I’ve listened to this series many years ago, but forgot most of it. I’m going to read it one more time to remember it and be able to review it.
This series follows one of the classic iseaki tropes where the main character (and his girlfriend) are using a new VR game when a crazy video game developer makes it so that everyone in real life dies and their consciousness only exists inside the game.
This doesn’t seem to cause as much of an existential crisis in the people killed as I would expect. The people of Earth attempt to have the game’s servers shut down (“killing” everyone inside the game), and the people inside the game seem to have embraced their new reality and are living their life inside.
If the humans inside the game, they respawn. A lot of time is spent explaining that respawning is really painful and nobody would ever want to go through it, to prevent deaths being consequence-free. But death really is consequence-free for most human players (“reborns”).
Things I liked:
- Classic iseaki themes, a VR world where players can’t log out
- Easy to read
Things that could be improved:
- MC completely forgets his real-life girlfriend 10 minutes after logging in
- MC very easily handles the news that his real life body is dead and he’ll never be back on Earth again.
- Entire book 1 only covers 7 days of game time
- Entire book 2 covers another 7 days of game time
Since I own the first five books, I decided to re-read them all.
Audible rating, Book 1: 4.5
Audible rating, Book 2: 4.7
Audible rating, Book 3: 4.7
Audible rating, Book 4: 4.6
Audible rating, Book 5: 4.7
