i purchased the next book in this series at the same time i purchased this one, if i hadn’t done that i would probably not get it after listening to this one. i still plan on listening to the sequel though.
the performer did a good job most of the time. he put inflection into his voice and showed emotion without being too over the top. i didn’t like the fact that the voices of the two main characters were so similar, i had a difficult time telling them apart. also when the performer did accents it was sometimes difficult to understand what the characters were saying.
Sometimes this audio book comes across as a decent adventure novel, other times it comes across as a game of dungeons and dragons played by immature high school geeks.
the two main characters are supposed to be a combat veteran turned EMT and a programmer (author never says what kind of programmer) that are in their late 20s. when they are talking to each other, fighting monsters, or planning the dungeon raid i can sort of believe that. when they are talking to the two females in the group or about females in general they come across as high school teenagers. for example the subject of cat-girls comes up way to often. the first time was funny, none of the others were.
the female characters in the story are worse. they are only kind of fleshed out and only seem to exist in the story as love interests for the two main characters. they do have their own backstories and personalities. one of them is a shallow reflection of a star trek vulcan (including the pointy ears) the other one comes across as a tsundere straight out of an anime. at the end of the book they are capable of defending themselves, they just start as helpless damsels in distress needing to be rescued by the two heroes, and then follow the main characters for the rest of the book because reasons? i am not even going to go into random comments about there being more women then men in the world the book is set in even though most of the characters they interact with are men.