Barely made it an hour in and had to stop.
3 major reasons forced me to put this book aside.
1. The MC is apparently well educated, intelligent, and has a steady job. then learns he can make more money playing a video game then working, so he quits and does that. then when he is betrayed and forced to play a new character, that source of income is endangered. That should be a good set up for why his situation is so dire. except the book flat out tells us that he has had years making money on the game which allowed him to make multiple investments while still having enough liquid assets to live comfortably. which given his supposed intelligence and education, should mean that he has a significant nest egg saved up. that combined with him having no debts, no family, and no health issues means that there is zero immediate real world impact to his situation. He can just find a way to make money from the game in a new way, or use his supposed high intelligence and current wealth to play the stock market. Worst case scenario he has to go back to working a regular job. In short loosing his game character sucks, but isn’t actually a big enough deal for the reader to feel any sense of crisis for the MC.
2. When he finds out that continuing to play as his new character could literally fry his brain he decides to chance it just so he can try and get revenge on the people that betrayed him. This brings potential real world consequences to what is essentially a couple of people being Dicks online. Because again, he is totally fine and can just play a new character. If he is truly so invested that he is willing to risk real world consequences for revenge, then his actions make even less sense. Being the supposed Intelligent person he is, combined with the fact he knew the people that betrayed him for years. It should be simple for him to find them in the real world. So if he is hell bent on revenge, it would make more sense to go after the real person, not the character in a game.
3. this one is a common trope for this genre so its not that big of a deal, but it always bugs me when i see it. The whole in game gold is exchangeable for real world money makes no sense. Why are people paying real world money to players in the game? The developers offering items or skills to the players for real world money makes sense. or people paying to watch a players livestream. But major corporations or rich investors paying real world money to Joe shmo so they can learn to cast a fireball seems ridiculous.
Review from Life Reset: A LitRPG Novel →