Chaxin awakes in a world completely unfamiliar to him. His memories are clouded, except for images of glass and metal. He quickly finds that he's not alone in this new realm. There are others who all arrived just as he did.
My Opinion: About 200 pages, $3.99, available on Kindle Unlimited
The novel drops you into what first appears to be a fantasy world with the main character naked and without memory on a stone altar. He makes his way to shore, only to be attacked by a mereman. Our unnamed main character is rescued by some guards that happen to be nearby and he’s taken to the nearby city. There our MC remembers his name, Chaxin, and we get our first glimpses into the RPG game aspects of this world as it’s revealed to him that there are things like health, mana, stats, and special magical effects and spells in the world. After that, it’s really a series of battles and scene changes that take the main character to different places in this world.
There are some really odd changes in the story which I won’t spoil but at one point the main character even jumps ahead in time some ten years. Then there’s a revelation that the entire world the main character had come to know changed and there are several weird plots involving nameless gods, time magic, and mimics.
It’s not really until the very end that things even start to tie together. While I won’t spoil the twist ending, it was a surprise I should have seen coming.
As far as the LitRPG aspects of the story, they’re pretty minimal. The mechanics of level, health, stats, status effects are only accessible through artifacts called Grimoires that are rare enough to be available one per town or community. So to access that information the main character has to visit the center of town to use the item. This puts those game mechanics into the background for most of the story and it’s not really until the story is almost 70% done that the main character even trains his stats. Up until they’re really relegated to an informational level. However, this doesn’t mean the story isn’t LitRPG. The narrator weaves the character sheet stuff into the very culture of the world, creating things like taboos about sharing stat information with others and a magic system that can temporarily boost those stats and make a person more effective in combat.
One of the major flaws in the game mechanics in the story is that that it references health, magic, and stamina in terms of percentages. Which is fine during combat. Ie: The hit takes 25% of my health. However, on the actual character sheet it’s just annoying and unhelpful to see the same information in terms of percentages. After all, percentages are only meaningful when they’re tied to actual numbers. That the MC’s character sheet says his health is 65% doesn’t really mean anything unless you first tell me what it should be at 100%.
Overall, this is a good story if you can stick around till the end. It has some flaws. A lot of the events in the story won’t make sense until the end. Some of the battles seem like random monster encounters without the setup of it or explanation that it’s the case. The main character seems like he’s only following other people around until the last 25% of the novel. Still, the ending was interesting enough to make me glad I stuck around.
Score: 6 out of 10.