Advent: Red Mage, Book 1 (Unabridged‪)‬

Four star book, and a good start to a series. I’ve listened to a lot of LitRPGs, and this one is among the better ones. If you don’t like hearing level ups repeatedly, this book might annoy you during the parts where the MC reads his new stats. With that being said, the MC tends to save this for times when he’s safe, and you get an info dump for about two minutes tops before the story continues. I don’t mind this, but it could have been done better. An example would be when the MC’s skills level, the system reads out each level, “Acid dart has reached level 2” followed by info about level up, “Acid dart has reached level 3.”, followed by info, and so on. It would have helped to just write it as “Acid dart has reached level 2, 3, 4, 5.” followed by the final stats of the skill. Aside from that, the plot of the story isn’t anything new in the genre, but the system is its own(closest I can compare it to would be Defiance of the Fall), and I welcome the difference. The characters are written with room for growth, although the first book isn’t long enough to see much of it in the MC. The book was good enough for me to purchase the second one right after finishing the first, but I will have to get through that before I decide wether or not to purchase the third. Overall if you enjoyed Defiance of the Fall, He Who Fights With Monsters, The Good Guys, or Dungeon Crawler Carl, I would suggest this book for its story, and unique world system.

There is a lot to like about this book, the characters are likable, the story is unique but the rest really isn’t very good.

This reads like you might narrate to a blind person every detail about a video game you are playing. All the way down to pop-up notifications that, mystically, appear in the main character’s (Drew) vision. The thought of that is pretty ridiculous that you have pop-up notifications “at the edge of your vision” and you click them how exactly?

This flows through to the in-game notifications when you get an ability upgrade (I am an avid gamer, so these things are all very familiar). The repeated notifications are silly in a book. But in an audiobook it’s a nightmare. Imagine listening for, and I kid you not, 12 minutes of the narrating saying “Congratulations Sub Lieutenant, your <insert ability here> has been upgraded” followed by another twenty “Congratulations Sub Lieutenant….”. It is infuriating to listen to.

It’s obvious that the author is a gamer and is trying to translate a World of Warcraft style game into a book. This has been done, many times, but she takes the extra step of continuing to make it a game and this just doesn’t translate well to the written or spoken word. It just doesn’t.

But once you grit your teeth and manage to just get through all that terrible dialog, the book ends suddenly, without anything being resolved. It’s like a bad movie where the action hero falls off the cliff and then roll credits, just begging you to watch the sequel in a year or two but no satisfaction that the hero did his job.

A more subtle book ending is that ALL things are resolved (the senators group, the real purpose of the two cops, how the captain turns out - none of which were resolved but all of which were huge plot points) but there’s something like “and suddenly there is a strange blinking light on the button that says the world is going to end…”. Now you look forward to book number 2.

Had she resolved this book properly I could get through some of the other goofiness, but it wasn’t resolved. In the number of pages spent writing “Congratulations Mid Shipman….” Blah, blah, blah, a proper book ending could have been written.

But, alas, it was not. I’ll never get to book 2 because book 1 was so bad.