Z

Likely dropping the series

Revisado: 05-05-25

There is a trend in the LitRPG genre, and it's the same one that anime fans are very familiar with--filler. The series started out so well, but now it feels as though it has devolved beyond salvaging. Get ready for constant interpersonal "development" that just feels like idle banter and conversation that goes nowhere, so many characters that you start to lose track of who is supposed to be important or just a sidenote, and a constant exploration of everyone's fEeLiNgS. What could have been an epic Berserker tale has instead become half slice of life half therapy session, with just enough battle to disguise and mask your disappointment. These types of stories start out with a promise, and the first book or two usually deliver on it, but this is one series that soon runs off in every other direction but forward, abandoning the audience and its promise to them.

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Not even worth the free listen

Revisado: 02-12-25

*Spoilers*
MC's motivation is to "be the best dungeon" and make his parents proud. No stakes, unless you count the risk of not being the best. The only real threat to the MC is a literal school bully and the lead developer of the game, except MC has plot armor against the latter due to his parents' status. Author constantly tries to tell you something is funny instead of actually being funny. Much of the early book is spent with the MC's teen angst over thinking his AI fairy is cute and then falling for her, all the while gushing over the personality they gave her and how "anime" the situations seem. Author obviously struggles with wanting to include pop culture references in a story set in something like the year 2142, and so is constantly making excuses for the MC to learn about said references--the author created the problem of his setting and tries to solve it in the most convoluted ways.

Imagine the following lines and try to guess if it's from the story or if I made it up while picking my nose (hint, they're basically the same thing): "Z sprinted toward the Dickens, shouted 'drop it like it's hot!' and hurled a fireball at its face, his party bursting into laughter at his exclamation. Rue tried to hold back a grin but fell to the ground laughing, holding her sides. 'What? I don't get it' James said, looking to his pixie for answers, then quickly turning away once he realized he could see more of her than she likely knew. Or did she want for him to see? No, no, none of those thoughts right now. Rue finally caught her breath, laughed some more, and then straightened up. 'It's a reference to an old song, and to think he basically screamed that while throwing a fireball, I can't ' Rue started laughing again. James made a mental note to find the song and listen to it while watching the replay of Z charging and then burning the Dickens. 'But now my Dickens is Kentucky Fried,' James pretended to whine, earning another outburst of laughter from Rue. He'd hoped she knew of the old restaurant chain, despite it closing down in the 2050s, and was glad the comment may have earned him some points with her. 'Want to bet that the party wipes on the next pull with Z shouting 'Leeroy Jenkins'?' Rue asked after calming down."

That kind of drivel is basically how everything in the story proceeds and it boggles the mind how it managed a decent rating.

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Disappointing

Revisado: 01-18-25

Take everything you love about "That time I got Reincarnated as a Slime," then throw it out the window. What starts out as pretty solid (albeit unoriginal) quickly devolves into sophomoric writing and storytelling. Characters have about as much depth as whatever exposition the author is trying to force down your throat at the moment, and the interactions and exchanges feel extremely forced and plastic. On top of that, the author must have forgot to prompt the AI to avoid using repetitive descriptors, because you'll often hear things like "I cast the fire all around me, burning everything all around me" and "I opened the door, the hall opening into a larger room" (these two examples aren't verbatim, just the most recent two that jarred me out of what little immersion I had). What's most unforgivable though is the absolute trash heap that is the audio editing. The poor writing is the author's fault, but I can't blame the author for the nails-on-chalkboard level errors the audio editors made. We're talking single word inserts where the narrator must have made a mistake, but instead of getting them to reread the line or passage, the editors just copy/pasted an audio clip of the single mistaken word mid delivery. It sounds something like this: "Oh, that's nice, you gained a level. I wish I'd gained--ALEveL--too, hardly seems fair" complete with the forced and terrible dialogue to compliment the editing error. Oh, and the other reviews aren't kidding with the constant stats--stats on a page are something you can skim over, but no effort was made in editing the page for audio, and less effort made in listener QOL with options to skip or making dumps their own chapters. I'd wager about 25% of the total word count is spent entirely on system messages, or at least feels that way. Combat? Better read that skill again. Thinking of something? Better read that skill again. Going to buy something? Better read that skill again. Were it on the page with proper formatting it'd be a non-issue, but having a narrator vomit system messages all over the place is messy at best. Do yourself a favor and save your credit, there are much better written and produced LitRPGs out there.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Fairly poor writing, annoying characters

Revisado: 11-05-24

Early on, the MC meets some goblins and "koblins" who speak and have names for things that the MC jokingly says are going to give him an aneurysm from having to listen to them. That kind of self-awareness from the author never made it beyond the attempted joke. The audience, too, wants to gouge their ears out with sporks at all the forced colloquialisms and dialect of less intelligent races. How the author could be aware of this and choose to keep it with an aside rather than rewrite it into something tolerable is beyond me. Enemies dropping "Gobby Coins" makes me want to throw the phone.

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Don't believe the 5★ reviews

Revisado: 08-06-24

When does the story start? All I'm hearing is unending chain of thought, but with all the dryness of a dissatisfied housewife contemplating whether she'll do the laundry or dishes first. The author has no real sense of character development and within the first few chapters alone drops you in what feels like the middle of a lifeless story, and everyone and everything is made of brittle plastic. How is the audience supposed to ever care about anything when all the MC does is prattle on and time skip, giving updates on what happened? So much telling going on, and what little showing there is isn't even really worth seeing. It's like what we're hearing is the author's cliff's notes version of a story that could have been interesting had all the story itself not been omitted.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Mishmash of everything

Revisado: 07-14-24

I really wanted to like the series. But it feels like the author was trying to achievement hunt by including nearly everything from every litRPG genre.

SPOILERS. Series title suggests it's about running a shop, but you quickly realize it's a.. mess of every idea rolled into one. We have cards, gods, divine cores, cultivation, ascension, magic (from mages), abilities (adventurer guild), dungeons, dungeon cores (and their associated concept after absorbing, via a choice of two), different energy reserves for each, also chaos. MC is a shopkeep for the first little bit, then a card collector with emphasis on time, then a portal user, then a dimension hopping time traveller, shortly after a god, then a cultivator, somewhere in there he became an illusionist (whose truth is reality is an illusion so he's basically a full summoner who can even create mimics of other gods at 2x their power), on and on and on. Basically give the MC every power you can think of, invalidate it a few chapters later after using it a couple times, then go on to give him even more powers, rinse and repeat. The whole thing was incredibly disappointing, and that's coming from someone who loves the genre, its tropes, isekais and op MCs--and I couldn't bring myself to ever recommend this amorphous blob of concepts. At the very end where the title of the book becomes the MC's idea for a system rework (oh, yeah, did I mention the system?) where he gets a new one constructed for the universe that revolves around shops.. that was a total slap in the face to anyone who bought into the series ever thinking it'd actually be about a shopkeep, when it's just a cliff note on the MC's bio sheet that's brought up once in a while when he's feeling nostalgic.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Too many side plots

Revisado: 06-09-24

I'm not sure why so many litRPGs suffer from this, but the stories start off strong in the first book and, in the case of Beware of Chicken, by the third book it feels like 90% of it is just filler trash revolving around side characters and their plots. There are so, so, so many characters in this story, and, not being a Chinese speaker myself, I'm often confused which characters are which. It feels like the author names just about every character instead of generalizations or titles. Nobody cares about the backstory of some guard, but BoC will try to make you emotionally invested in that guard. Idek what happened in the story anymore because it was just side plot after side plot.

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An incredibly boring way to waste credits.

Revisado: 05-01-24

As with many litRPG series, it starts off interesting, and then quickly degrades into slop. Not only was this one a particular snooze fest, but it became one by following the samey litRPG formula of "introduce more and more characters that nobody will care about, make them all have unique powers to stand apart as snowflakes do in that they are different but unbearably monotonous, and ensure that exposition is delivered through dialogue at every point as though the audience needs handholding because they can't think for themselves. Oh and be sure to abuse at least one trope such as the mc skill collector, the MC who doesn't have offense capabilities but finds ways to work around that fact, having a character or mc that everyone listens to when they shouldn't even have an opinion worth listening to on the matter, power creep and/or value creep where ranks and the worth of things quickly unravel because the author stopped referencing their notes so they could spit out another weekly chapter, filler chapters that are just incoherent banter or moral debate between characters, and making sure the word cacophony is in there at least a few times because evidently it can't be a litRPG without it." Better still to include as many of the tropes as you can. All the Skills? Pshh, All the Tropes. Do yourself a favor and pick something by RinoZ instead.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Still meh

Revisado: 03-23-24

Aside from my previous complaints of this series being very "samey" to many of the other litRpgs you'll find here, my biggest complaint with this installment is the poor pacing. If you're into nearly non-stop prattling on about fight scene details, then maybe this review isn't for you, but if you're into world, character, and plot development, get ready to be disappointed since well over half of this story is fight filler. It got so bad that I legitimately started skipping the fight scenes when I could, but then had to stop when I'd realized that immediately after that fight is another, then another, and another ad nauseum. It's a shame because I'm interested in what little of the world has been developed, but the characters are as two-dimensional as ever and there isn't enough time to develop anything more given the constant fighting.

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Did not finish

Revisado: 03-21-24

I'm sure there may be some good information in there, somewhere, but the book doubles as a thinly veiled advertisement for her works of fiction.

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