Pleasantly Surprised!

I’m a huge fan of RPG video games and anime, so going into this book and reading the synopsis, I was very familiar with the architecture that makes a story like this function due to my both good and bad experiences with Isekai (Another World) stories with similar game-like world building attributes such as ‘Sword Art Online’, ‘Log Horizon’, ‘Jobless Reincarnation’ and ‘That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime’. In addition, I have also consumed (listened through) both ‘Ready Player One’, ‘Ready Player Two’ as well as watched the movie based on the book series. That being said, I wasn’t expecting this story to please me as much as it did, fearing that I had reached a sort of burnout on these sorts of stories.

If I may be critical, I wasn’t too pleased with the constant status updates, but I eventually began to look forward to them. Perhaps more challenging for me, was some of the early plot twists, at first, that is. Allowing each the first act’s twists and turns to take their course yielded unexpected fruit as the story progressed, and rather than become bitter about the sudden disruption to my expectations as I moved forward, I was thoroughly pleased with the book overall, whereas notably, some other readers/listeners have allowed this to END their trek through stories like this and other titles.

Once, I realized that the nature of the story that was being told was changing (for the better) as it moved into the second act, I had already lost track of time. Before I knew it, I was midway through the book and I couldn’t help but become more engaged and deeply invested in the main character and all that he was attempting to accomplish with the world building being perhaps my favorite aspect of this story, second only to the fun and steady character development achieved by our down-on-his-luck Goblin ‘hero’.

I can’t wait to dig into the next book, which I intend to do the very instant I finish writing this review. One down, four more to go!