This was a really interesting introduction that truly takes advantage of the medium. The performances are great but the material isn’t quite on par. This isn’t to say it is bad, it isn’t. The issue is mostly pacing.
I like the premise and the integration of music helps it take a much more novel approach to some well-worn tropes. It just feels like things happen almost conveniently and at a pace that makes it hard to be satisfied with the results in many cases. Fights either wrap up very quickly or are mentioned that they happened almost off screen with little fan fare. In some ways this is contrary to the pitfalls of the genre where things are strung along to the point that I have stopped series 60 hours in because nothing impactful is actually happening.
The counter point is I don’t have time to get invested in many events here and often wonder if my app messed up and skipped a chapter when I resume listening. A bad decision will happen only for it to be solved very easily within a few minutes so that the stakes are immediately gone. This happens so often I stop caring when something is an issue because it will almost always be resolved in 5 minutes. A proper tournament arc can be an entire book and here it feels like they take 15 minutes.
I would recommend this on the performances alone and it feels like a solid draft, just fixing the pacing would go a long ways towards elevating the series from a decent book to a really great one though. More time for characters to grow and learn and overcome setbacks would be nice. Instead we get the setup wrapping up in the course of a week with me being unsure about what their ultimate goal even is and what other tradeoffs they could have made. There seems to be no exceptional luck or skill with the main character either, so it gets confusing as to why every other person doesn’t just do what they do.