This book was a very pleasant surprise, what looked like your average male gamer wish fulfillment, turned out to be a very compelling and intriguing ride.
Narration: Jeff Hays is amazing, plus the addition of audio affects and a guest star makes every character feel unique, easy to distinguish, with appropriate sounding voices.
Settings: most of the story is your average fantasy world litRPG although there is a part at the beginning that shows a world much, darker, and creepier then you would expect out of this kind of book, which makes you feel there might be a bit more behind this setting then just “guy gets teleported into a video game.” But the main world feels very surprisingly flushed out, with established history, political factions, and complex non generic races and cultures.
Characters: the characters aren’t incredibly deep or complex, but they are fun. And the main character is a bit more then a sword wielding good guy fighter protagonist. In fact he is much more of a clever tactician using guile and bending rules to get things done, which I always have an immediate liking for the more guile orientated protagonists. His side kicks are fun and diverse, but not too terribly deep (at least not yet), but they’ve got a good group chemistry set up that it’s just fun to see them together.
Premise: one of the things that surprised me the most is how dark and creepy this book got. It started with the premise of guy being sent to video game world with the caveat that he was sent there as a villain “raid boss” character as opposed to a Normal heroic player character. So the character started out as aligned to the evil faction or “The Dark” as they call it, which sounds really cartoony and cheesy. But when you see what some of “The Dark” is composed of, it’s not cartoony mustache twirling evil, but straight up nightmare fuel horror. With the character that transports our protagonist being something straight out of a creepy pasta. Not to mention some of the monsters in this world. some are basic video game bad guys like giant spiders, but then some are surprisingly dark and disturbing monsters you’d find in a Horror novel. And it is AWESOME, the author makes “The Dark” actually feel alien and scary, which because our main character is technically aligned with them, makes it much more intriguing that he is technically a “villain” within the world. And what is even better that even though the two factions are called “the Light” and “The Dark” you get the feeling that they aren’t really so black and white as we see examples of “the light” being merciless, and “the dark” be surprisingly reasonable in its logic. And it comes together to hint that the story is much deeper then the genre and title may originally imply.
Plot: This book feels like the first season of a really cool Tv show. Meaning it gives you a complete story Ark, but not a complete “story”
We’re introduced to all our main characters, given a few big conflicts ,challenges, and character developments, and all the immediate concerns get wrapped up by the end. But there is obviously so much more to explore, the characters keep mentioning far away lands, nations, cultures, and factions that are just begging to be explored. And the big giant questions and mystery’s that are introduced at the beginning, are still hanging over the story just as as mysteriously at the end. This is a book that was obviously intended to not only have a sequel, but seems to set itself up for 4 or even 5 more books. That being said I felt this book was very well paced, and with Jeff Hays Narration just plane fun to listen to.
Flaws: I’d say the weakest part of the book is it’s characters, not that they are badly written or uninteresting, in fact they are really fun and have great chemistry it’s just in a kind of “guardians of the galaxy” way there really cool, but kinda shallow, don’t get me wrong their given a lot more depth and complexity then what I originally expected from this book. But after seeing the author hint and foreshadow at how much deeper and more complex the setting, story and premise are than “guy gets sent into video game.” I kinda expected a bit more from the characters (which I may get in further installments.) but for this book their fun and interesting, but the rest of the story seems to say it’s going to be so much more then you’d expect, so you kinda feel like the characters should be as well.
Finally the only thing left is that there is a sex scene. Don’t get me wrong I don’t have a problem with sex in books. Hell, I actually love to see books handle sex in a mature and even explicit way (like Game of Thrones) as I do believe it can play a legitimate roll in story telling. And the main reason authors usually choose to fade to black or simply imply it is because they feel people might say it’s not “classy” or that it invalidates the rest of serious nature of the story for some reason. But this just kinda came out of nowhere, and it also doesn’t actually go anywhere either. It’s like the author was like “oh! I need some sex, to make it seem like a more mature story” but then couldn’t decide if he wanted to go for semi-erotica level description of it or just fade to black, so he did a little of both. And to be honest I am fine with either just pick one. But then a little bit after it happened, they just invalidated the whole thing, as it didn’t serve to change the nature of the relationship between the characters whatsoever. There’s a lot of reasons to use sex in books, to show a relationship dynamic between characters, maybe as legitimate plot event to impact the story or characters, or even just for the simple fact to rustle your audiences jimmies. But this did none of these things, and as such feels completely out of left field.
End: 4/5 highly recommend it, can’t wait to see what the author will do with it next.