My Best Friend is an Eldritch Horror

As of writing this review, I’ve read all three published books in the series.

Blurb

Damien nearly ended the world. Now, his mistake might be the only thing that can save it.

Good things come to those who wait. Damien Vale didn’t, and he ended up bound to an Eldritch creature from beyond the reaches of space. It has lived since the dawn of time, seen the world born and destroyed countless times, and wants to be called Henry.

Unusual companion or not, Damien was still determined to go to a mage college and study magic. He wants nothing more than to live normal life as a researcher, but if Henry’s true nature is revealed, he’ll be killed.

To top it all off, Damien’s teacher is a madman from the front lines of war, his alcoholic dean suspects something is awry with his companion, and Blackmist might possibly be the worst school in history. Damien has to prevent the end of the world, but he isn’t even sure he’s going to make it through Year One at Blackmist.

Thoughts

Disclaimer: I am a big sucker for magic academy books. If you’re the same, well then, enough said, this is great. Despite the Eldritch Horror (Henry) the book is actually fairly light-hearted in tone, and much of the first three books is slice-of-life, where classwork and training takes up the bulk of the narrative. There are some hints of a larger problem (with other creatures from the void) hinted at i nbook one, and its explored a little bit further in books two and three where the MC and his totally-not-girlfriend partner leave the school for a quest. But I don’t want spoilers, so no more details.

The burgeoning relationship between Damien and Sylph is very well done, and its rare to see a human-first relationship like theirs that takes the time to establish friendship, empathy, and compassion in such depth. Outside of the two humans and Henry, there are a relatively small cast of important characters, which suits me just fine.

Now, while I’ve labelled this as LitRPG, because the magic watches do technically show stats, let me be clear in that that’s about it. There’s no system, no classes, no levelling up, no real stats. Think of Corin’s mana watch from Arcane Ascension, and you’ve got it pegged. The story is much closer to cultivation in that respect, where people can shape their mana into various constructs and the main spellcasting system uses the good old “combine runes to get fun effects” style that myself and a million others use. Of course, Damien has Henry to help him out, so his rate of learning is bonkers.

That said, he puts the effort in, and so this falls into the “rewarded for hard work” style of LitRPG instead of the “starts with a cheatcode” style.

So to summarise, minimal LitRPG elements, runic magic system, but the star of the show are the characters and the relationships between them all.