Neon Dragons

Blurb

Everyone who is anyone is obsessed with Neon Dragons - the latest highly immersive cyberpunk aRPG from Sparksoft. But as fate would have it, the PC of our late-twenties main character broke, mere days before the game’s release.

All she could do was to console herself by watching a copious amount of content creators play through the game she had always dreamt of.

Limiting her own knowledge to the parts of the world she sees in the respective playthroughs, is her way of keeping the mystery surrounding the world alive.

Wiki-dives are her late-night pleasure - naturally only about things that were already covered or appeared in the new episodes of whatever playthrough she was watching.

Things change drastically, however, as one day she wakes up inside the body of a 15-year old girl inside the city of Neo Avalis, 6 years into the game’s past.

It feels like a dream come true - she can finally experience the neon-lit streets and mixture of high tech and grime she’s only seen in videos!

Plus, Seraphine, as she quickly learns is the name of the body she now inhabits, has an extra thing to be happy about - she can level herself just like a character in the game!

With everything she has read and watched about Neon Dragons, it should be no problem to make herself the perfect person to solve the mystery of the enigmatic Wall at the (seeming) edge of the play-area on her own!

But she quickly realizes that she cannot just sit and grind out her skills while the world is on pause - this game is very real and life in a cyberpunk future is full of danger and intrigue whether you are looking for it or not.

Not only does she need to fit into her new strange family and understand how her abilities work, but also her world seems to have some differences from the game she saw played - differences that are rapidly revealing themselves to be bigger than she had anticipated…

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I’ve read all published 158 chapters.

Yes, I’m still on my cyberpunk binge. Still trying to scratch that itch, still haven’t quite managed to get it out of my system.

Alright, the blurb on this one is fairly comprehensive. MC wakes up in a game, except its not a game any more, and they have a System. Cool, cool, cool. Standard premise, and normally one I wish they just cut the whole “Its a game” out of and just made the character and world more authentic. But hey, that’s just my personal prefs shining through.

Sera and her family are a bit fucked up. Her brother is super supportive, in a similar manner found in Ghost in the City, one of the story’s key inspirations. The father is friendly but a bad parent, the mother is a tyrannical, corporate monster that tortures her kids for failing to live up to impossible standards. The norm.

The family dynamics are strange, and normalcy comes from Sera’s interactions with people like Mr Shiori (which I might have misspelled) and Miss K (her dojo instructor). There’s Tom and Jin and Kenzie as training partners, and I wishhhh we got to spend more time outside of combat training with them to flesh them out. There’s a broad cast in this story, but Sera’s balancing of her time with family, learning to code, working at the ramen shop, training at the dojo, trying to become an operator, doing missions for Mr Stirling, going shopping, and ruminating on the system spreads her so thin that we haven’t yet gone very deep in any one segment. For those that enjoy the slower-burn stories with lots of different interests, this probably sounds great.

I too enjoy slower-burn stories, and I don’t think this story is too slow in that regard, I think it’s too slow on a technical writing sense. There are two aspects to this, one of which the author addresses often in chapter notes that some people may hate this chapter, here’s a two sentence summary of it so you can skip. Those are generally the system-heavy chapters, where, for example, a perk becomes available with five options. Each option will have a paragraph description, and then the MC will restate this description and weigh its pros and cons, and then mentally compare them all, slowly rule one of two out, and eventually come to a decision about what to pick. Once the decision is made, then you get many pages of knowledge download about how Sera now knows how to do X and Y, and that A is just B with a twist, etcetcetc. Can take a few thousand words, easy. Again, some may love the system rumination, some may want it condensed. So that’s the first ‘is this story right for you?’ split.

The second is, I think, less personal preference, and more on the “This could be tightened up”. Alright, let me give two examples. For the first, amorphous one, Valeria (the mother) doses her kids with a torture drug as punishment. There’s a big leadup, lots of tension eating the poisoned meal, and then the onset of the drug. Once the drug kicks in, there are more than 1200 words (5 pages) just describing the pain, over and over, in different ways. I got the picture in the first sentence, a paragraph fleshed it out nicely, but by page three of the descriptions I was skimming until it got to the end.

Here’s a slightly more concrete example. The context here is that Jade (member of Clawed Beast gang) has stumbled into Vega’s office covered in blood and badly hurt. Vega is high-ranking member of Clawed Beast gang.

The emergency message he dispatched was terse but laden with urgency: [“My office. Now. Jade is hurt.”]

Such brevity in his communication was uncharacteristic of Vega but spoke volumes of the gravity of the situation. Known for his precision in words, Vega’s succinct message underscored the critical state Jade was in.

Now, if you’ve established a character’s voice properly, deviation from it can show emotion, so these three sentences could be communicated with just the message if the voice was established. If it wasn’t, then probably the tersness and laden with urgency would be useful descriptors. The second sentence (“Such brevit…”) is just restating the first sentence. The third sentence then just tries to restate the second sentence in a different way (and is almost contradictory in content, given precision normally implies brevity to some degree). This is the sort of writing that I feel could be tightened up a lot, where the same concepts are restated numerous times back-to-back. Neon Dragons right now is a 2000 page story that I feel could be effectively tightened up into a 700 page story without losing any plot lines or character interactions.

Again, I know this writing style will be an issue to some, and not an issue at all to others.

There’s so much potential in the story. The worldbuilding has tons of hints and clear scope to go beyond what the MC has explored right now. The System and its place in the world. The wall. Monsters and anima. Even just more delightful exploration of Delta, the megabuilding Sera lives, works, and trains in. The characters have breadth in design. Killjoy is an absolute delight. Grinding through the attributes, skills, and levels, and seeing Numbers Go Up is fun.

Some of the alternative PoV chapters showing Sera’s skill are hilarious to read (though some of the early ones feel a bit overdone with how much glazing they do of the MC despite the MC having low skill levels). Most of the plot points feel deeply connected to the fucked-up nature of the cyberpunk world, I just wish Sera got to leave the megabuilding more than once in the 2000 pages I’ve read. That was the best (and only) proper Operator mission she’s done!

So yeah, I think this story has tons of potential, my main wish would be for the writing to tighten up a lot so that all those words can be used for deepening character interactions and doing more Things. It’s similar to Outrun in its pacing, so if you enjoyed that story, check this one out too.