What if you could guarantee life after death?
Denton Wade is Dying.
And Cyberternal Industries has the answer. An answer he isn't willing to accept: life everlasting in a game world of fantasy, swords, and magic.
EndWorld Everlasting. A man-made afterlife. It goes against everything he's always believed in.
But there might still be hope. And hope is a very dangerous thing.
Far below their headquarters in Dallas, Texas, Cyberternal has been working on a secret medical program. A program made available to Denton though his personal, if not complicated, connection to an Assistant Vice President at the powerful company.
After agreeing to undergo the procedure, Denton finds himself awakening to a strange, new world. A world he never wanted.
Second Chance is the first book in the series: A Battlemage Reborn, and is a GameLit Fantasy Adventure with soft LitRPG elements set in the digital world of EndWorld Everlasting.
My Opinion: 549 pages, $4.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
This is a digital afterlife story with RPG mechanics, but also a very fantasy kind of plot.
I’ll be frank and say that I just didn't enjoy this story. I big part of that likely has to do with the opening that didn’t work for me. But
It started out with an overly long and emotional section where the main character (MC), a dying old man, is supposed to get treated by an experimental nanite treatment at the request of his daughter who emotionally manipulates him. All the while he hints heavily that he doesn't trust either the tech or the guy running the company. Then of course something goes wrong and he dies and is uploaded to an MMO afterlife the company runs. The MC almost refuses to stay there but more emotional manipulation makes him go on and fully upload. The entire section may work well for some readers but I couldn't help but feel like it was a complete waste of time reading it. From the first paragraph I knew he would upload, otherwise there's no story. The entire time I just wished the long scene would end so then story would get to the actual LitRPG story.
From there the MC is magically saved by wolves and meets plenty of new players. He then gets tricked but saved again and acquires a powerful sentient magic sword, for nothing while still level 1. It just bothered me that this old man didn't have the sense to price check and seemed to trust everyone he met in this world he never seemed to want to be in.
Sure, I get that this is all there so that the MC can grow as a character but it was just generally annoying and I never ended up liking the MC. On the story side, it felt forced to make the MC a hero in a world full of more powerful players. The MC complains a lot about it being unfair that he died a generally how much he didn’t really want to be in that digital afterlife. Then despite that, the MC gets power he never earns, even so far as completing hidden quests by walking into a room to pad his XP to get him to level. Even ignoring that stuff the story itself was very plain and nothing happened that I hadn't read in many other fantasy stories. Yeah, the actual story also felt more fantasy though with a chosen one element that forced the MC into this reluctant hero role without really justifying his success in RPG terms.
Overall, the writing wasn't bad. Combat was just kinda meh, especially in the beginning and mid story while he’s grinding for XP and taking trope and predictable quests. But ultimately I didn't enjoy the story or the care about the MC. I don’t hate the story and recognize that others liked it just fine. But it just didn’t do it for me. I had to force myself to finish it all.
Score: 6 out of 10
Second Chance - A Battlemage Reborn (Book 1): An EndWorld Everlasting Saga