The Legend of William Oh

Blurb

William Oh is not a legend. Yet. He’s an orphan whose biggest dream is serving his absentee parents a knuckle-sandwich, but the only way to do that is to climb The Tower, the center of the world through which all magic flows. A betrayal, a bit of generosity, and a knack for surviving impossible odds sow the seeds of a legend. The only problem is… As the stories about him grow and take on a life of their own, can the boy outrun the legend he is becoming?

Thoughts

The Legend of William Oh is, more than anything, fun. William and his party stay busy enough that a lazier book would repeat itself into glue. It does not, mostly because the phantom-hands trick lets him hot-swap builds and lean on different strengths when a fight needs a new angle (which is often). Combat stays fresh and fun.

I should say this clearly for the record: I hate tower climbers. You might think that doesn’t make sense, because I have reviewed so few, but that’s just because I bounce off almost all of them hard enough that I never write anything down. Maybe that’s because many of them are from the VRMMO era, or still seem a bit disconnected from ‘reality’ even when not (Tower of Somnus, for example), but they often feel stakeless. And yet… this story is a tower climber. It is also one of my favorites in the genre, so you know it’s got to be good.

What else would you expect from Macronomicon?

What saves the premise is that the floors actually change the game. Each level pushes a different tempo, different threats, different strongholds, and the team powers up fast enough that you get a bunch of tight little arcs instead of one endless staircase slog. I eat that up.

I do wish there were a bit more worldbuilding, though, especially outside of the tower. What does the world actually look like? Is humanity flourishing or barely hanging on? I just cannot place humanity on a scale: are we talking a hundred thousand people left, ten million, a billion? A couple of concrete reference points would help, because right now I mostly have these tiny little higher-floor strongholds to go on, and from that it seems like humanity is one sneeze away from just vanishing.

On to the cast. William is fun. Scheming, cunning, cagey, and suspicious of everyone. His friends fill other roles (most importantly baking). The banter between them all is sharp enough and the dialogue is high quality. No giant walls of expositional text shoehorned in as a “conversation”.

As the raw numbers start to matter less, the book does not go limp. William shifts toward stranger, deeper magic in a way that reminds me of how Defiance of the Fall slid from straight LitRPG toward cultivation, except the drift here feels more like “what are the rules, really, if you peel back the system?” To me, there’s a little Arcane Ascension in how the magic gets picked apart and abused in good faith.

If you want a story where the legend sprints ahead of the kid, where jokes land, where fights stay clever, and where the tower actually earns its page count, this is the one. I love it, and I really didn’t think I’d ever say that about a tower climber.