Despite the two main characters having the same character, this was fun and fresh and slightly silly. It reminds me of Unsouled (Cradle #1) but also a bit of Ed Greenwood's Band of Four series.
This is a weird one in the sense that it's really bad, but I didn't hate it.
For one, this book tries it's best to fulfil the challenge "add an adverb for every verb". Which is aggravated by the other challenge - to add a "say" synonym for every line of dialog. This naturally leads to some of them being nonsensical. But there are other dumb things. [spoiler]I was most annoyed when the protagonist being rude to someone and then doubling down on that was described and treated as "presenting a good argument". A close runner up was the one where the book says something like "learning to use a weapon takes a long time" and immediately continues to manage every kind of leveling for our protagonists in a really short span of time.[/spoiler]
The plot is let's take videogame mechanics and put them as the basis of a fantasy …
This is a weird one in the sense that it's really bad, but I didn't hate it.
For one, this book tries it's best to fulfil the challenge "add an adverb for every verb". Which is aggravated by the other challenge - to add a "say" synonym for every line of dialog. This naturally leads to some of them being nonsensical. But there are other dumb things. [spoiler]I was most annoyed when the protagonist being rude to someone and then doubling down on that was described and treated as "presenting a good argument". A close runner up was the one where the book says something like "learning to use a weapon takes a long time" and immediately continues to manage every kind of leveling for our protagonists in a really short span of time.[/spoiler]
The plot is let's take videogame mechanics and put them as the basis of a fantasy setting. In a pretty straightforward way. And that works surprisingly well.
I guess the reason I kept listening to the end is that I wondered how will our two protagonists being on somewhat opposite sides be resolved at the end of the book. Decently.
This was really creative. The main character essentially being a dungeon was a nice change of pace, and I enjoyed the essence-based magic system as well.