I wasn't the girl that cowered in the back waiting for her knight in shining armor, I was the girl that wore the armor.
Joely Quinn woke up in a strange room, and she couldn't remember how she'd gotten there. In fact, she couldn't remember much of anything at all.
When she strikes out in search of answers, she's thrust into a fantasy world filled with swords, sorcery, and enemies that want to kill her just because they can. Joely must not only quest to find the answers she seeks, but she must also survive in this world of untold dangers.
With the help of others like her, will Joely and her new friends be able to survive the fantasy world they are trapped inside of? Or will they be destined to stay there forever?
My Opinion: About 200 pages, $4.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
A little over priced at over $0.02/page. Especially when the last 10% is a preview of an unrelated novel.
The first few pages of the novel are really engaging and I was rather pleased to have a female main character in the story. Unfortunately, as the story went on something about it just kept bothering me.
Transported to a fantasy world ruled by RPG mechanics or trapped in the game. It’s never really made perfectly clear which it is, though it’s implied it’s the latter.
I was reading the story and something just kept bothering me and it took me a little while to figure it out but when I did I just made sense. There's a lot of implied game mechanics in the story. For example, it's implied that everyone not in the group is an NPC ‘they don't have the same the light in their eyes’ as the people in the group. It's implied that experience points are given out at the end of a quest or for defeating a monster. It's implied that the characters go on quests but there are no quest descriptions. Outside of the character sheet at the end of each chapter and a few item description in the characters' books, it’s rather light on any numbers. A lot of the number crunching is hidden in the background. All the experience points, damage numbers, etc. are implied but not shown.
Seems like the characters are all stuck with a particular class that automatically assigns abilities, spells, and stats as they level.
Sebastian - Healer
Joely - Fighter
Darren- Rouge
Maggie- Mage
Elias- Archer
Not my favorite game mechanic since it takes away agency from the characters.
It almost feels like the author was trying to hedge their bets by not making the story too LitRPG. Perhaps the author did not wish to alienate their current reader base, but I am only guessing.
The characters never feel like they're making choices so much as following a script they have to fulfill as they follow a quest chain. All of these characters just happen to be on the same quest chain? None of them turned left instead of right somewhere? In gaming terms, the storyline feels very linear and on the rails.
There’s a line in the story that describes how I feel: Joely the main character says, “At least we all understood the frustrations of not knowing, but I didn’t feel they had the same need for the answers that I did. I didn’t have a choice. I needed to know.” That’s how I feel about the game mechanics in this story and about game mechanics in LitRPG in general. I’m the type of person that loves to understand how the game worlds I read about work. I love getting quest descriptions, learning enough about a class to plan my own character, figuring out what weapons or spells work best against what monsters. I’m the type of guy who enjoys reading D&D manuals for fun just because I love to read about item and monster descriptions. ‘I don’t have a choice. I need to know.’
When it comes down to it, this LitRPG story doesn’t fill that need for me. It’s a well written story. Unfortunately, it doesn’t bring anything new or particularly interesting to the table. There’s no cool or interesting game mechanics. I don’t feel like I could roll my own character in this world. If not for the likeable main character it would be ‘meh’.
Score: 6 out of 10