William B.

Protagonist is a braggart

Revisado: 10-08-24

The story is solid except that the writing is really poor. Every other paragraph is "this is beneath me because I used to be super powerful". half the book is just the protagonist saying how good things used to be or bragging about how strong he used to be. VERY stuck in the past and after 18 years being powerless has not come to terms with it at all. The writing is really odd because of this.

Oleg Sapphire tends to write characters that are overpowered and also very morally black and white. If anyone wrongs the protagonist or even is rude to them then they deserve nothing short of death. If they're nice they can live and often have riches showered upon them.

Overall his writing gets tedious. This book should be reformatted where the exposition of the protagonists past is structured as flashbacks or largely left out. It would be MUCH shorter.

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Lots of stats and skill sheets.

Revisado: 09-26-24

The amount of time dedicated to talking about stats and skill sheets is not for me. If you like that stuff this might be for you. The story wasn't anything remarkable and turned into a slog with all the skill sheet tedium added in. The narrator is great, but the material is not. I think audio is simply not the best format for this book.

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Fun premise, terrible execution

Revisado: 07-01-24

I can’t tell what’s worse, the narration or the writing. Every male character is either a crazy, depraved villain or has same personality. Same for the females. Lots of sexism is built into this. Lots of erratic behaviors that don’t seem realistic even in the context. There are lots of weird sexual moments.

The narrator reads with the same cadence and information the entire time. Characters all sound the same. I was struggling for a time deciding if the writing was bad or if the narration was bad. It’s both and they magnify one another. I got tired of listening to the narrator because it was so formulaic how he read.

I barely made it through this and would not recommend.

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Really bad, can't power through this one.

Revisado: 12-17-23

This book is bad, the plot is all over, the characters are odd (in the worst way), the narrator isn't great. I'm only a few hours into reading it and here are some examples:

Beginner quests are to go get beaten up by training masters so they can direct you to where to learn, but they are largely uninterested in actually teaching you. Main character shows up and they're all suddenly fighting each other to train him. The whole interaction was just weird.

Main character joins random party he meets. They learn he is a new player and tell him how important knowledge is and how it's carefully guarded for power. They then proceed to give him all the knowledge and later are willing to give him info on the most guarded secrets with very little effort on the main character's part.

Main character meets a master and starts learning. Has trouble with a challenge because he can't produce enough force. The serious answer that everyone takes very seriously to this problem is "hit harder, hit faster". Such wise words.

There are a couple moments that made me feel sleezy. The main character (or author) is definitely not a well adjusted individual and some of the ways women are written about made me uncomfortable and cringe.

Usually I can power through a book at 2x speed just to give it a fair chance. But I just can't. This is just that bad.

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Sorely in need of an editor

Revisado: 05-02-23

All the characters are caricatures of their professions or have no personality at all. The engineer is the only one that could possibly understand anything science related. The accountant is the only one that could possible understand anything with numbers (unless those numbers happen to be science). A CIA agent is somehow also saluting and calling the protagonist (a civilian) sir. He immediately tries to take charge, but then concedes control when he is beaten in a fight because they sent him in with zero knowledge of how games work (that was really dumb). And they're all geniuses in their one area, but useless outside of it. There is a weird theme of gamers being misunderstood that is brought up an annoying amount (I say that as a gamer). The CIA agent is referred to as "the spook" what felt like constantly. I didn't know that was a word of CIA agent until this book and now I hope to never hear it again. All character interactions were cringey or unrealistic. Most of the time it was hard to listen to the love interests interact.

The overall story was interesting and the world I enjoyed. The characters were all written terribly. An editor was badly needed.

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This is bad. Writing is bad, no plot.

Revisado: 01-16-23

This book is weird, pretty cringey in spots. Would not recommend. Definitely skip this. The writing isn't great with a few phrases that the author sticks to and overuses. There isn't really a story to speak of. All it is is a guy getting really lucky and everything working in his favor while you breezes through life. This same guy will make sure the reader knows how hard a life he's had. It's all weird.

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Performance is pretty good

Revisado: 06-27-22

The story was great. It was very satisfying to watch a street urchin ride up. The narrator sometimes was pretty cringey in his delivery, but overall good.

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Great dialogue and progression

Revisado: 06-16-22

The story makes sense, nothing is super convoluted. Dialogue is actually good. Stats are a little long but they’re all in one place so it’s easy enough to skip. An enjoyable read and a great start to the often overlooked merchant-route in video games.

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Not sure who this is written for

Revisado: 06-15-22

This feels like it’s young adult or maybe for tweens but it also has adult themes that feel forced and inappropriately placed. Not sure what’s up with that. Overall I never got invested it never really felt like anything was happening.

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Incredibly bad, idiotic book. Skip it

Revisado: 06-01-22

This book is really horrible. Like really really bad. It's a fantasy litrpg masquerading as a sci-fi book. These elements were crushed together haphazardly and poorly at best. Things that make zero sense as a scifi book and zero sense as a fantasy book are shoved in to make the "plot" work. There are random and arbitrary limitations on the progression of the MC that make no sense based on the set up. There are things called matter converters that can take in matter and convert it into other matter. You can put in random stuff and get totally different stuff back. There are inefficiencies in that you can put in 25 units of A to get 1 unit of B back. But there are random glaring holes in this to make the plot advance. They can make food and other organics easily, but crystals the MC needs to progress? Too complicated. That's just one example.

I listened to this whole thing largely on 2.5x speed to give a fair review. It never got better. The stats chapters at times are +20 minutes long and you'd think having stat chapters would mean you can just skip them and not have to listen to stats, but no. Stats are in most chapters outside of the stat chapters. Overall it seems like the information is superfluous and simply there because the author has a weird thing for stats.

The author has a weird thing for swearing too. Right away it is obnoxious and juvenile because the MC's assistant is swearing literally every other word and it feels like the whole time it is supposed to be funny? It's not. This disappears a bit after the first book, but it's never entirely gone. It's awkward and clumsy.

Anytime anyone in the book has a significant other they will call them "My love" every other sentence. Annoying at best, cringey at worst.

I really wanted to like this because the premise is interesting and there are some interesting ideas, but the execution is so bad it was near torture to listen to it.

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