Sep 29, 2025
The end, congrats on finishing!๐๐
I wrote my comment once and it disapeared๐
, so am gonna write it again perhaps more concisely, gomen, hopefully I'll comvey all the same stuff๐
๐๐.
I think the books biggest strenght is how it captures game popculture. Lotta game isekai get complaints about not being mmo enough, and I think you nail that which is a great strenght๐ฅ๐
The books not without weakness, lotta typos escpaically in the kater chapters tho thats a small one.
A bigger point imo would be that the book is rather front heavy. In retrospec, their initial meeting is effectively act 1 but in practise, Act 1 is all the way to chapter 26, with the initial meeting before just that, a sort of episode 1.
Then we skip to act 3 for the final 15 chapters.
It feels as though an act 2 is missing, one where we visit the people and get a proper image of the stakes, building princesses relationship to them on the way, having Berous fight some mid level demon maybe - and then you'd have the castle.
Likewise character arcs feel rather A and C wothout B. Berous has the setup of feeling like he's failed to protect people > then the resoultion of protecting everyone.
Ki-Ra gets grumpy > then has fun biking and reveals herself to be good natured.
The middle step of trying to improve and failing, the growing and developing gradually part of a character arc, is very understated I fell. Not saying its not there, but its very quiet.
Meckan has no arc? I'm not really sure๐. She has flags for an arc, her lying, her disposed status, her guilt around Boreus soul - but none of those majorly go anywhere. For the cover character she generally gets very little to do, princess feels far more intergral.
Princess likewise doesn't really have an arc. She trust Boreus in the finale, but she was always trusting, of her dad, of the strangers, in the finale. Phorack was the untrusting one.
Phorack conversly is the best excuted character, untrusting > slowly growing trust > falls backwards being selfish > act of redemption and development in death.
All that aside, however, the cast are consistently fun and likeable, they are pleasent to be around. Boreus is a nice guy and Ki-ra is pretty enjoyable in particular. Phorack is the sort of old man character I have an automatic bias towards so him too.
Plot wise, again it feels constricted. Not much actually happens, yet we manage to liberate a whole kingdom. Its very simple in that sense and I don't think thats bad, it faciliates a nice time that I enjoyed reading through out๐, but combined with the rather simple characters, it doesn't leave alot of meat on the bone.
Over all I think the world ends up carrying alot of the weight. Its not revoultionary, but its mmo stylising are fun and refreshingly accurate feeling and theres a constant atmosphere that I find nice. Its relaxing to read with nicely short chapters to settle into.
In that sense I do find myself oddly conflicted with it as it's one of the contest entries I like quite alot! But theres just not much to be invested in, a simple 'easy' plot, pleasent but rather one note cast, a good world but not much to get excited about in it. I think its a book that needs an extra pinch of something, really engaging hype fights or a greater focus on character dynamics and development or whatever else, something to make that interesting world shine to it's full poteintial.
Overall I enjoyed reading it๐, but would love to see it be more ambitoius and more fleshed out. A sorta 3.5/5.
Thanks for writing itโค๏ธ๐ฅ๐
