While a lot of series tend to hit a lull as they proceed, this one was the best yet. The jokes are still actually funny (mostly, some of them are word-play, but the main character is aware that they are puns and the “joke” of the puns is that he’s annoying his companions with them), the adventure is still fun, and the progression is still a mixture of hard to remember or parse skill names that must exist firmly in the author’s head, but that I only understand through context. . . and yet, the combat is still fun. It’s a definite area for improvement, but not enough to bring down the score.
The only downside of this book is that sex is no longer off-page. Eroticism is great, but it isn’t one-size-fits-all and I found myself skipping ahead during the chapters that were about shared sexuality over a psychic bond with the MC’s dragon-daughter-twin-companion that is meant to have matured to young adulthood through leveling in the game but has only existed for a few months as well as the moments when the main character and his girlfriend’s sexual escapades became explicit. Admittedly, these sections are short and I’m all for romance and sexuality, but I don’t want explicit stuff (even brief passages) in an adventure story. I want to read about his abused girlfriend’s struggles and the difficulty of the psychic bond in relationship to sexuality, but I want the actual sex to occur off-page. Plus, there is a ton of foreshadowing meant to pave the road for the main character to eventually have sex with his dragon. Luckily, the main character is well aware of how creepy that relationship would become, but then the psychic bond thing happens and he’s turned on and it seems like the author is chipping away at the taboo wall to eventually reach Creep Town, but I don’t want to go to there – though others might and I will freely admit that if this was a story about gay male characters with the dragon being a gorgeous twink when polymorphed, I’d be ambivalent and interested in both potential outcomes instead of my current states of boredom and revulsion. . . so I’m willing to just skip ahead on this stuff and not hurt the score because I realize that I’m probably yucking someone’s yum.
So that’s a lot of criticism, but look at the stars. This is a great LitRPG novel that is highly entertaining and I include criticism not to scare people away but to try to make this glowing review helpful.