Unfortunately, Willmarth seems unwilling to put reasonable limits on the abilities and progress of the main cast. I’m sure he’s heard this criticism before as he seems to have made a new character in this book to raise this issue and have Alexander get angry and not really justify why his crew is so powerful so fast. If someone accuses you of cheating, it’s not really a good defense to point out all the advantages you have because your dad created the game. Let’s look beyond that to a more fundamental issue: there are few challenges presented to the Greystone guild that they don’t have a defense against or easily overpower due to the obscene connections this group has made because of their unique skills. It’s not that most of the story being in a game takes away the stakes – I’ve seen it work very well in many other litrpgs – it’s that the losses suffered are minimal. Either unnamed NPCs get killed or someone who has been given very little time in the spotlight is killed which makes the loss ineffective. This is further undermined when characters joke about dying and respawning or go down suddenly just to be easily rescued by the nigh-deity level friends the group has made.

On that topic, while you can excuse the power levels of Brick and Alexander, it’s hard to believe that a person with Alexander’s background is as convincing and makes friends so easily as he is when he does really suspect activities like channel spells next to royalty he’s just met with a charisma score of 12.

I think the cast has vastly outgrown the predominantly single-person point of view the story is being told through. If we spent more time with people not involved with Alexander, maybe some of the deaths in the game and out of it would have an impact. The one player who was harmed outside of the game just left me with a “who?” question because, while his group was familiar, it was because of everyone else in it except him. If the story is to have emotional stakes, the person lost can’t be the one with the least character development. Hell, even Max, one of the primary party members, is barely developed beyond humorous greed and being an Archer with two skills.