3.5 stars. So far, so good.
This book starts in the classic iseaki style – a new system is brought to Earth. Through some extreme luck, Zac was able to defeat a Herald just as he was trying to come to Earth, and that got him a lot of titles and points. He seems to have a massive head start over the other beings on Earth too, since he didn’t get to do the “month long” tutorial as others were forced to go through. So he could gain points, level, and build before anyone else made an appearance.
Things I liked about the book series:
- The MC is overpowered
- Well written
- Relatively easy to read
- MC never whinges about his circumstances
- Stats are mentioned, but not frequently
Things that took away from it:
- Relies a bit too much on the helpless female slave trope (in the early books)
- The sheer number of secondary characters means little character development for many of them
- Some characters just disappear – they were once important and then we stop hearing about them
- A lot of pondering on the nature of his various “Dao” powers and how they relate together
- The MC is both overpowered (for his planet) and has super slow progression
I’m currently reading Book 5 of this series, and I do like it. But it can be slow. There are large parts of the books dedicated to the MC trying to understand how his body works with his various magic powers, and his body keeps changing.
The author has managed to create several really interesting side characters who only get a few pages of attention. There are some characters here that I want to see develop, grow and succeed. But so far in the first five books, we only get a few lines about what they do and how their day-to-day life progresses.
Maybe that’s an impossible request. How can we spend days following Emily around to see the world from her point of view? We possibly cannot. Or Emma the movie star? Or Julia the government liaison? There are just so many people surrounding the MC, and we only get a couple of sentences per book on each of them.
I finished the first five books. This is classic iseaki, and a good example of the style if anyone is looking for a series to introduce them into LitRPG.
I might just stop after five. The cultivation aspects are a bit too boring for me (pondering the nature of the Dao), too many pages spent pondering potential future paths, and progression is just too slow. I can’t remember the last time the main character gained a class.
The first couple of books were pretty good. But there comes a point where it becomes too much. Too much dao, too much pondering the future, too many characters with no character development. The character doesn’t progress much, and thus is now one of the weaker “top” people in the world. By rights, he should be dead after every fight, but he somehow wins.
