Fair warning, some examples may be used from the story, so spoiler warning.
I’m constantly looking for new series to listen to since my current day job forces me to commute a significant distance from home. In doing so, I consistently look for duet (male narrates male characters, female narrates female characters) or fuel cast or in this case multiple narrators narrating multiple characters with one narrator, Jeff Hays, being the main narrator but it’s not necessarily a full cast. So, let me get this out of the way, the narration of Hays and crew is great. No issue there.
Here’s where the issue lies. I saw in the marketing and some reviews on Royal Road that this is compared to Dungeon Crawler Carl, which although it’s not without its own issues, I enjoy and would recommend based on a person’s specific tastes in what they want to read/listen to. Unexpected Hero, I would not put on the level of DCC for a variety of reasons.
First – While DCC injects comedy into the story, including dark comedy, it’s mostly balanced out by the fact that it has a serious plotline working behind the scenes, even if you feel the plotline is absurd. It’s there. Even each installment has a plot that it’s following for that book along with the overarching plotline of figuring out how to overall survive the dungeon crawl and/or topple the dungeon system used by the alien overlords. In the first book, Carl and Donut gain a purpose – survive, fight, get stronger, figure out what’s going on, etc. And they make moves to do that.
Unexpected Hero lacks that. By the chapters into the late teens the MC is still bumbling around and whining about being isekai’d. One of the Royal Road reviewers dinged this story because they felt MC didn’t have a decent reaction to what happened to him in the beginning which I don’t have that big of an issue with. Authors wanted to move on. I get that, but the problem is MC doesn’t REALLY move on. He’s constantly bringing up his old life, MILFs he barely interacted with outside of singing at their lady’s night at a local dive bar, and his past that we never got to see where he was in a rock band that according to MC, got swindled by an agent and a record label and broke apart. The MC doesn’t take time to figure out the system, figure out any abilities he has, or learn about the world. No, he blurts stupid things out and the system tells him after the fact why it was historically offensive and typical of Westerners isekai’d into another word, MC harbors some “better than” social-political ideological views. But, they’re not that bad, but typical of what you’d expect of someone from the US getting downloaded into a Middle Age-esque society. He lacks drive to get better. No, the first chance he gets he makes a deal to magically get better which makes no sense since in his previous life he was actually a musician. Authors make him suck in the new world for the comedy. Which brings me to my second issue.
Second – Everything is made out to be funny even when it isn’t and MC is the but of nearly every joke. As I said, this drains the balance out of the story when everything is a joke at the expense of the MC. He’s not heroic, you think this might be at least at first, but nope, he’s the trend of the cowardly bumbling into success MC.
He’s also an idiot. Authors think constantly bringing up his low IQ stat justifies some of the stupidity. I mean I had to take a break for a while when MC’s big-brained idea to deal with rats in a basement of a building made partially of wood was to set the rats on fire. Really?! Back to him blurting out stupidities, that too is excused because authors bring up low IQ stat, which should’ve been buffed by a permanent buff MC had so his IQ should be working at a 14 instead of a 4.
But the overwhelming problem is that MC is the butt of all the jokers and a constant whiner. If the MC had some redeemable or acceptable traits, it would make his unacceptable traits more tolerable. This is often how idiot characters are done well. Their foolishness, if it’s the highlight of the story, is balanced by other traits. Think Dumb & Dumber, while both characters were meant to be idiots, they were also likable because the leaned morally good and definitely didn’t whine unless the story called for it.
Your mileage may vary.