Sky Realms Online is the largest and most popular Virtual Reality MMORPG ever made. Set amongst the mystical, floating islands of Hankarth, it's played and enjoyed by millions every hour. Until something goes wrong.
Unable to log out, players find themselves reduced to level one, and in the starting zones. They receive a cryptic message from the developers stating that for unknown reasons, they are trapped in the game and may have to live out their lives within the virtual world.
Hall is one of the those trapped in the game. He’s been playing Sky Realms Online as a spear-wielding Skirmisher ever since the beta. And instead of panicking as many do, he decides to make the most of it; to play the game and live his new life, all while quietly hoping the developers will find a fix.
It doesn’t take Hall long to find out that, while some aspects of the game are the same, the difficulty level is beyond anything he's ever experienced.
Together, with a new party of trapped players and NPCs with canned answers, Hall will find out just how different Sky Realms Online has become, and how playing a game is different from living the game...
My Opinion: 415 pages, $2.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
Full disclosure: I received an advanced copy of the novel for review. I purchased a copy when it became available.
The novel has a pretty cover, but I was mostly bored with the story. While the story isn't poorly written, it never gave me a reason to care about the main character (MC) or his slice of life adventure. After the annoying setup (I’ll explain that later) you really just follow the MC as he and his group explore the world, go on quests, and fight monsters. There’s no real plot you’re just following the MC and his group do stuff. I'm not opposed to slice of life. However, if that's what you're going to do, you need to give me some other reason to stick around besides plot. Either I love the main character, or the action is great, or the game mechanics are so neat I want to see how they develop. But none of that was here so I just got bored.
There's a minor amount of character development for the MC, but none really for the other group members. The action is ok. The RPG stuff is fairly standard with levels, and quests. It’s nothing really amazing but not bad either. There are lots of quests but there's really no purpose to them besides giving the characters something to do. There’s no real novel antagonist, though one is hinted at for book 2. I will say, the ending is good. That last quest was the best part of the story, adding in the potential for a plot for the series and showing a glimpse of town building mechanics. But I was still bored with the other 90% of the story.
There are a few things I found annoying with the story. The premise doesn't make sense. It's a weird alternative version of the ‘trapped in the game’ setup. The players get their minds uploaded during an attack on the game servers. They're taken offline for two years but when no one can figure out how to put them back in their bodies, the game company decides to restart the game and let the trapped players play. Only they add more realism, pain, and possibly permanent death. It just didn’t make sense to me and honestly wasn’t needed considering how the rest of the story unfolded. Another thing that bothered me were the constant comparisons the MC made between the old game and this new version. They're used to tell the reader about the game mechanics but it's not done well. The reader has never seen the old game so what's the point in comparing the changes? Just show us what the rules are for this world. Just a couple small things that made it harder to enjoy the story.
Overall, not a bad writing. I just never had a reason to care about the slice of life story.
Score: 5 out of 10