Diving into a revolutionary new video game, Jason and his friends are working to move their entire guild to Pro-Gamer status. Unlike the current line of MMORPGs and PVRMMORPG games on the market, FIVRMMORPG introduces a new gaming technology unlike anything experienced before.
Choosing a Nightmare start to get ahead of the wave of new players starting the game, Jason finds himself alone in the wilds tasked with saving a group of refugees from goblin invaders. Although he manages to save the survivors that is just the beginning of his trials as he desperately fights to bring them back from the edge of annihilation.
Jason is quickly swept up in the adventure as he struggles to build a home for his guildmates and the NPCs that he’s saved. As the trouble heats up, he quickly discovers that marauding goblins are the least of his concerns.
Warning: This story contains adult situations, foul language, MMORPG-style violence and other fun things. Read at your own risk.
My Opinion: 233 pages, $2.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
There’s a bit of controversy around this story. The author admits being inspired by the LitRPG story Ascend Online, but takes that inspiration a bit too far and actually word for word copies sentences from that story. This is mostly seen in the early part of the novel with the novel description, quests, the character creation section, and some plot points. Like being dropped into the game in the middle of a battle with some goblin raiders, saving some NPCs from that attack (literally the same quest dialogue), and being tasked with getting resources to rebuild that community (very similar quest dialogue). However, after reading the novel in full, most of it is still original. After the 50% mark of the story, it’s completely original. It’s just a shame that anything like this exists in the story. Copying and pasting from someone else’s work, even in minor instances is just not ok.
You can see the screen shots showing the copied text here http://litrpgpodcast.com/first-login-the-world-book-1-vs-ascend-online/?rq=plagiarism
Now, on the review side of the story. It is well written. There are lots of gamer references. This novel is mostly setup for the series. With the early part establishing gamer cred and introducing the MC and his friends who you won’t see in-game in this novel. There’s a small story arc with a PK group and some dungeon crawling. The one complaint I’d have on the story side is that the MC is just over powered for his level. It’s supposed to be bonus from being a early adopter of the game but it honestly makes the fights feel a little cheaper. Still, fights are entertaining and the antagonists in the story are fun to root against.
The game mechanics are heavily inspired by Ascend Online but the main character (MC) takes a different spellsword path, choosing frost magic and eventually light magic. There are lots of numbers, character sheets, ability and skill descriptions.
Overall, if the author didn’t have those issues with copying someone else, this would have been a good read. But I just can’t support this. If the parts that are copied are changed, I’ll change my review.
But until then it gets a score: 4 out of 10.