The Land: Founding

Richter is either a typical fantasy hero or an obnoxious gamer stereotype and rarely anywhere in between. Female characters are either maternal figures and quest givers or romantic interests. Richter's relationship with the sprite is the only really enjoyable character development of the book.

The game messages are very repeatitive and boring. Might not be so bad with a physical book, since you can skim past those, but the audiobook is painful.

So, I'm giving litRPG a chance. What I like about the RPG idea is the creativity aspect, how it can originate such fantastical histories with such little talent required.

The first book I read of this genre was Critical Failure, and I found it to be surprisingly funny, it showed great potential for other books in this category.

First of all, this book should be classified as litMMORPG. It is as if someone started playing WoW and then decided to write down everything that is happening. ‘Gained quest: kill wolves. You have 14 XP, 20 STR, 25 INT, ...'. This kind of text appears a lot and goes on for quite a while.

Well, the premise is kind of interesting. In a parallel dimension, a prison world full of god like demon creatures devise a plan to escape their cells. This plan relies on getting a massive amount of people to kind of agree to sell their souls to them. They decide that the fastest way to do this is through an online game, where there are so many people playing and for such a long time that they basically already gave their soul to the game. Also, nobody bothers to read EULAs, so when prompted, they accepted the deal in exchange for new areas to explore.

The story is too flat and dull however. I kept waiting to get something either funny or interesting to happen to keep my attention. While I'm still early on my journey through litRPG, I'm already thinking that satire was what I really liked about Critical Failure, and its not just any author/story that will do to get me interested in reading these kind of books.

Read 1:34/9:49 16%

Executive Summary: Not great, but still entertaining. 3.5 stars.Audiobook: I haven't listened to much by Nick Podehl, but I've always considered him a great narrator. This book is no different. He speaks clearly with good volume and inflection and does a variety of voices that make for an excellent audiobook. I do however have some reservations. One of the drawbacks to Unabridged can be that some text is meant to be scanned/skimmed in a book, but must be read its entirety for the audio version. This books suffers from that. I feel it's also made worse by adding audio dings/music like you're leveling up in a game. In a game I appreciate it. In this book, I found that a bit irritating, especially when most of the text that followed was long and tedious.None of this is the narrator's fault and he does a great job despite the source material not always translating 100% well in an audio format. None of this was enough to put me off of continuing the series in audio because Mr. Podehl does that good of a job and this otherwise is the type of book that works well in audio.Full ReviewI first heard of “LitRPG” on the Sword & Laser podcast a few months ago. Mr. Kong labels himself as “The Father of American LitRPG”. American is a key word here because Japanese Manga and Anime has been telling this kind of story for over a decade. I also have read other books that are very close in style to this, albeit maybe less explicit on including all the stats/character sheets of everyone involved. I'd put this book in a similar vein as books like [b:Ready Player One 9969571 Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1) Ernest Cline https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1500930947s/9969571.jpg 14863741] or [b:NPCs 22088245 NPCs (Spells, Swords, & Stealth, #1) Drew Hayes https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1400095217s/22088245.jpg 41426688], both of which I enjoyed more than this book. The idea of being trapped in a fantasy video game first crossed my radar in the early 2000s with the anime .hack//Sign.That all said, after nearly 2 decades as a D&D player and over 13 years playing World of Warcraft, this style of story really appeals to me. This book has many of the usual tropes present in any number of animes of this genre. The main character is a “dude-bro” although thankfully not 100% of the time. The book also severely lacks in female characters. The few that there are serve mostly as quest givers or providers of information with no real agency to speak of.Richter comes off as your stereo-typical “elite” gamer dude part of the time, and someone who actually seems to genuinely care about the people of The Land the rest of the time. He grew on me as a character, but I could stand fewer of his lame jokes and sexist comments.Overall the writing is fine, but not great. Some of the dialogue (beyond the aforementioned jokes and sexist comments) can be cringeworthy. It's important to note however that I wasn't reading this book for a deep wow factor. It's one of those popcorn books where you just turn your brain off and enjoy the ride. The ride was pretty good. The setting was established, some mysteries were set-up for the series and mostly our protagonist did what any new RPG player does: complete quests, explore, fight stuff and level up.I found the book entertaining enough that I not only picked up the second book right away, but I rolled a new character in WoW because it really got me itching to level my own character. If you're into the whole RPG/leveling thing and aren't put off by the dude-bro stuff, this book may be worth checking out. I hope as it goes on we get some more depth to our protagonist and some actual female characters with some agency.

A good LITRPG story.

Nice system, nice plot/story

Minor issues
Sometimes the MC doesn't feel like he's actually played any RPG's. understanding some things, while not knowing some things on the same level. When displaying levels and skills, a mini version or a shortened version of everything would have been nice. i don't need the full level up text every level up. or full text for skills every time.

I was really excited to check this series out. I enjoy the LitRPG genre as I understand it, and I was excited to see that the “founder” of the genre was from an underrepresented group, which I'm trying to make an effort to be mindful of in my reading.

But only about two chapters in this book were particularly interesting or engaging.

The early hours of playing a new RPG are often full of grind. Sometimes, that's nice because it allows the brain to turn off, fall into a familiar pattern, get that dopamine rush from watching your stats rise. But if you were to simply describe this process to another person, even a fan of the genre, it'd be entirely mind-numbing. Sometimes, a good game spices up that process by adding unique lore, uncommon facets to the magic or other systems. Sometimes that can be enough to make the early hours more than a grind. It can add a layer of joyful discovery. But in this book, that wasn't the case. Nothing particularly original seems to exist in this world so far. It's all quite standard. What's worse, the protagonist is supposedly very familiar with the world, from the game. Not everything is apparently like the game, but much of it is. So why spend so much time on piddling exposition? Few interesting characters are met; almost no world building. Much of it is taken up by actual reading of non-metaphorical repetitive dialog boxes and prompts. It's truly like listening to someone describe their first ten hours in WoW. There's not even much of the characteristic “modern Earth inhabitant meets fantasy world” wit of the LitRPG genre, besides like one “FML” reference.

The story of the world and why the protagonist has been brought there is established in the prologue and then never mentioned again.

The book has no thrust, no real climax, and ends suddenly and unexpectedly. We still have neither a short term goal (besides “level up village”) nor a long-term goal.

The third act starts to introduce some characters and some conflict but it doesn't do anything with it besides a quick skirmish and I guess a sub-boss?

I dunno. I want to say I'll give book two a chance because it's a popular series and it's possible the author learned a lot from book one, but this one was no fun and I listen while running so it actually meant I skipped my run for a while because I the book didn't motivate me to return to it.