Ther is not an exciting moment in this entire book. Even when the MC is fighting this book is boring.
The premise of this book sounded interesting and it was on sale so I ignored the reviews. That was a mistake.
First of all, and the badness of this is a matter of taste, this is the crunchiest most stat packed Game-Lit I ever heard. The format of these stats was probably not bad in written form. Very skimmable. But that very character of skimmability makes them torture to listen to. Also, those stats are close to half the length of the book.
Secondly, about half the remaining half of the book is descriptions of mech battle and mech battle mechanics that make the idea of giant robots firing magic missiles and body parts at each other incredibly boring. I didn’t actually think that could be made boring but it was done here.
Lastly, The Main Character of this book has spent the eightish years prior to the beginning of this book playing this game. since the beta in fact. and is just now discovering that if he wants to be good at it he will have to work hard.
The less than 25 percent of the book that is nominally storyline is filled with him telling everyone and himself that he sucks and just can’t do it while literally everyone else he meets tells him to “stop being easily discouraged”. He teaches his roommate to play and the roommate tells him how to train like an intelligent person. He meets someone who has started playing recently and she teaches him how to properly customize a mech.He meets his game idols and they all tell him that if he actually tries to figure out what he’s doing wrong he’ll get better. I put that one part in quotes because it is said so often that it should be the subtitle of the book.
All the while he is constantly pointing out to himself and everyone else how much and in what ways he sucks. I’ve had these people as friends. At some point they stopped being my friend because they were exhausting. This is what reading this book was like.
But, The narrator was pretty good. He did what he could with the material.