I’ve always had a soft spot for books about RPGs come to life, and that fits this book pretty well. The main character is an ordinary young man with a superpower that lets him upgrade anything – complete with points and character sheets out of an RPG. His power is useless, though, because he has no power source – until he ends up accidentally owning a superhero slave and his power starts to rise exponentially. By the end of the book he is, for all intents and purposes, a god.
The audio performance was great. The voices were easy to distinguish, with a host of characters that all sounded distinct. There were also sound effects, like when the main character spoke over a speaker, that sounded good and didn’t break immersion. Would definitely listen to this reader again!
The storyline was… meh. Even as a guilty pleasure, it was underwhelming. The main character and his harem were engaging characters, mostly – except for the times they stole the souls of enemies and then turned their corpses into sausages. And I’m not exaggerating – it comes up at least half a dozen times, and is just plain creepy – it reminds us that the main character isn’t actually a nice guy, which bothered me throughout. That’s par for the course in the novel, where nobody is a good guy, even the Guild of Heroes – with one exception, one of the slave girls. Everyone else is uncaring at best, and awful at worst. There’s also a lot of gore in the book, especially at the end of the book. A few times it got a bit much for me, but I do have a weak stomach, so you’ll probably be fine. There were also several anime and video game references that got old fast. The book was trying to be clever by throwing in references to Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, but it sounded like the author was trying too hard. Finally, as a lot of reviews have already said, there are frequent times when the character pulls up a character sheet and we get treated to 30 seconds of reading a spreadsheet out loud. It gets old FAST, and you probably get 20 minutes of it throughout the book.
Storywise, there wasn’t a lot of plot. Most of the book read like playing a video game: the main character bought more slaves, upgraded his lair and deepened his relationship with his harem. It was fun to read, but lacking something. The plot has a mysterious enemy attacking the main character throughout the book, but it lacks something, because he’s simply too powerful to be really challenged. And that brings us to the climax of the book. The ending of the book is abrupt – I was shocked when the epilogue began. Worst of all, it doesn’t actually tie up the plot threads very well! There’s even a scene, just before the epilogue starts, where the main character himself wonders aloud at questions that don’t get answered in the book!! As the reader, you’re left thinking that the whole point of the plot was implausible at best.
But, well, if you can get past the problems in the book, it was fun – I just can’t help thinking that it would have been better as a video game you could play.