Sadly, I couldn’t finish this. It had a strong start and the author has talent; however the main characters are university students that have the reasoning skills of grade schoolers with the emotional intelligence to match. If the author would have just taken out the needless cursing, which thickens in the middle, and the gag about erectile disfunction and made the characters high-school students, this would have been an excellent young adult book. I’m dumbfounded as to why the author decided to have all the bad words and aim at adult audiences.
If you like litrpg, the skills and leveling system is far in the background and is never explained. Instead the alignment of your class is central to the story. And magic is just system created stuff that is totally random.
If you like entomology, you are out of luck. The main character imagines he has special insights into beasts (which are almost completely missing from the book) because he studies animals, but he literally thinks camouflage is something others can’t understand and even fails to identify his pet making a cocoon. Even the second character thinks the MC is a complete loon when he tries to trick some animals by acting like them.
The killer though is the lack of any stakes. They enter the world via a brain-computer-interface and can quit at any time, which means the main character is descending into madness the whole time. This makes the book a lot like the old Tom Hanks movie about DND. I imagine if I kept listening the character would unplug but think he is still playing the game and start killing people in real life.
The MCs do almost absolutely nothing but follow system generated quests. Without the characters having some special personality or spark that propels them to greatness, the story just falls completely flat. Oddly, when they finally do go off plot, they go in like Rambo with a sliver of a plan before losing all reason because the villain sings Johnny Cash and locks his pet in a virtual cage.
Finally, Travis Baldree, the narrator, is awesome as always, but this works against the author as Baldree correctly reads the MC as a delusional, whiny toddler who is in desperate need of a time out or some psychological help.