A ten-million-dollar MMORPG tournament. An invincibility hack gone wrong. Welcome to MythRune.
With his glory days behind him and nothing but life as a loser to look forward to, Zane can’t wait for MythRune. A first-of-its-kind immersive fantasy game that promises to provide just the escape from reality a washed-up athlete like him needs.
But when his younger brother learns he only has weeks left to live, Zane is forced to take his gaming to the next level if he’s going to afford to pay for his brother’s operation and ditch their sorry life forever.
To celebrate the launch of MythRune, the game’s developers announce a worldwide player tournament. The prize? Ten million dollars. More than enough.
Utilizing a God Mode bug to make himself invincible, Zane aims to win it all without getting caught.
But it doesn’t work as planned. Between pain-sensitivity glitches, exploitive players, a re-worked world map, and a leveling system unlike anything he’s ever seen, Zane realizes there’s much more to pro gaming than staying alive.
My Opinion: 453 pages, $2.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
It’s an ok story. The stakes of the story are decent, with the main character (MC) trying to level up enough to compete in a VR contest and win money to help pay for a surgery for his brother. The special unique power he has, an exploit he found in the beta test of the game, is to lose the ability to die in the game. He still feels pain, more than others actually, but he can not die as long as he doesn’t log out and lose the unique circumstances that let him use the ‘God Mode’ exploit. Along the way another player figures out he’s doing something fishy and blackmails him into letting her group with him or she’ll report him to the developers. She also wants half the prize money if he wins the contest. Most of the story is a slice of life adventure where the MC chooses a particular race and goes on quests to raise his level and find a contest entry coin.
The game mechanic side of things the novel doesn’t use traditional leveling and XP, instead using randomly dropped stat orbs and an averaging system to determine level. Skills are the big thing as they require points to improve and unlock new abilities, which are gained from quests, random drops, or leveling. The other game mechanics are pretty common in most MMOs and the vibe of the story will feel familiar to anyone that’s played one. There are PKers, Roleplayers, and min/maxers from players and lots of familiar quest types. Lots of notifications, quests, skill increases, a pretty crunchy story.
It really does kinda just follow the MC as he tries to use the short period before the contest to gain levels and a contest token. But there’s not much more to it than that. I didn’t actually like the side character Leesha at all, but I’m sure that was intentionally for the story.The fighting was fine, but there was never any real sense of danger for the MC since I knew he wasn’t going to die. Even for the other players there was no sense of danger since they just respawned. The end antagonist wasn’t really evil, just a jerk.
Overall, it’s an ok story. Nothing bad. Nothing really amazing either. Decent read with some funny moments.
Score: 7.2 out of 10