It could be worse. You could be stuck with a literal shoulder demon.
After dying and being reborn into a world that’s built like a video game, Jim has found himself stuck in a very old world style new player zone for low level adventurers. Unfortunately, the zone fell out of use centuries ago, and no one told the monsters they were supposed to take it easy on the Noobs. Even worse, the only new player around is Jim.
Jim has been given an opportunity, and he’ll do his best to take advantage of it.
As of writing this review, I’ve read the first 1.3 books before putting down the series.
Let’s start with the positives: the inversion of the demon-summoning trope that starts the book is well done. Jim’s soul is summoned by a demon, instead of the usual inversion. The unique trait he has (allowing him to have multiple classes and bypass restrictions on various perks and skills) is a fun premise. So, the series has a solid foundation… why exactly did I put it in my DNF category?
A few reasons. I normally try to focus on the positives when reviewing (after all, piss of a user base and they’ll review bomb my own stuff and hey presto my writing career is over), but I feel like I need to delve a bit deeper than normal here.
Spoiler warning.
Some LitRPGs barely use numbers and a system. Like My Best Friend is an Eldritch Horror where the numbers are almost an afterthought. Some systems of stats and classes. This one has stats, classes, skills, perks, inventory, maps, menus, etc, the whole hog you might expect from a VRMMO book. I’ve always been fine with crunchy systems, but in Noobtown, it really slows down the pace of what should be action-packed fight scenes. For example:
I again dodged, ducking under the battlements as the bolts struck all around me. Shards of rock pelted my face, but it had only cost me 18 Stamina to dodge this time, due to fewer shots being fired.
Frantic, desperate fights are bogged down by overusing numbers and then justifying why the numbers are the way they are. Over-explaining happens a lot, whether it’s being used to clunkily give information to the reader:
“See,” hissed SueLeeta, “He’s just trying to see the enemy commander’s face. He knows you can’t fire at range at an enemy leader during battle.”
Or when it’s being used to hammer home things to the reader even more verbosely:
“Interesting strategy,” she said, “Grou’tuk was ready to attack us poor unorganized defenders but, suddenly, we have a strong defensive plan. Now, he doesn’t know what to think. To top it off, there is you, and you are going to kill Grou’tuk yourself. Goblins never count the commanders in their battle calculations. All you need to do is kill the goblin leader, and we are going to win this easy.” I wasn’t sure how putting people places constituted a strong defensive plan, but the logic of this world was well outside my understanding.
And you can see the author lampshading how arbitrary this all is in the last sentence.
This book isn’t /r/menwritingwomen… but it does give me a lot of similar vibes.
Despite everything, she marched, not walked, towards us. Her posture was perfect and her shoulders squared. From what I could tell, she still had a bit of curve on her, despite her recent mistreatment. She had somehow found the means of cleaning her face off, too. She was pretty, even possibly beautiful, but her expression was very serious. She struck me as the kind of girl who wanted to succeed on her own merits and not on her looks, a real no nonsense kind of girl.
And…
I smiled, walking towards the sound and spotted Jarra, picking up a small dog, “Yes?” She blushed prettily, “Um… Jim, this is my dog. Jim.”
And…
I had kind of been hoping for the typical male/female fantasy armor dichotomy, where men wear armor and women wear glorified BDSM outfits.
And then there’s the treatment of the family Jim left behind. His wife and two kids. Surprisingly, Jim barely thinks about them, except when there’s a chance to ram some sexual innuendo into the story. For example, Jim’s shoulder demon (which he called Shart) gets impaled by a spike through its mouth. There’s an obvious blowjob reference in the setup, and Jim thinks: I miss my wife.
Who cares about the kids? Who cares about every aspect of his relationship with his wife apart from sex. It just reads as so… Juvenile? Disrespectful? Misogynistic?
Imagine this. You’ve been captured by goblins. You’re trapped in cages, waiting to be tortured and killed or used a slave labour until you’re worked to death. Someone comes along, and at huge risk to their own life, manages to save you and defeat the goblin outpost. Then, they take you to a city magically protected from attacks and offer you citizenship and places to stay free of charge.
Sounds pretty good, right?
No, this is a socialist hellhole and in a glorious capitalist society, this cannot stand. So, after five full days of people fixing their own homes up and making food for everyone, things come to a head because everyone is pissed at Jim and morale is super low.
Why?
Because Jim wasn’t paying them wages to fix up their new home and feed each other.
A man (that Jim saved) confronts Jim about it after the town hall is fixed (because that’s what allows Jim to pay wages):
“Well, be that as it may,” he stated, after a moment, “I assume you’ll be paying these good people for the days of labor they spent toiling without reward?” That actually got a murmur of agreement. People did not like to work without pay.
This was where I put the book down, because honestly I don’t want to read about Jim agreeing everyone should be paid (glossing over the fact that Jim has to pay them to help each other from his own pocket despite not getting anything from these people himself)… I want to read about Jim saying “I saved your life, gave you accommodation and protection, have been running dozens of shitty quests to get you the resources you want, and you ungrateful psychopaths are on the verge of revolt because I’m not paying your sorry asses to feed each other? Fuck you, get out of my village and enjoy being captured by the goblins back into slavery.”
Seriously. It feels like the book’s target demographic is horny teenage boys that are on their way to growing into right-wing Andrew Tate fans, and damn, but that just isn’t me.
This is probably my strongest take out of every book I’ve written reviews of, so let me know if you think I’m being overly harsh… or not harsh enough.
