Ready for Anything—Except This
Strapped for cash, Souya signs up for a shady gig straight out of a video game: warp to a fantasy world with a team of experts and ascend a dungeon tower to make off with its spoils. However, an accident in the transfer process leaves him stranded there alone. Desperate for support, he recruits a host of adventurers—from elven sisters banished from their forest, to a Goddess of Deception and Secrecy partial to lazing about as a cat—to form a party that can brave the tower’s perils. Caught between corrupt nobles and merchants outside the dungeon and deadly monsters within, can this motley band rise to the challenge? Or will Souya’s adventure end before it even begins?
My Opinion: 330 pages, $8.99, Not available on Kindle Unlimited
First off, I’d hoped this was LitRPG based on the cover art and the slightly notification like thing there. But it’s not. At the end of the book, the author actually states that they went out of their way to minimize anything game-like. The best you get on that front is a familiar adventurer guild that dives the local dungeon for resources and profit, including a system that keeps track of a person’s skills and deific patron. Plus adventurers have a super healing ability, as long as they have a deity’s blessing, that is almost game-like in its function to heal any wound except sudden head trauma.
That being said, it’s a cute isekai (transported to another world) story with a small amount of dungeon diving, some nice world building, and an interesting premise that sets a normal guy with no inherent advantages besides a bit of earth tech trying to survive in this fantasy world. There’s not a lot of action, but it’s a light novel translated into English, so I wasn’t expecting a ton of it. The big draw for some readers will be the relationship development between the main character (MC) and the races of this world.
Overall, the story misses for me as someone that loves LitRPG, but the story never said it was that. It is similar enough that there’s some crossover but honestly the price of almost $9 for 330 pages is a bit much. If it was on kindle unlimited or just a bit less expensive, I could probably give this a low 7 score, but as it is it’s just a miss for me. But you may still like it.
Score: 6 out of 10
The Otherworlder, Exploring the Dungeon, Vol. 1 (light novel)