When the narration started, I thought “oh, this doesn’t sound fitting at all”. By the time I got just half an hour in, if that, I thought “I have never encountered a narrator so good and so well-matched to the story”.
Baldree differentiates each character with their own voice so well and so appropriately that I can’t stand to listen to lesser narrators any more; his cadence and emphasis are also top-notch, completely natural and often making what might have been a mild chuckle or a brief “hm, cool line” into something hilarious or resonantly awesome.
As for the book and the series… there’s nothing else like it. I haven’t found any litRPG book I like, and the translated-from-Chinese cultivation stories can be interesting but are still (so far as I’ve read) not nearly as captivating.
The worldbuilding is fantastic and I’m still hungry to know more after nine books; mysteries are revealed slowly but regularly and everything always makes sense and often gets you excited to see more. Watching the characters grow, both as characters and in power, is addictive and satisfying, and after a while of following a character Wight will sometimes give you a brief glimpse of them from another character’s perspective — and it’s amazing to realize how much they’ve changed without you (or them) realizing.
I also love that the morality of the world and the protagonist are not unrealistically goody-goody and black-and-white. I love that the main character doesn’t balk at grasping for power, and that the desire to attain mastery or rule is not treated as somehow inherently evil in and of itself.
Absolutely fantastic. Just try it. it wasn’t anything like the books I usually read, but I’m so, so glad I gave it a shot. 1000/5 stars.