Clovermite

Not Much Happens

Revisado: 03-23-25

This book feels more like the denouement to the previous book than it does a book by itself. Not much happens to drive things forward, it just wraps up loose ends from the previous book and starts on a somewhat boring sidequest that comes out of nowhere and then cuts off before getting to any of the interesting progression I was looking forward to.;

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Started off Well but then goes off on a soapbox

Revisado: 02-05-25

Per my title, the book starts off well, but then it goes out of it's way to hamfist modern ideology propaganda into the story in a way that just killed my immersion.

It starts with a random character being introduced who immediately kills themselves, and many of the characters are all torn up about it for seemingly no reason. Jason and Henry it makes sense, it's part of their character to take responsibility for every random person that needs help. But Beze Eeby (no idea how to spell)? The boy grinned his face off at the first sight of Jason and Henry slaughtering people mercilessly. It doesn't make sense for him to have some kind of identity crisis in response to some random terran who called him a devil offing herself in the night while he was on guard. Ludus is a brutal world, you would expect him to be hardened to death, particularly against those who fail to demonstrate even the smallest amount of perseverance.

Then everyone but Henry and Jason go "bigot mode" against a cross dresser that shows up. You want to explore the idea of alternative gender expression and how people who do so face discrimination? Sure, but please do so in a manner more skilled than a high schooler blatantly shoving surface level allegory into their English writing assignment. And for the love of god, don't throw info dumps about well known, real life Earth religions into your fantasy book about a planet completely divorced from Earth culture. The Catholic church has zero relevance to the story as a whole, if the reader doesn't know what it is they can go look it up themselves. You don't have to subject us to boring, time wasting exposition about it.

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Great Story Despite Deceptive Marketing

Revisado: 01-30-25

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and I have to call out the dishonesty in the "Publisher's Summary." It states that MC is "not overpowered". This is a blatant lie. The very first ability the MC learns is not only the most versatile ability in the book, it is also capable of instantly winning a fight against basically any single target, including those who are conventionally far more powerful and more skilled. While this ability is not unique to the MC, his raw power with it IS rather unique, and due solely to his nature as an isekai protagonist. His version of the ability is about 100 times more powerful than anyone native to the world.

This isn't to say it's an unlimited power, there are some harsh restrictions on his use of it, which brings it down from "godlike, unbeatable power" to simply "overpowered, but with glaring weaknesses."

Anyway, enough ranting about the marketing. The worldbuilding is very good, and the voice acting is solid. This story leans more into the gritty brutality and nasty backstabbing politics type of story than the pure wish fulfillment kind of isekai. The main character is fairly intelligent and makes mostly good decisions. He is rightfully paranoid about revealing his secrets, but at the same time not to the extreme that he lets it completely get in the way of making forward progress when some small revelations will benefit him.

True to the title, the story revolves around his life being conscripted into a Roman style soldier company. While he does have the magical ability mentioned above, most of his fighting revolves around physical combat.

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Lacks Worldbuilding and Breaks Immersion

Revisado: 12-24-24

I listened for a few hours, but ultimately chose to return the book. Tao just really isn't believable as some kind of wise advisor that's been behind the greatest men in history. He first starts off singing the praises of how much potential the fat and lazy nerd of an MC has, only to then turn around and be surprised at the MC's struggle with learning hand to hand combat in only a few weeks to a month. His teaching method essentially involves just berating the MC and lacks any kind wisdom or insight you would expect from a character with literally millions of years of experience.

The author just doesn't know how to believably write a character who is as smart as Tao is supposed to be. nor has he seemingly done his research with regards to the programming terms he throws around in the book. It's clear that he's heard some of the words, but lacks understanding of them. He talks about a "java dump", and technically yes a "memory dump" is a real thing that a Java program might do, but no one would be printing out actual physical pages of Java code to debug a problem, and you don't resolve a bug in Java by "typing in a few commands," nor does java have "global variables."

His advice on talking to women was even worse. Saying "hi" is somehow "not charming enough," but allegedly "I've been working out a bit" is super impressive and so much better.

Some of this might be forgiven if the worldbuilding was really interesting, but from what I've seen that's completely lacking. The aliens aren't providing any futuristic technology or exotic culture or deep dives into unique biology (you get a little bit of unique biology in the beginning). Instead, the entirety of the world building seems to be "aliens are responsible for everything impressive humanity has ever done." And it's not like the aliens have already developed everything ahead of time and are passing on their advanced wisdom to humans, it's "oh actually anyone who did anything interesting was us telling them what to do as we figure things out instead of them." You can see my first paragraph for how believable that appears.

As for the performance, it's good, certainly much better than the story. I can't say it's overly impressive, but neither do I really have any criticisms for it. Mikael Naramore did a good job narrating.

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Originally Just Smut, Eventually Deep Characters

Revisado: 12-18-24

I came here from FortytSixtyFour's other book, Re:Trailer Trash because I absolutely loved the deep psychological character driven plot combined with the fantasy element of the time travel. I'd hesitated picking this one up because I feared it would just be a smut piece, but the other reviews seemed to be glowing and didn't mention that aspect. I almost dropped the book immediately because in the beginning, it was 90% porn style sex descriptions.

About halfway to three quarters through this book, it eventually starts to broaden out into the deeper psychological character writing that made Re: Trailer Trash good, though it never quite reaches that same high quality in this installment (the next book does, though it's still about 60-70% smut prose). I'm marking the score down to a three specifically because the ending of this book comes across rather predatory to me. While it's common for Royal Road books to cut off in the middle of events without a proper ending, this one ends on a such a blatant cliffhanger before any kind of story climax gets reached that I can't help but feel it is particularly malicious in comparison to other books.

So much time is wasted on just describing wet pussies and erect dicks rather than getting the story going that it never really escapes the exposition phase in this book. Now if you're explicitly looking for some smut, this is probably a perfect book, as the author's descriptions seem inventive and clever enough. I'm not really an expert on these things, but I get the impression that it's likely much better than your average smut prose.

If you're more interested in the development of the characters and plot, this installment will be rather disappointing. Part of me wanted to just walk away from the series out of principal for how early it cuts off, plot development wise. It would be like ending A New Hope right when Obi Wan Kenobi cuts off the alien's arm in Mos Eiseley without the main characters having even left for Alderaan/death star. I am glad I continued, however, as the second book is much better.

Aside from the ending, my biggest complaint is the author's overuse of describing thoughts and emotions as having color. It's excessive in this book and doesn't really make sense for how often and hard the author hammers it in. In the next book, it makes more sense, but in this one it comes across as if the author was trying to be deep but failed.

The next book is much better storywise - it gets much deeper into the individual psyches and issues of each character and expands upon the fantasy element so that it becomes more than just a flimsy premise and actually becomes more solid worldbuilding. So I'm rating this specific book as kinda average for its flaws, but anyone considering the series of a whole, the next book is well worth the investment even if you're not big on the smut aspect. You'll have to wade through that in this one, however, in order to get to the better stuff in the next one. I haven't read the third book yet, but I'm just about to start it.

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Suffers a Little from Sequel Syndrome

Revisado: 10-28-24

Overall it's a good book, and Connor does an excellent job narrating just as he did with the first installment. It feels a little short in content, however, compared to the first book. The first book established a large amount of worldbuilding while this book simply builds on that foundation at a steady pace and feels more like a setup for the next book than a proper episode on its own.

This isn't to say that it's filler material - the book is remarkably absent of filler, particularly for the cultivation genre. Neither does it contain any notable plot holes. It's both highly focused on a single adventure while simultaneously developing multiple subplots, with the lightest of touches, that will clearly be explored in upcoming books.

It just ultimately left me wanting for more in the same way that a midday snack can awaken your appetite more than it sates it. This is good in terms of continuing a well-crafted story, and disappointing in terms of providing relief from the itch for a substantial step forward in the plot. I look forward to the next book, as I hope it will deliver that larger chunk of plot development that I'm craving.

If nothing else, the book does an excellent job of increasing the stakes and hyping up future events. It also re-contextualizes a few events/conversations from the first book in a way that makes it clear the author had a clear vision from the get-go.

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