RPG brought to life

If you have ever played a Role Playing Game then you will be familiar with the concepts brought forward in this story. Definitely rooting for the protagonist.

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A Collection of Awesomeness

I'm a huge fan of Alexey Osadchuk and in my opinion, his works are underated. I just finished book 6 and am impatiently awaiting 7. Epic event after epic event increasing only in scale this series never ceases in filling us with excitement and anticipation. You can expect to see this wimpy kid grow into a respectable man full of ambition. Thank you Alexey!

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Reads like a Young Adult Novel, listen to sample!!

I'll start by Disclaiming that the book is from a Russian author, and has been translated to English, so perhaps some of the repetitive language, and simple sentence structure is what caused some of my issues, but that said, you'd think a good editor would have caught just how flimsy the writing is before it made it this far.. oh well.
I also want to say that I'm halfway into book 2 because I had hopes it would get better, but it never does.

Like the headline for this review, the whole book reads like a Young Adult novel, very simple use of words, very simple sentences and stuff like 'I would have never thought', 'when i heard ___ I immediately _____' , 'my heart was ready to jump out of my chest' used so often you can set your watch to it.

This is made worse by Derek Shoales performance, He exacerbate the Young Adult feel by over-acting every emotion and sentence in the book, PLEASE do yourself a favor by listening to the audio sample before buying this book. If I had thought to do so I would have never bought it, it's pretty terrible and never gets any better, even into the second book.

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1 person found this helpful

Another great book!

Love the book. Already read it in boom for but had to pre-order it in audio cause it was just too good a book. Looking forward to reading the next one.

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Main character needs an overhaul

The premise of the novel is good, in my opinion. The structure and delivery though, is done somewhat poorly. Although to it's defence, the novel does have a translation tag. That being said, I've read tons and tons of translated novels, especially CN and KR novels. So the translation tag doesn't hold much water when it comes to shifting blame.
Ok, enough of that. My biggest gripe with this novel, is how the MC is portrayed. He is read as a teenager or possibly a young adult, but interacts with the world as a 5 year old. This wouldn't be bad, assuming that he actually IS a 5 year old. I'm not sure if his age was mentioned and I just missed it, or the author just glossed over the details when writing all the cringy backstory. The problem is that this novel clearly gives off the impression of being PG-16, or at the very least a PG-13 type of novel. So the MC behaving like a child fresh out of kindergarten is very, very, very annoying.
Something that also upset me pretty badly was the progression. There was absolutely zero progression or character development up until chapter 14. This was halfway through the entire first book! The author literally had the MC sloughing through mud for half the program doing nothing but reliving his miserable past, and equally dismal present. It took a whole 2 and a half hours on 2x speed just to get to the actual beginning of the book...Uhm yeah, maybe I should reduce the rating to 2 stars after all that...
The narrator was pretty good though. His job well done goes a long way to diminishing the novel's failings 👍.
Would I recommend this novel? Well, even with all the shortcommings, I would still recommend it. The idea behind the novel can somewhat make up for all the obvious nonsense at the start. This is of course providing that you can just ignore the brain-dead MC, turn off a portion of your brain 👀, and continue listening. Overall, I'd give this work 3/5 (mainly because of: premise, narrator's performance, action, and hope). I can only hope the 2nd book has a miracle going on for it 😪.
P.S. The system seems quite convoluted.

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1 person found this helpful

litrpg 4 the win

I love rpg's and this one does not disappoint I'm at book 3 now and decided to comment on the first one to tell you guys it's a good one for now!! time will tell for the rest

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Unsophisticated LitRPG

Ukrainian author Aleksey Osadchuk offers a disappointingly immature story about 'Eric "Ric" Bergman' - an incredibly naive recurrently exploited/bullied Level "Null" NPC forced to make his way as an indentured slave in a cruel world at the age of 14 and progressing from there.
The game mechanics - involving loot drops of "experience essences" & "characteristics tablets" - are interesting but never really fleshed out, the characters are cookie-cutter predictable ("good" or "evil", with no "in between"), and nothing particularly attention-grabbing occurs.. even after the story FINALLY gets going in Chapter 13 (the action is well-scripted and cinematically described, but the pacing is subpar).
The limited vocabulary could potentially be blamed on translator Andrew Douglas Schmitt.. but regardless, the prose is amateurish (a high schooler in a Creative Writing class could have generated this book). I wasn't left impressed.

As to presentation: Reader Derek Shoales turns in a professional narration - backed up by exemplary technical support from Tantor Audio engineers - but doesn't help the situation by straight-up *performing* the text instead of reading it (and not very well - the breathlessly overacted action sequences are groanworthy, for example). This is an "average" exhibition overall.

Altogether, a sophomoric story coupled with a largely over-the-top cartoonish performance yields a 3/10-star audiobook. Your 10-year-old should really enjoy 'Dungeons Of The Crooked Mountains' - and I didn't HATE it as a 53-year-old Fantasy-SciFi fan - but even for free, there are better GameLit options to occupy your time.

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