I think I wasn’t quite the target audience for this story as I found myself more laughing at the plot and setting than thinking “wow this is cool.” There was a little bit of that too, but ultimately the story felt very, very silly and like a goofy adolescent male fantasy. I might have liked it more if I was 20 years younger. The writing was good for what it was, though, well-paced and evocative. I can’t decide if the casual and shallow lifting of ideas from various cultures is problematic or just a faithful representation of how JRPGs often depict that sort of subject matter. All that aside, I’m pretty impressed with the narration quality. Both voice actors demonstrate very impressive range and characterization, their tone always, always fits the narrative perfectly, and the music and sound effects sound *incredibly* appropriate for a video game, even if that along with a few other story elements felt odd to me in a book. Honestly I am at times bad at identifying parody and I can’t tell if this is meant to lampoon its subject matter or not. If it is it deserves a much higher rating than I’m giving it here.