Perrins2win

Wish i had picked this up along time ago

Revisado: 08-26-24

I've been reading Eric's Good Guys and Bad Guys series for a long time now and have avoided this one because I didn't want to get wrapped up in another set of books that didn't go anywhere satisfying for several books at a stretch. He has a tendency to write a lot of potential storyline without actually getting to the payoff. For his Lit-RPG stuff this is okay, but.

This book is like a whole other person wrote the book. Funny, engaging, funny, real, and did I mention funny. This is a series of stories tied together by a great heroine and has a very satisfying ending, though it is a cliff-hanger. That cliff-hanger does not feel like a bait and switch though. It just sets up future dramatic opportunities.

Best of all is the narration. This woman is awesome in this performance. It made me want to go out and find other stuff she's done. funny, well ranged, and the characters can be heard even out of the context of the scene.

Overall, a very good reading experience and even has good re-read potential.

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Left me wanting more

Revisado: 12-05-22

So, right up front, this is a relly fun book. Also right up front, this is a bridge book.

A bridge book can a really great and fun ride and this is that but for all of you out there who need the book to to be a long journey in every installment pause and wait for the next book and buy them both together.

For those of you who can handle an installment in a series like this that is just a fun episode of the good guys getting to show off their stuff before the climax happens, buy this now.

As ever the pacing is good and the cultivation is meaty. Travis is the man as always and nails this book as he almost always does. honestly I only ever found his narration flaggting when the material is bad.

Linden and the team spend this book taking all the steps necessary to set them up for the final showdown, just like it says in the blurb. Lots of laughs, lots of action, lots of twistiness. Love it.

My only complaint is the cliffhanger leading into the final book. but as prviously stated, that was necessary to the flow of the series and and it was done well. You aren't left hanging as much as left wanting more.

P.S.: listen all the way through the bloopers they are funny.

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Summary Doesn't do this justice

Revisado: 11-25-22

This was above average for the genre. I'm actually looking forward to the next book. There are a couple internal continuity issues that didn't get cleaned up in the editing but nothing that should distract unless you are reading for the sake of critiquing. I wouldn't have nticed without reading other reviews.

The summary does not give a particularly good picture of this book. It really doesn't describe anything past the first hour.

This is a really fun dungeon crawl. As in the father son duo get dropped into a dungeon crawl and it gets fun after that.

There is a little bit of unrealistic power leveling here that might annoy some of us that get irratated by that. But it stays within the lines of plot so no need to be put off if you don't have that pet peeve.

My favorite part is the crafting sequences and thought that went into them. a little handwavium involved but it's the good kind.

Altogether a good start with good potential for a new series.

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This is so Bad

Revisado: 03-18-21

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.

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Distressing Devergence

Revisado: 06-04-20

Okay, so, I was not kind in my initial reaction to this book. For quite a while I could not figure out what about it was so distressing to me. So I'm going to give the only warning I feel is actually important to fans right heare at the top.

The main character of this series is not Richter, it's Mist Village. If you agree with this sentiment you will be disappointed to know that this book does not include the village outside a quick "I wonder what happened to Richter" sequence.

What it does include is Richter in the dark confronting alot of knarly stuff that will often make you laugh. So if that's what you love then proceed.

Good points:
Richter gets on with his evolution on the path of a chaos seed and gets alot of entertaining new skills / powers.
There have been several questions about his development that have been left hanging previously that get resolved here.
Richter is moving out into the bigger world a little here.
the potty humor is strong here, so laughter follows.


Bad points:
If Crunchy is not your thing with Lit-RPG this is significantly more crunchy.
This one runs a bit more to the Deus ex machina than the previous volumes.
This is a man alone in the dark for a really long time and so most of the exposition happens in Richter's head and thus alot of tell with very little show. This might be frustrating for fans of the previous book's fun pacing.



Having said all that, Richter has always been portrayed as awesome and continues to show his awesomeness here I hope Aleron circles back around to the village and richter soon.

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Decent Premise, Flat Writing, Munchkin System

Revisado: 02-10-20

This is one of these situations where I'm trying not to say too many negative things. I might fail.

With that in mind let's start with the good. The premise of this book has potential and the system of gameplay and magic has great potential. The Author starts out right from the beginning telling the reader that the protagonist are getting all the help the gods can reasonably provide and that all the good guys want to hand them every advantage. So it is not a spoiler that both of those things happen. The emotional dynamic of the party is very nice and leads to good feelings. The variety of play styles and character builds represented by the party dynamic allows the reader to get a wide experience that play system and magic system.

That's all the good. I will not be saying good things about the storyline, , narration, plot development, or dialogue so with that warning read further if you wish.

The narration on this book is mediocre. He does a good job differentiating male from female and dwarves are definatly separate things but everything else kind of blends. Not bad, but nothing special.

I agree with other reviewers that the interparty dialogue is incredibly irritating. Real people don't talk this way. I'm not sure a single conversation went by without the use of the browski. This is not the only offense to the ear that occurs but is the most prevalent. This led to the narrator reading the dialogue pretty much like the characters were talking over voice chat during a gaming session. Which considering they are in a real world with real consequences made the party members sound like they were brain damaged.

It took me a long time to get over the intro for this book where the main characters without any exposition whatsoever accepted what was happening without even a pause. Most every reaction to every problem goes like that, which is where I realized that they actually were brain damaged in some way.

As for the plot development and game play execution. I remember back in my youth when I used to play table top games like D&D and Plainswalker type games. Every once in a while I would luck into a GM that just wanted to be like by everyone and didn't care if their games were interesting or challenging. With those GMs all you had to do was explain how a thing could be logically done and *Poof* Phenomanal Cosmic powers. I remember once ending up with a character that could instantly turn himself into an exact copy of a moon sized battleship to fight a space battle. And while that is fun to play sometimes it gets boring very quickly. Because no one has to be clever or work hard to win. Also, once you can do those things no matter how hard you worked for them you don't want to do them anymore because you want to see how much further you can push your GM. That's what this book is like. The characters seem to get a new very cool thing every other chapter but they almost never seem to use them unless they are those "And I used my ungodly hammer of unending might on balrog and he slinked away like a wussy" type moments. There is one particular spell that keeps getting used by throwing the equivalent of a grenade down monsters throats.

As for the character interaction, I can only agree with other reviewers in saying that I came to the end of the book and still couldn't actually name more than three of the six party members by personality or class type. I can't explain how, but they all seem to blend together except the main party leader. Maybe if the perspective switched occasionally it might resolve this. Maybe not.

Two last things just as a warning. As is the case with a lot of Indie publications these days And editor was not employed so there are continuity and logic issues peppered in here that you just have to brace yourself for. I keep hoping that Mountain Dale will help with this as they are consolidating authors but not yet. Second, and this is just a distraction based peeve, These characters are supposed to be ex-marines that have served in front-line combat. Yet, none of them seem to have grasped the concept of unit based combat and communication principles. They even mention this lack amongst themselves a couple times. Every time this happens in books populated by ex-milityary characters it gets on my nerves.

If you made it this far, I'm flattered .

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Stand-Out Beginning, Eager for more

Revisado: 01-29-20

First, The summary for this book and it's sample do this book a serious disservice. The Summary is accurate but minimizes the storyline and the sample makes this book sound stupid. I almost didn't buy this book.

I'm now extremely glad I saw this on sale and decided to try it out.

The world building and lack of exposition are the only flaws in this otherwise fun and very thought provoking tome.
The main character is a smart and very well educated young man who knows how to tackle a problem with thought and determination. and that's what he does here. That could be the subtitle for this book. "Doing everything the hard way"

I especially love the altered magic system he has to master because his bet makes it so that he cannot be given any advantage in the game. To give detail would be a spoiler. but, it's good and makes for a fun montage like chapter.

There is a lot of pop culture refs and genre specific refs in this that are kind of amusing but they are overly prevalent if that's not your thing.

I would almost have given this a five star review, which is very rare for me. except that the narration is a bit rough here and there, which took me out of the story. And, Though the premise is very clever and thought provoking, The author said and didn't show so I was hard pressed to keep my brain in it when not in the game. Basically, the Singularity that we all look forward to was turned into the greatest catastrophe in history by man's greed and inability to enjoy a good thing. You get all that but nothing else which wouldn't be a bad thing if the story didn't require so much time in the "real" world to tell the story so I kept waiting for more exposition and didn't get it.

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New Narrator, Very Different Experience

Revisado: 10-19-19

Yet another very good book in this series. But if you have listened to all the previous books this listen is going to be VERY different.

First to speak on the sotry itself, this is a good continuation of the trend of rolling this series into the Completionist Chronicles. More inights into the Mage and Spirit rankings of the Cultivation system. Some of which are pretty fun to hear. Barry and the Master continue to themselves. Cal and Dale become even closer and creepier. And the puns keep on rolling in. If you loved the previous books you'll love this one.

I gave this a three across the board because the narrator change really took me out of the flow. not because of luke Daniels actual narration but simply for the fact of Luke and Vikas are two very different guys when narration. I also read Desolation and Eternium back to back and that really punctuated the difference.

So basically, wait a bit between this book and previous one and do a couple palate cleansers to avoid the abrasive difference.

That having been said, Luke Daniels is an awesome narrator with lots of voices and personality. The primary difference here is in method. Luke does a lot of differentiation using accents and Expression while Vikas does his differentiation using mostly tonality and personality. This causes a lot of differences in how the characters come across . For instance, Madame Chandra is now French and Cal is now a middle aged guy from Wisconsin. These things work after a fashion but are hard to hear when compared to Vikas's delivery. Also, Rose is Irish and Hans is from Jersey/Deleware. Actually, Hans's new voice really works for him. One Major improvement is actually the voice used for Tom, he now actually sounds like someone of a norse/Viking heritage and that really does a good thing for him.

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Entirely a transition Novel

Revisado: 07-12-19

I love Michael J. Sullivan's novels. I Love Tim Gerard Reynolds Narrations, in this and his other projects. You should not red this book until the next one comes out..

I was really looking forward to both reading this book and hyping it by giving it a great review. I am unable to do that.

Unfortunately, this book never really got off the ground. there is a whole lot of what I would judge as important plot movement devices here but nothing ever comes to fruition. I kept waiting for one of these plot lines to go somewhere and accomplish something but none of them did.

Important characters started development arcs, The war progresses without accomplishing anything, and several hints are dropped about future developments, and then the book just stops.

I'm Absolutely positive that the next book is going to be stuffed to the gills with awesomeness, but this one seems to be just a setup for that.

With that warning delivered. The content of the book was fairly good, though not up to the author's usual standard. The characters, with very few exceptions are two dimensional. People do things without any real exposition as to why they would do that thing. People are either deliriously happy or riding on the horns of soul deep conundrums without any real shading. A lot of that is understandable of you have read previous novels in the series, but not really all that much within this book.

Usually, I have to fight to put down one of these books from this author, and I wanted to do so with this one. But I have to admit that I found it easy to do so whenever the real world intruded.

And Lastly, lest I neglect to give the big kudos where it is deserved. Tim Gerard Reynolds was awesome as always. seamless character transitions, strong differentiation, and powerful engagement styling.

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Well Executed Primise

Revisado: 07-07-19

Nice Example of the Post-Apocalyptic Lit-rPG. The sample for this book doesn't do it justice. Then, Neither does the Summary. The whole thing basically starts with the Protagonist trapped in a dark whole when the world ends. But worry not, the system does a real good job of explaining it to him like he's a five year old and better yet, he's a gamer so no culture shock there.

I like that the system here doesn't grant the "players" the traditional short-cuts for getting started in a game world. This really feels like the world has ended and the living who survive get cool powers based on the kind of person they are. The Protagonist has to find fire, food, and ultimately shelter while fighting evolved monsters from his environment. He eventually finds allies and starts to tackle the larger world. Very satisfying fight mechanics and group interactions so far. I look forward to seeing what the author does with the story going forward..

To address some of the bad points. This is indeed an example of the "Man blessed by Destiny" archetype. The main character is quickly and repeatedly identified as a hero that will save humanity who skills cannot be equaled even among his counterparts on other versions of Earth. This is fun for some people and goofy/unsatisfying for others. Go into this book knowing this and you shouldn't have anything to complain about.

The Narrator, Luke Daniels, is awesome as always. It's hard to tell the male/female apart in the beginning but that might be just a choice on his part and you get used to it and it's corrected later.

And Final note, And I only mention this because you need to be prepared. The game system for this book is not stat oriented. It's entirely skill oriented. Imagine Materia from Final Fantasy 7 crossed with skill trees from Final Fantasy 10. you only hear stats twice in the entire book. You do on the other hand hear the skills and their upgrade info A VERY GREAT DEAL. Honestly the system is a good one that should have resulted in the reader not having to hear/read those experience updates as much and I think in the written version this probably worked, especially since you can skim in the written version. But this has resulted in the audiobook being a little tedious in this area. It is entirely necessary for the story that you hear these things so it's not bad writing or anything. But you need to understand this going in and just deal Or said another way, Don't read this unless you find the mechanics of RPGs fun enough to listen to periodic character growth updates that must be understood for the plot line.

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