I bought this title based on some glowing 5-star reviews, but I just don’t see it. For the first 10 hours or so, the story is ABYSMAL and I had to force myself to keep listening time and again. The reason I hated this story for so long is simple: the two lead characters are very unlikable. The main character (MC) is a rich, spoiled man-child who uses his lavish wealth in the opening pages of the book to lock the rest of the world out of a head start into the game universe. This creates world-wise animosity towards MC which is only enhanced when he is also given a unique item which is simultaneously unhelpful and designed to encourage other players to kill MC and loot the unique item from him. This creates the key source of drama for the story where it’s essentially MC vs the entire rest of the world, only MC is not nearly competent enough as a player to remotely manage that sort of challenge. At no point in the story does MC acknowledge that he messed up by turning the whole world against him or try to change his trajectory. Instead, he seems to feel entitled to the prestige of being the foremost player in the game, apparently by virtue of being willing to drop literally tens of millions of dollars on it. It’s a sickening level of oblivious entitlement accompanied by stumbling incompetence and ameliorated only slightly by a vague sense of wanting to ‘do the right thing’. Then, there is the other lead, Frank, a talking axe which is meant to be a guide to the game universe, yet is almost incapable of providing any useful information to MC aside from generally pointing him in beneficial directions. The information the axe is able to give is gated by it’s owner’s level in-game, so, the axe is really only able to perform its intended function for other players who are lower level than MC, but MC plays solo until more than halfway through the book! I think Frank was meant to be comic relief for the story, but the one-note personality of the AI (it hates magic and the MC wants to play a mage) became aggravating after the first scene and never let up. The combination was a mediocre player being led around by an incompetent game guide with the axe seeming to serve little point aside from shouting out system messages containing the type of information the player should have access to in any case. The game seems designed in such a way that EVERY player should have a guide of Frank’s capability with them, otherwise, I don’t know how other players are meant to get along or interact with the game; but we never see how other players play the game, so it’s not really a problem for the book, just poor design from the author.
The game itself is blatently World of Warcraft. There are MANY instances of game mechanics that are just lifted straight from the game, including boss dynamics for raid bosses near the end of the book. It’s hard to fathom how technology could have moved to the point of full sensory immersion, yet people are still playing games based around timers and cooldowns. The author presents a confusing mix of NPC’s enemies which at times he wants to portray as actual people and at other times wants to portray as game sprites and pre-coded dialogue. The MC literally wants to abandon real life and permanently live in the game, and I can’t imagine why someone would want to do such a thing when you aren’t consistently treating the people in-game as real people nor even want to really interact with other players. The MC is called pathetic at multiple points in the story, and I can’t help but agree with his detractors for the most part.
I spent the majority of the story waiting for MC to die or get punished, and while he does technically die a couple of times, it’s never to any great consequence, and he acheives his goal in the end. I really don’t know what the author intends to do if MC dies and his magic talking axe is taken from him, so I don’t believe that the author will ever let that happen for any real span of time from this point onward.
While the story does improve drastically as soon as MC starts actually playing with other players, it’s too little and too late for my taste. And even at the end, MC seems intent on continuing with his ‘Me vs The World’ attitude and keeping other players at arm’s length. For a game like an MMO where success is founded on collboration and cooperation, it truely is pathetic. I have no interest in continuing the series from this point.