Retribution

Interesting idea to set the story in a MMORPG controlled (and mostly built) by an advanced AI. And what a world - wouldn't we ALL want to play this amazing game? Unfortunately the writing itself is pretty terrible - utterly cliche character set up, characters muse aloud to themselves to expound on obvious plot points, and pretty much every female character mentioned is abysmally characterized. Example, this is the conversation where we meet the main female character, Riley: blonde, rich, beautiful, senior, and supposedly intelligent:

"Where are you heading now? Riley asked, trying to break his morose mood.
"I have calculus, and then on to English"
"Calculus, huh? You must be a smart one," she said with a teasing note in her voice and a grin. Her eyes sparkled with mischief.

>>gag<<

Let's not even mention the female broadcasters who apparently watch footage of a video game and develop instant crushes on computer game characters, nor the fact that every female in the book basically seems to be simply impressed by whoever has the most power. Painful to read. Male authors: if you really have no clue how to write women, just write them exactly like your male characters. Believe it or not, we are intelligent human beings too.

Anyway, if you can get past the bad grammar and plodding writing, the story of what happens in the game is actually interesting (assuming you enjoy computer games). The author clearly did a little bit of research about how MMOs work -- I'm guessing reading a few D&D handbooks and playing some World of Warcraft -- although he's also clearly not a real long-term player, as he clearly doesn't quite grasp some things that would be assumed by players who are really expert in these games. He also clearly didn't bother talking to anybody who actually makes computer games for a living, as most of the descriptions and assumptions about what happens on the development side are laughably wrong -- the idea that any game would be designed without complete real-time logs of all events is totally laughable, and no game company EVER would EVER write into their terms of use that they could only access a player's logs if they suspect wrong-doing. Constant monitoring of every game event is necessary, not only to ensure the game remains balanced, but also in case of any customer service dispute (like lost items, refunds, contested loot, whatever)... it's utterly impossible to believe that this company wouldn't have real-time logs of every event and transaction accessible real-time by a large customer service team. Anyway. I do make computer games for a living so this probably isn't going to bother most readers as much as me, so I won't continue this list....

Bottom line ... entertaining light reading fantasy if you enjoy gaming and can overlook the shallow characters and bad writing.

This book is about a new VR game called Awaken Online. Our protagonist is a school kid who is bullied at school and ignored at home. Fairly similar to most LitRPG, but the twist here is that the game's AI works to resolve your emotional problems outside of the game.

The game itself is your standard sword and sorcery type game, however the AI rewrites portions of it in response to the users desires and needs, so longer term, who knows what it's going to end up as. The game has some Tabletop RPG aspect, namely the alignment system from DnD.

This book was very good for a litrpg, it didn't fall into too many of the tropes of making the main character a hero, and (I can't believe this comes up so often with LitRPG that I have to mention it) the women characters were pretty well written, and for once for this genre not everybody is russian and dying for a smoke.

If I had one criticism, it's that the author failed to build up my excitement in dramatic moments, and while they were kinda cool they didn't quite achieve that wow factor.

It's a 4 but it only just scraped that. I think I'll probably read the next in the series.