Chrysalis

Blurb

Anthony has been reborn!

Placed into the remarkable game-like world of Pangera.

But something seems a little off… What’s with these skills? Bite? Dig?

Wait….

He’s been reborn as a WHAT?!

Follow Anthony as he attempts to adjust to his new life as an ant in his new Dungeon home. He’ll have to learn how to survive, level-up, and grow both himself and his bite-sized colony into a force to be reckoned with.

Thoughts

As of reviewing this book, I’ve read the first six books. I think.

It took about a thousand “FOR THE COLONY” comments on reddit before I decided that, yeah, I should probably dig into this series properly. I’d tried a few times in the past, but me and present tense do not get along. But with The Wandering Inn having Ryoka in present tense, another book on my TBR (Ironbound) in present tense, I thought “Hey, let’s just get em all out of the way in one go.”

And honestly, great decision, because this is a really fun story. Like cooking, a good story is all about contrasting flavours. Non-stop comedy and quips gives you Marvel something you can’t take seriously. Non-stop tragedy isn’t what I read escapism for. And in this section, I think RinoZ crushes it.

The wholesome nature of the ants and their strive for the common good, contrasting the bleakness of the stratums. The amazing epigraphs of future adventures and tour guides adding levity to bleaker chapters. The silliness of the antmancers’ behaviour against the seriousness of their beliefs. Tiny vs Crinis. Leeroy vs the rest of the Council. I know, if you haven’t read it now I’m just saying names and it’s not useful, but bear with me.

The worldbuilding, like the world, is revealed in layers. As the ants reach new (literal) depths, the factions and politics become more obvious. If anything, I wish there was more context on the wider world earlier in the series to help flesh out some of those aspects, but given Anthony was a basic ant trapped in the (mindless monster) first stratum, there are good reasons why the camera zooms out so slowly. The first book (or a very good portion of it) effectively serves the same purpose as the extra-dangerous-action-packed tutorial zone in other works. Anthony (the MC) is not safe at home with his colony, but instead finds himself carried (by monsters kidnapping him as a snack) an absurd distance.

Some may say that this is good! There’s lots of action, lots of rapid power progression.

Some may say that this is bad! MCs talking to themselves out loud is no replacement for character dialogue and interaction!

I take no sides.

Somehow, for a story literally about ants, its the character work which carries the story. Anthony, the Eldest, our isekai’d ant protagonist, is not the star of the show. He is in third place. Leeroy, in her suicidal tendencies, Tiny in his desire to hulk smash everything, Crinis in her overwhelming desire to please, the Queen and her proclivity towards THWACKING, and then all the other members of the Council that grow into their personalities, they collectively tie for second place. In overwhelming first is the macro-organism that is the Colony as a whole. By far, my favourite chapters are those where either Anthony comes back and is overwhelmed by the sheer changes in the Colony (like their adoption of smithing, scent-based books, magical research, industrialised mining, etc), or when we get those precious PoVs following some non-MC ant as they ruminate or work toward improving the Colony in one of a thousand ways.

I’d take a whole book of it, if I didn’t know that the magic of those moments would fade when you did in so closely.

Most of the chapters have us following Anthony and Pets as they get into trouble, start international (inter-racial?) incidents, or have to pull together to survive dungeon waves. The three pets do help add variation into the combat, though sometimes the action does become fall into a “Do something to let Anthony charge his super-OP gravity bomb he unlocked in book one when everything else fails” rut, but that’s probably more a function of how many fights the group gets in rather than it being the author’s go to. In fact, I can tell Rino deliberately tries not to just fall back on that OP strategy simply because of how many times I think during a fight “Damn a gravity bomb at the start would have really made life easier.” There are reasons not to use it (goodbye scavenging for anything, hello collateral damage), but still.

Technical writing is good (apart from the choice of present tense, of course), books actually end when arcs finish instead of at seemingly random points (you know which series I’m side-eyeing right now). It’s good! Characters are fun, plot arcs are fun, and the Colony must grow. Oh damn, Rino, if you ever read this review… do you play Factorio??