This is a good book, that kept me listening far later than I should have stayed awake. The writing is solid, and all around impressive for a debut novel. If you like Fantasy or LitRPG you won’t regret your purchase of this title. I’d recommend it most for fantasy readers who have some experience with RPGs. I will certainly listen to the sequel if one is written.

I would have given it 5 stars except for 2 glaring plot holes.

#1 – It reads like a fantasy novel with game elements imposed on it. I get that that’s what most LitRPGs are, but there’s literally no explanation for why people level up, have skills, and attribute points to spend. Usually in LitRPGs there’s a foundation of “We’re playing a game, and this is your life now.” or “You’ve been kidnapped by an evil overlord with a fondness for RPGs and has warped your perception of the world to resemble one.”

Is this a game or not? Why not just make it a fantasy novel where characters are imbued with branches of magic (classes) and advance their abilities via practice and experimentation?

The characters certainly don’t act like they are playing a game – they’re afraid of death, grieve for friends who have fallen, and there don’t appear to be any respawns. Dante doesn’t seem to have any memories outside of living in the world we’re introduced to and yet… Every so often people stop to spend points based on their experience to level up their skills. Where is this coming from?

We are often told that the protagonist is selecting tabs, and using some kind of interface, but we’re never told how he interacts with it. Does he have a little tablet like an iPad? Is it an illusory manifestation that hangs in the air like laser light? Does he close his eyes, and just picture this in his mind? I have no idea because it’s never described.

A lot of times we hear about instances where people are decapitated or cut in half, but there’s a distinct lack of description of gore. No blood spatters, no entrails spilling all over the place that someone will have to clean up (in the case of the arena). I can’t tell if this is because they weren’t there (as with most video games), or because the author didn’t want to describe them. Sometimes people are killed with painful ease (again, the same as in a game), but I’ve also read fantasy novels that weren’t LitRPGs where people die with very small effort made by the protagonist.

All of this leaves me confused.

#2 – The author goes to great lengths to detail how Dante’s glove absorbs his enemies’ classifications after every fight. At first it seemed like this was going to be a story of an OP protagonist that has an artifact that allows him access to every class in the game, but that’s not the case. Someone dies, the glove “absorbs the classification” then… what? Nothing. There doesn’t seem to be any point. He doesn’t seem to gain any benefits from doing this, so I’m not sure why there’s so much time devoted to explaining that stuff’s being absorbed.

I also wish that the title had more to do with the story. Yes the story is about Dante, but the concept of immortality doesn’t even enter the story.