Stijn
Starts okay, but quickly falls off.
The further you get the less character identity the MC has. He's supposed to be a Necromancer, by the end of book 2 he's a frontline tank, melee dps, ranged dps, caster, crowd controller, affliction wielder, summoner and crafter all in one with summons that have their own broken set of skills
And then here's the time dilation training arc that completely removes the rest of earth out of the equation. Feels like the author already killed his own system.
First 3 books are solid fun, after that it drops off.
Classic YA Litrpg with an OP MC. Humanity is at war with demons MC is an orphan, gets rare magic, surprise surprise she's part demon, battle maniac, levels faster than anyone else,... you know the drill
Characters are fun, worldbuilding is simple but decent and there's an actually interesting plot. Writing itself is pretty bad for the first 20% or so of book 1 for some reason and then become solid.
After book 3 however the plot stops making sense . The entire reason for the war is gone and thousands are just dying for the fun of it. Kind of feels like the author wrote himself into a corner with the whole happy family and now has no clue how to solve it.
PS the covers are really bad and make this look like some harem catgirl series.
This reads very much as someone's first attempt at writing.
Overreaching plot is an okay but very shallow revenge plot with the main bad guy (presumably for the entire series) being our MC's brother with the personality of a generic third rate thug.
Writing is pretty bad with lots of spelling and grammar issues. Characters aren't great, woman are written terribly and only exist to be abused or saved.
Won't be reading more of this.
You know some authors visibly improve with every book they write? not this guy, he finds new ways to milk his already bloated series. Everything you've come to hate in this series got turned up a notch..
- Endless dao nonsense? Check
- Side characters that become irrelevant after this book? Check
- More bloated than ever before? Check
He fucked the undead chick and formed his core on the last page... there saved you 700 pages. Nothing else happens.
Solid series with pacing issues
Classic System apocalypse series where we follow a dad and his 2 girls becoming the strongest in the early days after the system's arrival.
The only problem is the pacing. Book 1 ok, we have the classic early dungeon where the MC emerges ahead of the curve. The dungeon overstayed its welcome, but whatever. Book 2 establishes the clan/base. A bit boring as nothing exciting actually happens, but ok now that the base is there, we can start getting the story moving. Book 3... nothing at all happens. A couple of generic recourse runs and hints of things that might one day happen, but nothing actually does.
If book 4 doesn't get things moving, I'm dropping the series.
ps. the coverart really sucks and doesn't represent the story at all. What sets this apart is our MC being a dad with his little girls, not him having a generic axe and some strange light squiggles. Where are the daughters?
- Cool Premise
+ Interesting world building
- Crappy MC
- Terrible buildcraft
So the basic premise is as follow: Earth is one of 5 planets that will be “inducted” into the multiverse (ie system apocalypse). Each of these planets has 5 people called forerunners who get 5 years of early access to the system to complete missions across the multiverse that will net their planet points. First planet gets to join the multiverse, the rest gets mined for resources. Our MC becomes 1 of the forerunners with 1.5 years left on the timer.
So imo this is a pretty cool new take on the genre. The writing is nothing special, but gets the job done. Now where it goes wrong for me is with our MC. I usually don't care too much about buildcraft, but this one takes the bad choices to a whole new level.
Our MC says he wants to a ranged support/dps hybrid, but pretty much only fights close range with a staff. He assigns his stat points pretty much randomly with a focus on charisma and mind, while barely using any skills linked to those and he constantly picks the weakest skills available to him
If this was any rpg game, he'd be the guy dying to the level 1 slime in the starter zone and honestly the only reason he keeps winning is plot armor. Completely broke any suspension of disbelief for me and kept pulling me out of the story.
Since they got their managers in book 4 nothing interesting has happened. They make a plan, everything goes according to the plan and they stomp everything. That's it. No twists, no turns, no story. Just listen to the manager.
The book is also padded to oblivion:
- Going into the dungeon? Here's 30 pages with POTENTIAL rooms and rewards, not the stuff they will encounter, the stuff they could encounter. It's an actual powerpoint presentation in a briefing room.... This doesn't mean it doesn't get explained again when they actually do encounter it and lets not forget when the managers on the outside have to give their opinion on it afterwards.
- Beat a challenge and standing in front of the reward crystal? Lets first discuss what we could potentially get and then go over the actual rewards.
- Found 20 random herbs and items? Lets discuss all their effects and uses before just chucking them in our lootpile and never mentioning them again.
- 3 or 4 chapters of about 15 pages each where it's just random unknown side characters' experiences in the dungeon.
We're 6 books in and there's still not even a hint of an overreaching plot or story. They're just endlessly stomping on faceless enemies with the only goal being reaching tier 50 for no other reason than that it's possible.
Won't be picking up the next one
2.5/5 for the entire series
So this series starts off okay. MC is a bit childish, story and worldbuilding are really simple, writing is okay. It's just a fairly generic OP MC making his way through the power levels.
My main issues with the series:
- The second realm (books 6, 7, 8 and maybe 9) feel like a complete filler arc. They're just clearing
out a place to then actually start progressing again.
- Except for her initial introduction - which was promising - Maylolee is one of the worst written
female characters I've ever encountered. She goes from badass warrior queen to a living sex doll
with the personality of a pet.
Main powers: stepping on things either barefoot or in stockings and changing her size... cmon. If
you want to write trash tier smut, just come out and commit to it.
Most boring version of the classic “Tournament Arc” I've ever encountered. If you read the first 4 and just imagine “Matt, Liz and tournament arc”, you've just saved yourself reading the book. Nothing interesting happens.
The main draw of a tournament arc is usually our main characters pushing themselves to their absolute limit, but even that is just gone with them still hiding their powers 5 books in.
On top of that the writing in book 4 & 5 has a big drop in quality and the good old grating litRPG tradition of endlessly repeating walls of text has become more common.
All in all, not a great read.
Great but annoying addition to the series.
It's a great book, with everything I've come to expect from the series. Well written with great action and I like the new characters and hopefully permanent companions.
On the other side, while the book doesn't read like it's bogged down, another full book inside the same dungeon was a bit much. Imo the first 30% or so could've simply been scratched and instead I'd have liked to have seen the story progress a bit further.
- Amnesia is never a good storyline. So many try, it never works.
2. Power system became a complete mess
3. The series completely forgot what it was about.
4. Zero is the most boring villain ever. So much buildup for such a pathetic dweeb.
First 4 books were simple but amazing. Diving dungeons, gaining levels and classes, finding items, fighting to protect those he cares about... Nothing groundbreaking, but solid good fun. 60% of this book is a strange depressed training arc/therapy session. The rest is endless villain monologues and it doesn't even get concluded by the end.
This book just pissed me off tbh, I doubt I'll pick up the next one.
2.5/5 for me.
I gave up during book 4
Decent writing and pacing, okay plot, non existing world building and character development, litRPG elements are an afterthought.
This series is just an endless string of semi-connected side quests. The story starts 6 months after System integration and so imo skips the most interesting part of this type of book.
There's barely any interaction with the rest of humanity. We spend most of the time with our MC and his companions in the jungle fighting random dinos following a loose conspiracy plotline that's honestly just not enough to keep this series interesting.
Cool concept, ends up boring
The concept of a human reborn as a sentient cultivating tree is pretty interesting. Besides that the story & characters are pretty cool, but the author never actually dive into this. Everything remains reactionary. MC is an immobile tree, characters remain only around this immobile tree and we're just waiting for stuff to happen.
The progression is extremely unsatisfying with a random slot machine system. No effort or breakthroughs involved. MC needs some corpses for points, rolls the slot machine and gets another SSS tier skill.
Book 1: 3/5
Book 2 3.5/5
Book 3: 4/5
Book 4: 4/5
Book 1 is by far the weakest link in this series, but I'm happy I stuck with it. It took about halfway through book 2 to really get me invested and I binged the rest of the series after that.
So the start got whiffed for me, but after that it turns into a fun adventure-cultivation story. The characters are great and continue being fleshed out. Storyline and writing are generally solid. MC's powerset starting from halfway through book 2 becomes pretty cool.
my main problems:
1. Her early power doesn't feel earned, just given for free
2. The core fix and resulting power were too quick and easy
3. The trauma of childhood with a broken core wasn't established enough, which makes the resulting
character development not work great.
4. “big bad guy” wasn't established enough. We don't really have any reason to hate the guy except
that the author tells us he's the bad guy.
Weakest one of the series so far. The last 20% or so were great, but this one dragged on too long for me. The gimmick on this floor was just annoying and we had way too many info dumps on this system, especially when it looks like it will be gone in the next book.
It seems like the overreaching story will finally start coming together soon, so I'm definitely looking forward to the next one.
Not sure if this is bad writing or bad editing, but it isn't good.
There's a decent - albeit generic- system apocalypse story hidden in here about a college kid climbing his way through the leaderboards to become one of the strongest on earth. There's an initial world-building phase, some kind of tournament that opens up the universe and a psychopath antagonist to drive the story. All the elements are here, but the execution is plain bad.
It feels like huge chunks of info were just cut out. Not sure if they were edited out or were never there in the first place, but it makes the entire book feel more like a highlight reel than an actual story. The skill tree system never gets a decent explanation and our MC keeps investing in random “skill leaves” with no noticeable effect instead of actually upgrading his abilities. There's references to training arcs and conversations that never happened...
My guess is someone went through the original, selected full chapters they deemed as not necessary, fully deleted them without adjusting and called this edited and ready for kindle.
Basic premise: Ancient lich necromancer gets reborn into his own world thousands of years later where suddenly a System exists. Our MC now has to figure out what happened to everyone he knew and get stronger.
We have an interesting premise, a pretty cool OP necromancer MC, the writing is decent but definitely could've used more editing.
The story is a bit of a parody on the generic isekai tropes in the sense that he comes across multiple plotpoints that usually would kick off a major storyline, but our MC just says “Nah not interested, don't involve me”.
And this would be great, but it's where it goes wrong for me
Instead what ends up happening is that we still get drawn into every single one of those storylines, but now without any of the background info, which makes it so everything ends up feeling shallow.
It just feels like a lazy way for the author not to have to flesh out his story.
It's still an okay read, but it could've been a lot better
Cool story an everything gets wrapped up nicely, but like with a lot of web-novels it suffers from pacing issues and doesn't have the cleanest writing. This series could've easily been reduced by half with some decent editing.
This last installment could have been a lot more interesting if instead of focusing on the big battle - which kind of fell flat for me - it focused on the character interactions during the final loop.
Made it ‘till about the 40% mark
This just isn't very good. The Pre-iskai stuff are interesting and well written, then we arrive in the new world and everything falls completely flat. Imagine the most generic isekai anime you can imagine and boom.
During the first couple of days the mc gets: super healing, strength, speed, intelligence, all knowledge of both earth and the new world, is able to control all elements and is able to create custom force barriers. All locals are pretty much npc's and barely question his existence...
There's just nothing interesting here.