Chronicles of Retha was meant to be a full submersion video game filled with adventure and magic…but it has become a prison.
Kit and her party of misfit players have managed to collect two of the four seals that are required to face Malignus—Retha’s ultimate villain whose defeat may be the only way out of the game. Unfortunately for Kit—who is stuck playing as a defective elf dancer—the quest only grows more difficult.
The remaining seals are hidden in areas of Retha that Kit and her low-leveled party can’t fight through. Even worse, they will need to unite other players and guilds to face Malignus--an unlikely event as riots have spread across the game world.
Unwilling to give up, Kit and her party band together with Solus Miles—one of the best players in the game—and throw everything they have against Malignus.
But is their strength enough, or will Retha be their end?
My Opinion: 307 pages, $3.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
With the exception of the last boss battle (80-92%), this novel is a repetition of book 1. Get two seals then a boss fight.
The goal of this novel is to collect the last two seals that allow for the big boss fight that will auto log off the raid group, thus saving them from being trapped in the game. However, it’s not the main character or her group that get the seals but another summoned
It’s not the main character, Kit, that makes that progress but another character, the guy she accidentally married in game that she summons to save her.
Additionally, it still bugs me that a game set in the future where full immersion VR is real is still using a dated progression system that forces ability and skills on a player as they level instead of giving the players the choice of how to build their characters.
The last boss fight was legitimately good. Well thought out. It’s actually the main character that sort of defeats the boss, even though it’s another force that does the actual killing damage.
Also, there’s less level skipping. Instead of just going from level 5 to 11 without any real detail as to how, the author at least shows the level grind in summary.
I noticed a lot of reviews mentioning that ‘if you like K.M. Shea, you’ll like this novel too’. Then with a quick blog check, it just looks like A.M. Sohma is another pen name for K.M. Shea who writes fantasy romance novels. Which, if true, makes the forced romance aspect of the story and the less detailed game stuff, make more sense. The author is trying to appeal to an existing reader base that may not be gamers or have ever heard of LitRPG.
Unfortunately, some of those decisions make the story a bit less appealing to me. This isn’t a bad story. Good solid writing. But I feel like most of book 2 was just repeating the formula of book 1 and just one great fight at the end doesn’t make it more interesting. I think one of the last lines of the book summarizes how I felt reading a lot of the novel: “time to do the same thing again...only this time it will be even harder.”
Score: 6 out of 10.
The Desperate Quest: A MMORPG and LitRPG Online Adventure (Second Age of Retha Book 2)