First of all, I have to say that I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed this nearly as much without the absolute over-the-top great narration by Jeff, with a little help from Annie.
I passed a series by a bunch of times because I thought the concept sounded kind of dumb, and I read some of the negative reviews that spoke about a lack of personal development or backstory (as opposed to character development, which is literally most of what goes on here). Then, I found Jeff doing the cold read of book 4 on YouTube, and I ended up watching all three long episodes of that, and really found myself enjoying the book, not just the hilarious narration.
So I came right to Audible and dropped a credit on the first entry in the series.
And I am glad I did. While for the first half of this book I did agree with some of the reviews that said we didn’t hear enough about Anthony’s backstory or his Emotional development, and instead just got battles and progression and grinding and that sort of character development, by the time I got to the second half of the book it began to become clear why that was.
Because it turns out, what we don’t know if the beginning, is that he was a 15-year-old kid. And his home life was not anything that he would care to really remember. So it’s not very much of a surprise that he doesn’t ruminate on the life that he lost, or The family that he no longer has, or any of that: he didn’t really have that much to lose.
With that perspective in hand, the whole series makes a lot more sense to me, and I was able to enjoy it more once I recognize that.
Enough has been said about what the story contains, that I don’t really need to comment on that. It’s fun, it’s mostly lite, fast moving litRPG. If you enjoy that kind of stuff, this is worth a shot. And again I really can’t say enough about Jeff’s narration, he totally goes all out for this thing.
The book is pretty stats heavy, and I can’t say that I actually like the comment before every big stats section, that tells us we can press the skip forward button a few times. In later books this turns into: you can press the next chapter button. Jeff tries to change it up so that it sounds a little different each time, but generally I’m smart enough to figure that out and don’t need to be told that every chapter or every section. Just tell us that at the beginning like they do with the Jonathan Brooks Dungeon series, and leave us to our own devices. Literally our own devices, we don’t need to be told how to get past stats if we don’t wanna hear them, at least not more than once. It’s a little too… fourth wall breakie for me.
But enough about that. There is an interesting story here, and while there is a lot of giddy character growth, there is enough meaty plot to care about as well.
Recommended!