A New World. A Thousand Threats. Welcome to The Continent.
Felix’s life on Earth had become a series of dead-end jobs, ruined relationships, and rotating apartments smaller than most postage stamps. By all accounts, even his own, he was a coward. Too afraid to move forward, to take risks. Yet when given the chance to choose between risking his life or walking away from a deadly encounter, he didn’t hesitate.
Moments before his untimely demise, Felix was snatched from earth and thrust into a magical world known only as ‘The Continent’. Empowered by the ‘System’, he learns that he can strengthen himself through combat and dedication. To survive he’ll have to push himself beyond his limits, or else fall to the monsters all around him.
Levels, stats, and magic. Death is the start of a terrible fate, but if he lives…no one knows what he will become.
As of writing this review, I have read the first four published books on KU.
As with many LitRPG’s, we don’t waste much time before the main character is killed off and taken to a new fantasy world. Unbound gives us a whole chapter with an unusual yacht-party scene before we enter LitRPG land properly and the MC gets properly introduced. He takes the moniker from his main Earth-world MMO avatar, Felix, and very quickly bonds a chimera companion, dubbing him Pit.
From then on, it’s Felix and Pit against the world. Monsters, frost giants, ancient golems, primordials, dragons, gods, Inquisitors, giant monkeys, the Blight (Manawarped in this story, but I figure enough people are familiar with Dragon Ago to get the reference), you name it, Felix fights it. If you’re a fan of action, and by that I mean you love action and you want your books chock-filled with it, this one may be a winner for you. It’s a popcorn read, for sure.
To go light on the spoilers, book one is a lot of setup and adventurs out in the Foglands, book two is a side adventure, and books three and four focus on the larger plot that is uncovered due to the actions at the end of book one. Book two is in odd spot here, because I feel you could probably delete it and people reading straight from book one to book three would probably barely notice. That said, I did enjoy the side quest (look it’s not really a side quest, I’m just holding back spoilers).
Book one, three, and beyond also serve to build up the wider cast of characters. The focus is still very much on Felix, so to those who don’t like perspective switching, while this series does have it, it’s normally very short scenes in fights providing a few pages from another character. It’s not Game of Thrones, and it’s not something like And None Shall Remain with the back and forth chapter perspectives. The side character themselves are good, and they provide some much needed context and clues about the world, although I wish we did actually have a few more PoVs from them in non-action scenes to help get us as readers get deeper into their perspectives, as action scenes tend to be very “explosion this, parry that, stab stab stab,” and while it’s fun, it’s often very surface level. That’s not a criticism of Nicoli’s writing, it’s a general comment about typical action sequences.
Talking about action scenes, I said this before, but I’ll repeat it again. There are so many. For me (as a fan of slower, often slice-of-life series), I was sometimes overwhelmed. So much is going on all the time, and I read to relax before bed, and reading all this stuff going down is not relaxing! I remember distinctly halfway through the fourth book, at 1am, thinking “Okay, they’re almost at the nest now, the fights about to wrap up, I’ll keep reading.”
I took a sleeping pill that night after it hit 3am.
The fight didn’t stop for 200 pages. Whenever one opponent was cast down, a bigger bad was there to fill its place. Over and over and over. Felix comments on his exhaustion because of this, and I was there, nodding along, eyes sore from my phone’s screen, agreeing with all my heart. Give him a break! Let me sleep! Why has so much been crammed into this one book?!
So if that sounds like fun to you, oh boy. For me, it actually detracted a bit from the story. I like the downtime after the fight more than the fight itself. And, critically in progression fantasy and LitRPG, power levels matter. Light spoilers: after a low-level Felix takes down things far beyond him, including eating a damn Primordial dragon, how can I take much more mundane threats seriously? After Felix helps kill the nest in book four, he beats a damn god in a battle of wills, ousting her from his core. Then he’s swamped by a monster horde, and two archids. And then there’s the Inquisitor there as yet another enemy in the same 300 page fight. But after a dragon and a god, it just feels weird to have this mundane human as a threat.
Felix overcomes these sort of ridiculous odds all the time, so if you like the overpowered MC trope, this will appeal to you. Most of the time when Felix was beating these much more powerful beings though, I was confused. Lots of these challenges happen in the visualisation of his soul/skills, and there’s a lot of “worst pain he’d ever experienced” over and over, and tons of “willpower” everywhere. I didn’t follow a lot of how it was all supposed to work, and many of the triumphant moment felt like reading a Michael Bay Transformers movie. Bright lights, explosions, swelling music (literally), and Felix walks away, not looking at the explosions, having won, but with me having no real idea how.
I generally shrug and keep rolling with it, but fans of analytic MCs (like Zorian from Mother of Learning) may feel unfulfilled with how larger fights are resolved in this more nebulous fashion.
Summary time.
Numbers go up, a lot. Stats, skills, titles, there’s plenty of it. Action. So much action. Like, non-stop, who does Felix have to absorb next before people get the picture style of action. If that sounds like fun, check it out.
