Age of Forged Steel

There are many things I like about this series, and many I don't.

In the “don't like” category, how absolutely stupid do you have to be to find yourself in a “System” universe and constantly, intentionally, ignore your notifications?? Matt does that all the time, and it is often something really important or really helpful. After a couple of times you'd think he might get a bit better at it, right?

I won't get into more details about some of the stupidity of the main character, because I want to talk about something that I feel must be true, as crazy as it may sound. You see, a couple of years ago I read a few of these terrible harem books called Backyard Dungeon, and aside from the vast amounts of cringe inherent in harem books, the biggest thing that annoyed me was how EVERY fight scene was essentially this: “The fucker came at me. I dodged, and shot the fucker in the face, then spun and kicked the next fucker in line.” Basically fucker fucker fucker. Completely unoriginal and lazy, and while I am certainly no stranger to that kind of language, it just got to be so obvious and annoying that I couldn't take it anymore. In my mind, even if your protagonist is callous and rough and uses language like that, it is still incredibly lazy of the author to write like that.

These books do the EXACT same thing. All the time. To the point where I am now convinced that both authors are the same person. The Backyard Dungeon guy has apparently written over 200 books in like 5 years, somehow, so it wouldn't be a stretch for him to have tossed in the books this author has done as well. I don't know how someone could write 200+ books in such a short time without it being obvious AI, but it is uncanny how similar the fight descriptions are in both series, and I have a hard time believing two different authors are inept in the exact same way. Like, I'm positive you could swap fight scenes between the books and no one would notice a change.

That being said, I still like this series, whereas BD sucked, so I'm not trying to crap all over this series or say not to read it. But as more and more fight scenes stack up with exactly the same wording, over and over and over, I couldn't help but make the connection. Is it true, or am I just seeing things? Who knows. But I'd like to know if anyone has ever seen the two of them in the same room together!