I’m on my second listen, and I love this series. The narrator is, well, not my favorite, but he is definitely not the worst I’ve come across on audible either (Hit up Travis Baldree, man reads litrpgs and cultivation novels like no other.) The story though is really great. I’ve seen people complaining about various things, and I wanted to touch on them a bit.
WARNING!
This review will contain spoilers, if you want to know if I recommend a listen, absolutely! If you’ve already read or don’t care about spoilers, read on.
1. Alex’s character progression: I’ve seen people say it felt anti-climactic for him to seem to be making progress then just fall back into his psychopathy. Well, I think you’re wrong. Alfred IS trying to cure Alex, or heal him him, whatever, but Alfred also has no idea what he is doing. And while we see what seems like Alex making some progress in game, the final scene where he seems to snap is out of game and the worst we have seen his psychopathy throughout the whole series. I don’t think this is an accident. People are chalking it up to bad writing, but to me it makes perfect sense. Alfred failed, maybe even making Alex worse. In game it seems that Alfred is limiting his psychosis by shutting off the external voices in his mind, or trying to (though it still slips through, because like I said, Alfred doesn’t know what he’s doing.) In that final scene where he’s out of game, he gets fully triggered by seeing Jason, the lowly, hated Jason, overtaking his accomplishments once again, and we see more than just an audible hallucination this time, he sees his mother physically manifest. We’ve never heard of him having visual hallucinations at all before, so this definitely marks a huge regression in his condition. Basically, even with Alfred having all the knowledge of psychology thanks to Jason giving him public access to the network and even though he has so much information about the human brain, Alfred is still just bumbling around trying to do his best to accomplish what may well be impossible. Of course, later in the series, Alex does continue to grow throughout the series (and I’ve seen teasers for apocalypse, which as of writing this is still a few months out, and Alex and Jason will be working together to some extent, proving he does grow further still.) so I wouldn’t write him off just yet, but these early days seem to me to just be Alfred failing to cure Alex.
2. Another complaint I’ve seen is that Jason is overpowered. He gets directly nerfed in the next book after this one because Alfred is starting to think so as well. I actually think his class would be fairly balanced on most players, but Jason is just that one guy that will break anything if given enough time. Having read all the currently released books and side quests, I can confidently say that pretty much everyone’s classes seem over powered, but the chosen of the gods all are Jason type people: intelligent and crafty and more than willing to break their builds for the advantages they will gain. I mean Riley and Frank are also very op, you just haven’t gotten a chance to really see them grow into their classes yet. But I think that’s kind of the fun of the book, and of AO as well, if everyone is op, is anyone really op?
3. I’ve seen people say that AO itself is very unbalanced. This is true as it is very similar to the real world. It’s not some crazy crit mechanic that allows a level 1 to kill a level 100, it’s called slotting someone’s throat. I’ve seen people say with this mechanic no tanks would ever enjoy the game. I think this is crazy, what would make a tank not enjoy the game is the mechanic that by being exposed to damage/damage types is how you gain resistance to it. A tank could develop resistance to piercing or slashing attacks and blood loss and might well survive getting their throat split, especially if they can quickly heal. Also, again this system is based off reality, so all we need do is look at reality (loosely and with magic involved) to see what happened. And what do you know, we still had knights in armor, archers, medics, etc. despite the fact that a person could just stab them in the throat to kill them. Crazy, right?
I’ve seen more complaints that I wanted to combat, but those are the big three I think, and this review is plenty long enough. AO is certainly not perfect, but it has earned it’s title as one of the best litrpg series to date and is well worth the read. I do actually suggest a bit of deeper thought though instead of taking things at face value! Sometimes things aren’t always what they seem at first glance, and my second time listening through these books is showing me that.
Also I wanted to note the actual most unrealistic thing about the whole story: that Alfred exists at all. How can a group of such intelligent people think it’s ok to release a possibly sentient GAI on the world who’s one primary directive is “make a game people want to play” with no real metrics to even measure what people want to do? It’s honestly silly, but if there is one criticism of this book I can’t refute, it’s that the adults in the story do the dumbest things and hardly act like real people save a select few characters, so I guess it fits in with the world building.