision levels of writing. I made it several chapters in before I wrote this review, but out of the ten or so characters we have met, all of whom wish to bone our protag, there have been no other male characters that have mattered (and this isn’t something I would normally complain about. I don’t care if a cast is full of one gender or another as long as it is interesting. Like the stupid inclusion of Sean Bean in the Silent Hill movie because it had no male characters before that, or the phone conversation with the girlfriend in The men who stare at goats because that movie had no female characters and the execs didn’t like it. That is stupid. I didn’t care if silent hill had no meaningful men in it, nor does the phone call make it a completely different movie in tmwsag. As long as it is good.). Yes, the main protag talks to his brother, for “no” real reason?, for a few seconds, and is mocked by some hyper jocks at one point. Other than that, everyone has been his harem. Just terrible, terrible, terribly written.

Just terrific. This is why I like it so much. The author comes across as either completely inept, or so talented that this was beneath him to do. Like an artist who painted a world-famous masterpiece who is asked to paint some murals in a pizza restaurant, and decided to make them so good anyway, but so avant-garde that nobody gets them. Either that or the writer gets free coffee as long as he writes a book every year and they were coming to take his card, so he banged this one out in an evening watching Netflix. Now I don’t really know anything about this author, but I really think (and kind of hope) he just didn’t give a single F***, because I believe that is the best way to experience this book. The timing is either Thunder-Snow made real, or this guys deliberate magnum opus. Holy smokes.

Every time he wrote a line that, before you heard it you say to yourself “oh no he’s not going to” and before you finish he says some awful line. But every time he did it, and I mean every time I noticed, while I was admonishing the poor, lazy choices, he would bring up how bad that line was. But he did it within the narrative of the book. Like “insert terrible line here” and while you are recovering from how stupid that line was and saying to yourself “I cant believe they sunk to that level”, the main character will go “man I cant believe we sunk to that level” or something similar. I am not saying that calling out your own bad lines makes those lines not bad, but in the same way self parody works it is all in how you handle it. And I just feel like there was way too much thought put into this to not give it credit. That’s why I thought it might be a really good writer that just didn’t care, but after he read the book and saw it sucked, it edited it to give it some character. Or maybe some self mockery. And every time I groaned with how bad it was, I laughed that the characters in the book were basically agreeing with me. This book is so bad, yet so intuitive, yet so, so, so awful.

This is a fascinatingly bad book, and I implore you to give it a try. This is an audible 420 friendly book, and I HIGHLY recommend.

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