I stumbled upon this book as a recommendation after listening to some LitRPGs by Jeff Hays. I enjoy all of the soundbooth studio recordings so I thought I’d jump into this one without much thought. The performance of the cast was great, but the actual story is a mess.
The rest of this review is heavy on spoilers for book 1 and 2 so stop reading if you are actually enjoying this book.
This is story is a LitRPG so it’s going to follow a lot of basic clichés. The first is the obvious “How did they get there?” and for me this is how I judge a good LitRPG. This is the backbone of the story and why anything even matters in the game. The reason in this book just feels lazy and almost an afterthought. The main character has a degenerative disease, so his dad (aka Richest man on the planet and owner of IO online). The whole actual VR version of the game before “Immersion” isn’t even actually described. Well anyway, the dad somehow makes brand new cutting edge technology to combat the disease, but it’s also a full Immersion pod and the dad has dozens of these things ready to go in secret. Now the dad wants to put the MC in the chamber with all his buddies and basically give them free rides in life to play VR games with his son. I’m sorry this is just lame, boring, uncreative, ugh. There’s literally nothing locking the MC or his friends in the game. Which is fine since it’s something different and enjoyable to see both sides of VR and real world. But to have them just kind of play in the game having fun, but causing issues for everyone else is like wtf this makes no sense kind of setting. Then there’s virtually no difference between characters that are in full Immersion to those who are not. They all act the same in the game without any notice of them being on vastly different systems. If that’s not bad enough, the only perk they really get is the ability to alter spells in which they backtrack on that right quick when side characters are altering spells. The whole setting is just weak.
Now I can live with some plot holes here and there, but a shifty main character totally ruins books for me. For starters the MC is the game owner’s son and he takes FULL advantage of that in the worst ways. Literally the main problem in the book is created when the main character gets PVP ganked and he gets sadly about it. So he calls them out as being trolls and griefers, but has no problem locking them down and spawn camping them down to level one. He literally traps the players and tortures them.
oh there’s a major issue with this before I continue. most, if not all players, earn their living grinding in the game and selling items on the marketplace for real cash. So the MC took a regular everyday gank and then decided to manipulate the system and spawn kill players down to level 1 effectively putting these players on the street in real life. Then he goes about bragging and talking endless shit to these people. He even goes as far as to publicly shame an entire guild for 3 players and make them public enemy number one using in game exploits only he knows about by being the devs Son.
The rest of this book is this piece of shit whiny rich kid who’s exploiting the system (and even being called out by the systems) and ruining the lives of hundreds of people and their families. Ge goes as far as to get people called terrorist who are just playing the game in a PVP way. Then he gets his dad to call the FBI and arrest these people in real life. Worst of all is he manipulates the players into incriminating themselves and ge records it all and makes a media campaign to make things waaaay worse.
so yeah. the story is about a whiny rich kid who’s the biggest troll/ griefer who constantly gets away with it. I can’t even finish the second book, I just can’t stand the main character and his sheep friends. cheer on the rich kid or we won’t get anything out of it.