This Quest is Bullshit

Blurb

The Questing Stones have come to Nowherested, and Evelia Greene is finally ready to receive her life’s quest. Perhaps she’ll be a great warrior, or a wealthy merchant, or a brilliant mage. Perhaps her quest is simply to live a quiet life, constantly honing a craft to the heights of perfection.

Or perhaps the Questing Stones will grant her the Legendary mission of popping over to the next village to pick up a loaf of bread.

Wouldn’t that be ridiculous?

Eve can’t even begin to guess how or why she’s come by such an absurd life goal, nor how a level 1 Messenger Girl is supposed to complete anything labeled as Legendary, but at least she can be sure of one thing. No matter how many wolves or goblins attack, no matter how many speeding tickets she racks up, no matter how many bakeries spontaneously combust as she steps into town, one way or another, Eve is going to get that gods-damned bread.

There just might be a few Side Quests along the way.

Thoughts

I came to this off a Reddit thread about the funniest LitRPGs going around. That’s a dangerous way to pick a book, because “funny” is doing a lot of heavy lifting and everyone means something different by it. Having finished the series, yeah, alright, I’d agree that it’s pretty funny. It’s got humour, but it’s a very specific flavour, and whether you bounce off it comes down to what kind of jokes you like.

Here’s the distinction I keep coming back to. The comedy is built on wordplay and authorial setup: puns stacked on puns, and gags or references engineered so that we, the readers, get the joke while the poor characters standing in the scene have no idea why anything is funny. There’s a delightful Shrek reference in one of the later books and the chapter its revealed in is called something like “If you didn’t see this coming, you haven’t been paying attention.” It’s clever, and Wes in particular seems to feed of them. But it’s a joke told at the world more than one that grows out of it. Contrast that with something like The Legend of William Oh, where the humour comes from how the main character actually behaves: the scheming, the paranoia, the reactions. That’s character-driven comedy, and it lands differently. This one is more the author winking at the audience. I do love winking though, so I’m happy!

What I did like, no reservations, is the cast. Eve and her friends are genuinely likeable, the banter between them is sharp, and the attention to puns is, if nothing else, committed. You end up caring about these people even when the plot is being ridiculous around them, which is most of the time.

On the LitRPG side it’s fairly standard fare. Class evolutions, skills, stats, the usual furniture. Nothing here is going to change how you think about a system, but it’s competently done and stays out of the way.

The one genuinely odd thing is the experience scaling, and it’s the sort of thing only a numbers-brained reader is going to be bothered by. For the first three books it’s fine. Then book four happens and the math really falls apart. Eve’s quest rewards are so broken that there’s something like a six order of magnitude gap between the XP she pulls from her Legendary quest chain (trillions) and what anyone gets from actually killing monsters (millions at most). And yet her friends, nowhere near that quest gravy train, still somehow almost keep pace with her. It’s pure plot-needs-them-at-this-level hand-waving.

But honestly? Super minor. Let’s be real: 99% of LitRPGs eventually go loose with the numbers once scaling stops making mathematical sense and the rule of cool takes over. This is just a slightly more visible seam than most because the author needed the characters to get to their tier five evolution quickly.

The story is fun, warm, and pun-drunk. Definitely worth a read if wordplay comedy is your thing. For me it was a great lighter read after a very heavy high-stress story (Path of the Deathless) and was a great palate cleanser.