Pagma's Successor: Book 1 of Overgeared

I'm told that the early chapters of this series are rough and the later ones get a lot better, the main character gets more tolerable, etc.

I don't care. This was literally one of the worst books I have ever read, of any genre. Maybe I'll miss out on some amazing storytelling in Book 20, but there is no way I'm struggling through more books like this one just to get there. If I hadn't heard how much better things got I never would have made it past 10% in this one.

I am willing to believe that some of the problem is the translation from Korean, and cultural differences not being familiar to me. But if so, that stuff is never going to change. And just to make sure, I went and read snippets of much, MUCH later chapters on the site it comes from, and while they might be a little better, everything is still stilted and awkward and badly written. It did NOT get so much better that I can force myself to get there. I hated this book, I hated the game system, I hated the endless stat dumps that the author copy/pasted over and over again so that we were forced to skip 2-3 pages every time we saw the SAME item repeated, and I hated the cringy dialogue.

But most of all I hated the main character. He deserves every bad thing that happens to him, and doesn't deserve any of the good things that do. It is debatable if I'd rather read the life story of a vegan crossfit bicyclist that sells essential oils or more about this character.

All I can say is, if you like slamming your testicles/ovaries in a car door, then give this book a shot. Otherwise, save yourself a lot of pain. And don't listen to everyone that tells you how awesome the series gets. It can't be that awesome to justify going through who knows how many books of this crap.

Avoid at all costs.