There were so many issues with this book that I honestly don’t know where to begin. My brother actually enjoys this series, and suggested I give it a try. So I understand that others can/do enjoy this storyline. However, in my opinion, there were WAAAAAYYYY too many character flaws, inconsistencies, and logic holes for me to find it enjoyable. The only explanation I can come up with for it is the editing/revision phase was rushed; as in numerous changes were made to how an individual section would play out, but certain excerpts were not updated to fall inline with the new story. This was painfully noticeable in the lack of consistent counting (killing 8 enemies and then killing 3 more does not equal 10 dead enemies, and killing an additional 4 after that does not equal 12 dead), but there were also a notable number of sentences that just seemed completely out of place. Aside from the distractions from the inconsistencies, the main character was frustratingly difficult to ‘believe’ in his character. He is (supposedly) a professional gamer that has dedicated the last few years of his life solely to playing this single game, where he has made a name for himself as one of the most – if not the strongest – mage player in the game. He made a name for himself early in in the game by becoming the first player to manipulate mana – allowing him to develop his own spells. Then he is betrayed and is forced into a race-change – causing him to start over from level 1 as a goblin character. After coming to terms with his situation, deciding that he would build up this goblin character, and “learning” the mana manipulation skill as a goblin, one would logically expect him to start training his chatacter to use as many low level magic spells as he was aware of; let alone developing new ones from all his accrued knowledge/understanding of the game. Unfortunately, that is not what the mc does. I was utterly dumbfounded when he went into his first 3 battles with a single spell in his arsenal. He eventually teaches himself how to generate a mana shield, and then miraculously forgets to activate it before entering battle (this seemed to happen more often than not). There were even a few instances where he even deactivated his shield, mid-battle, for no apparent reason other than to allow him to take damage and make the situation seem more dire. In another (low-level) situation, he stumbles upon a “Dyre Bear Cub” in the forest, and decides that it would be a great idea to test out a new ability on the cub. I’m not sure how any experienced player could read the name of that creature and reasonably decide to attack a bear cub, without first getting a look at the mother, unless they were actively trying to die. In essence, this “professional” player seemed to lack a basic understanding for game strategy/mechanics, and seemed to only make decisions that would nearly kill his character or endanger one/more of his clan members’ just to make the story “more suspenseful.” Truthfully, there are several other major issues that I won’t touch on because they’re potential spoilers and I honestly don’t want to devote any more energy to this review than I already have. There were just too many distractions and red flags for me to actually enjoy this story, and I have no faith that they’ll be remedied in the subsequent entries for me to continue with this series. If you think you can get past all the distractions then I am envious, but otherwise I would advise exploring an alternate series.