What would you do if you woke from a magical coma and found out you’d lost forty years of your memories?
Noah woke from a magical coma, losing 40 years of his memories. Even his body is not up to coping with this, so his only choice is to live in a VR-MMORPG game that would heal his brain and mind and help him recover his memories.
He accepts reality and decides to enter the game, but instead of a lush, beautiful human town, Noah is thrown into a cursed demon town.
Now every demon wants to kill him. There is no going back or hope of re-spawn in a human town. His starting location is fixed, and he has to somehow make his way through the nasty demon towns that sprawl between the cursed demon town and the nearest human city.
Join Noah in his epic adventure in BlackFlame Online.
My Opinion: 203 pages, $2.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
Note: Technical writing issues. Nothing too bad but stilted, awkward phrasing, missing words, spelling errors. Stuff that may throw you off because it does appear semi-regularly.
This is a slice of life, trapped in the game story. Huge emphasis on the slice of life element. It starts out with an odd premise and then kind of devolves into a slice of life story without any real purpose or direction.
The main character wakes, chained up and imprisoned. He’s told he’s been in a coma for 40 years after he went crazy in this magical world and started flinging magic killing his fellow researchers. He’s then thrown in a fantasy VR game and told to play it until his memories come back. Only something goes wrong and he ends up on the demon side of the world. He has to take a new class of cursemancer and side with the demons or he’ll feel the pain of death for eternity. The rest of the story is him adventuring, talking to demon residents, and XP grinding.
On the game mechanic side, things aren’t bad. There are lots of regular notifications that show the MCs RPG progress. His cursemancer class has some interesting features like turning opponent’s attacks into curses to be used later.
However, the really big issue with the story is that it’s frankly boring. The writing style is really dry and it put me to sleep, twice. The premise, while unique, doesn’t make sense. In a world of magic and technology why would dropping someone in a VR game restore their memory? Also, why would you make a game with fantasy magic when the real world has real magic? There’s not really a plot since it’s a slice of life story. Which is not necessarily bad, but if there’s no plot to keep readers interested then there is usually great world building, action, or character development to give the reader a reason to stick with the story. None of that happens here. All the characters are rather flat and lack personality and I was never given a reason to care about any of them. Both the game and real world feel empty. Action is ok but not good enough to carry the story on its own.
Overall, though there are a couple of good aspects to the story, I was mostly just bored reading it.
Score: 5 out of 10