Adventurers seek dungeons for riches. Heroes storm great fortresses. Gods clash far above.
Arek cooks lasagna and tops it with a dash of finely chopped basil.
An orc who has seen more than his fair amount of fighting, Arek wants nothing more than to spend the rest of his days cooking and away from the chaos of combat.
However, when Ming and her group of adventurers hire him as their full-time chef, his plans of avoiding violence crumble. He longs to leave his blood-soaked mistakes in his past, but old friends and foes have different ideas.
Cleaver's Edge is the first book in a Fantasy / LitRPG lite series with a cooking element that's perfect for the Holiday Season. It contains status windows and other RPG elements, but it is not set within a videogame. It will appeal to anyone that enjoys reading a slice-of-life fantasy about a group of adventurers as well as fans of Food Wars!.
This novel also contains real recipes, and we highly recommend you give them a taste if you’re hungry!
My Opinion: 436 pages, $3.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
This is a story that combines cooking with general fantasy adventuring. There are a couple of story threads about the main character (MC) and his group going through dungeons, taking ranking tests, and doing other fairly mundane tasks. The adventuring, fights, were all pretty average. Nothing bad, nothing outstanding. The characters were fine, each with their own flaws that they made progress on, there was good dialogue, and monster fighting.
The thing that is supposed to make the story stand out the most is the cooking aspects. That part is only ok for me. It wasn’t bad. The cooking scenes could be followed along well, the recipes were real and could even be followed as the author gave ingredient lists and instructions. But the cooking stuff lacked any kind of tension or importance. It didn’t impact the rest of the story in any way shape or form. I felt like the author was trying to bring in a Food Wars vibe with contests between chefs as a kind of conflict, but the contests never felt like the MC was ever going to lose so there wasn’t any tension. The other cooking scenes were just the MC cooking dishes for his team and they enjoyed eating. The only part I thought had more potential was when the MC actually took time to learn about a new recipe, research ingredients, and test his work. There was some actual growth there for him as a chef. But other than that small part of the story there wasn’t really any kind of growth, RPG or otherwise for the MC. I wished there was more of a journey of discovery and learning for the cooking element or at least some loss for the MC if he’s in a cooking competition that he could learn from.
On the game mechanics side of things, it's almost non-existent. The novel description says LitRPG lit, but it all really amounted to the MC or another character looking through a special tool to estimate someone’s abilities based on that person’s subconscious belief about themselves. It didn’t use levels or any other hard form of progression, just percentiles based on who that person had subconsciously compared themselves to. The aspect could have really been eliminated from the story with no consequence. There was some power progression for the other members of the MCs team as he helped them train their magic and fighting skills. However, it just felt forced that the teammates raised their percentile in magic or defense or whatever since it’s based on self belief, and as a system it always felt a bit loose. Even in the story it was noted that the information could be fooled/altered by magic or self delusion.
Overall, the story was still good. A bit lower on the scale, but it’s fine. I’d hoped for something a bit more outstanding on the cooking side, but there’s nothing done poorly in any element, just not particularly outstanding either.
Score: 7.4 out of 10
Cleaver's Edge: A LitRPG Fantasy Cooking Adventure (Morcster Chef Book 1)