Narration was good, but sometimes (very rarely) the narrator does the wrong character voice, it sounds like. Not a big deal. He does a decent variety of voices, and no one sounds very similar. A solid performance.
The characters are all interesting. They’re not particularaly deep, but they do evolve a bit as the book goes on and you see a bit more sides of them. The highlight os definitely the character interactions. They play well off each other enough that even pointless bickering between them is entertaining. The cast is really small for most of the book, but the characters that come in later add much needed variety, since before that it’s really just 2 characters, and one of them is an axe.
The story isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s loads better than most lit-rpgs. The protagonist isn’t a Gary Stu, he isn’t OP, the only real advantage he’s handed is the axe, which is a nice advantage, but definitely not game-breaking. The fact that everyone in the game knows he has said unique item and he drops it when he dies makes it probably more of a burden than a boon in the long run, actually.
I also enjoy how (in book 1 at least) there’s no “catastrophe” sorta thing tbat goes on. No glitch in the matrix, no ai’s going boners or bugging, no trapped in the game stuff. I mean, the protagonist never leaves the game, but that’s by choice, and it’s nice to see that sorta levity in the genre.
That isn’t to say there’s no stakes though. There are times when death means losing nearly everything, which for the protagonist may as well mean death with how invested he is in his progress.
I also enjoy how the story doesn’t have characters who are inexplicably cruel. Even when people are against the protagonist, there’s a solid reason for it. There’s no contrived verging-on-psychopathic characters gunning for the hero. I’m not big into Lit-rpg’s, but the few I’ve read almost all had a villain like that so not seeing one is nice.
All-in-all, this book was a pleasant surprise. It’s not my favorite book, but it’s a fun read and I don’t regret spending my money and time on it. I was iffy on whether I’d continue the series, but the additional characters near the final act was just what was needed to convince me. I’m excited to see how the character relations are handled when the sh*t really hits the fan in book 2. If you enjoy action mmorpg’s you’ll probably enjoy this book. Unless you hate when characters bicker. There is a lot of bickering between the protag and his axe.