This story started out with good potential. A college student with a zoology major playing a game about Beast and Monsters. An interesting turn where he may have an upper hand able to use his studies to his advantage in this game but this book doesn’t really do that often if at all.

He seems clueless on some of the most basic things, and surprised by obvious things when it comes to a field he studies in. Both characters though they are saying they are extremely smart, but the choices are not at all indicative of that. The quickness of how they stop being the smartest in the room is astounding.

This comes down to the weakness of this book in general is how it is written: The Main Characters are not allowed to be wrong and nothing is at risk. If they are wrong everything does right the next attempt. Also nothing in the game world matters. Until they fight the pyromancer did we get any hint someone was trying to bring magic from the game into the world but even then they aren’t doing anything that high stakes. They log in and can log out whenever, leading to the time dilation between the game and their real world not making sense as what should take 4-8 hours gaming they manage in an hour irl time by the sound of the one time we get something close to a show of how much time passes.

That is the biggest failing of the book from the start. Art picks a Paladin class, a class that is centered around light and holy power. He gets upset and doesn’t like it when the game punishes him for not playing right. You picked it! The game and those around him, told him he needs to stay with the light, and pick light based creatures to keep on the right path. He actively ignores this and instead of starting over with a new character/role to not be locked into being light based and just picking up the beast again before he got too attached and claimed it.

But the writer instead of letting him suffer for his choices, or be SMART for one and pick a new class and rushing back to get his ideal partner. The writer did too much bending the world to make sure he hardly had any problems. Unlocking a new class no player knew about, and the world of the game had forgotten about just so the MC could be the perfect balance he wanted. But still does evil shit 95% of the time, and never EVER goes into the dark alignment when he clearly should have. But no give him a class that gives him best of both worlds that hardly has any draw backs.

I don’t think I will listen to the rest of this series unless I have NOTHING else to listen to. And even then I would try to avoid it if possible. Not worth the time honestly, which sucks cause I had very high hopes for it. Not many LitRPG stories where the MC plays a none-human race.