I should start by saying this story had a cool and interesting premise – two rich jabronies making a bet on whether the hottest VRMMORPG is pay-to-win or not. They recruit twelve players, all in different circumstances to play the game to test it out. Our protagonist is one of the twelve, and the only stipulation is that he had to know nothing about the game.
I say this because I want you to understand that his lack of knowledge isn’t why I’ll be calling this dude a freaking idiot. I expect his knowledge of the game to be limited.
He’s an idiot in the literal sense because any achievement he earns in this story falls in his lap, it’s completely unearned. Aside from the very beginning, where he bullshits his way off a hostile starting planet (which is the only commendable thing he does in the entire story), Alexei just ignorantly charges through every hurdle, and is never punished for it. He doesn’t lean on his more knowledgeable crew to make smarter decisions, he just does something insanely stupid and it just happens to work for him with lucrative success.
This pattern plays out several times throughout the rest of the book. You can’t really attribute any of his successes to him. It isn’t skill or smarts that gets him the shiny, unique loot he gets, it’s the unprecedented good fortune of randomly warp jumping next to a planet that has said artifact… finding a needle in an entire freaking galaxy by dumb ‘luck’.
That isn’t truly what makes Alexei so unbearable though. It’s his personality – which, I have to add, is accentuated by the performance.
He points out several times during that book several nagging characters. His home’s AI (the one he customised) is like a nagging wife, his love interest is some kind of annoying feminist and his best friend’s wife is a horrible, nagging bitch who hates him ‘for some reason’ (gee I wonder why). Ironically, there’s no one who’s a bigger, more annoying, nagging bitch than Alexei. If he’s not blowing up at AIs that are only trying to help him, he’s complaining about his situation – despite the absurd amount of good fortune he’s constantly showered with.
This flaw is compounded by the narrator’s voice, which has a certain…whiney quality to it (listen to the sample. I’m horrible at describing audible queues).
I left this story so frustrated and annoyed that even the hilariously ridiculous cliffhanger couldn’t get me curious enough to buy the next book. I just ended it thinking ‘good riddance’, happy to be done with it.
I think this’ll be the last LitRPG audiobook I get from a Russian author. I feel like there’s s noticeable cultural clash that inhibits any enjoyment I get from them, be it dialogue, views on the world or, most importantly, characterization of the protagonists. I just don’t vibe with them, and being able to vibe with the protagonist is the most important thing to me when connecting with an audiobook.