narrator was great.
As well as the first book did at making a unique MC, this book undoes all of it. He was very dark and would do anything to gain power, but here he is exactly the same as every other MC in a litRPG novel.
Very little personality, inexplicably amazing at leadership, backs his way into good things purely on luck, and for some insane reason he is the good guy now even though he was very clearly evil in the first book. It’s not an antihero thing either, it almost feels like the author completely forgot the reason the first book was interesting.
Then there are the side characters. My God they are generic. There is generic female love interest who lost all personality between last book and this one, NPCs who do literally nothing despite one of them being 4x stronger than the MC, pudgy fat friend who is fat and is also fat (seriously, that is his only characteristic), and the bad guy who is probably the only interesting one of the bunch.
The main antagonist was interesting in the first book since he was just a bully with extra power and money. In this one, we are apparently supposed to forget he was the most popular streamer because the second he loses one battle, he somehow loses 100% of his viewers? He came back immediately but substantially less interesting in this book but now instead of a spoiled beat with unlimited resources, he is now a complete psychopath that murders animals.
The in game and out of game economies make 0 sense and were clearly made up using a random number generator. For example, the MC has to worry about how he is going to pay rent, so he runs into the video game and somehow makes over a year worth of rent in a few hours. But also he gets a streaming deal worth a third of the amount he can make in one 5 hour block. Even more headscratching is the fact that he is a promoted streamer, but he gets to edit his footage before sending it in? In no sense of the word is that streaming, I think the author just wanted his money problems to go away so he could go back to destroying everything that made this story unique.
If you liked the first book, just stop right now, this one isn’t worth it. If you like every litRPG with a generic MC, then this might be your cup of tea.