Which means this book is well edited, narrated adequately, and isn’t impregnated with the all-too-common, festering boil on the ass of LitRPG and fantasy titles on Audible… (for those not in the know), that’s the 13 year-old male, masturbatory fantasies inartistically and repeatedly rammed into the plot…
forgive the pun. Much like the authors I’m referring to I just couldn’t help myself.
It’s a testament to the state of the genre on Audible that merely meeting the three criteria above pretty much automatically guarantees a minimum 3 star rating from me.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of other problems that I had to overlook in order to get all the way through it.
In spite of the 3 star review I can’t say this is a “good” LitRPG book, it was just well executed in terms of basic technical writing quality and performance. Otherwise I can’t really recommend it unless your wishlist is bone-dry.
First, nothing (plot-wise) happens for about the first 10-11 hours. While there are a couple of “Interludes” that lay a little bit of the base of the story down, in terms of story progression or character development, NOTHING HAPPENS!
I won’t go through all the unnecessary things that the author tells us prior to the point where a story is actually begun. If I just start at the point where there is an actual plot, I can say that the book would be a typically average and inoffensive, middle of the road, Player collaborating with an AI, LitRPG book.
Sadly, even in the last few hours where the story begins to create some momentum, there are all kinds of holes in the story-logic and then the narrator chooses this point to become more hammy and melodramatic. In his defense though, he was probably just so bored of the book up to that point that he couldn’t help but get over-excited at the opportunity to do more than directly relate game mechanics and deliver “then they did this” narrative.
Finally, this author spends less time with any visual or sensory description than a trigonometry text book. I’m not saying I wanted him to wax poetic about the beauty of the sunrise or myopically describe the intricacies of a sword hilt, but common… We’re lucky if he tells us what time of day it is and whether the characters are inside or outside.
So all in all, in spite of the three stars I can’t say I’d recommend this, unless you’re like me and have listened to every single GameLit title on Audible that doesn’t include a harem, prose and editing a hamster would criticize, sex scenes as told by adult virgins imagining how great it would if the opposite sex wasn’t made temporarily impotent by a mere glance at them, or god-effing-forbid…. narrated by the true ruiner of every audiobook he touches: Mathew “the Anti-Narrator” Broadhead…
…seriously, anything but that.
On the other hand, if you are like me and just can’t face trying (again) to make it past the first 30 minutes of anything written by Schinhoffen, D. Davis, or Cipriano, or any other audiobook whose cover art features a minimum 2:1 ratio of semi-exposed breasts to pectoral muscles, then this is not the worst title to spend the credit on…. At least it didn’t make me truly angry that I spent time listening to it.