Where does Dungeon Lord rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
Based on performance and production quality, this is one of the best audiobooks I’ve listened to. No steady monotone reading here; the narration is dynamic and the voices used to differentiate the characters really bring them to life. The story itself starts out with a very entertaining scene of players interacting in a raid environment – stupid DPS pulling early made me genuinely laugh in a “been there” sort of way – but then moves on to a really forced, WTF scene where the main character assaults his boss (who was the stupid DPS in question) when the boss punishes the MC and another character over the in-game events. Now, maybe having the MC smash his boss’s face was intended to set him up with a dark side and make him “dungeon lord” material. Maybe it was wish fulfillment because the author had a boss he wished he could punch. I don’t know; the upshot was that it made me think the MC was an idiot with anger management issues, and I very nearly dropped the book right there.

Fortunately, the assault and subsequent arrest is a very short sequence, and the book quickly moved on to the fantasy aspects of the world. Which were interesting, but good god that was a huge info dump that could have been handled better (and which was saved by the narration, which was excellent even during the boring parts). And while the story is a good-not-great portal fantasy, some of the actual gaming elements that make it LitRPG felt pasted on. The author could have written much the same book without the game trappings. Making the mechanics more central to the story would have made it a better LitRPG book; dropping them entirely would have made it a better fantasy book. As it is, the story seems a bit unfocused and doesn’t really pay off, but the entertainment value of the narration kept me listening to the end.