Huh, this is actually really good. It doesn't present anything new to the genre, it's the same'ol "go back in time before future popular VRMMO launches" trope, but it's very well written.

The MC isn't some OP edgelord and actually has to struggle to get to where is. 

More importantly there's a sense of realism to the whole story, even though it's a SF. The VR tech doesn't feel like magic, it's finicky and relatively dangerous. The MC's antisocial personality is fleshed out in a believable manner where you can actually see him struggle to connect with others. Then the game world itself is very interesting and properly balanced as an MMO should be. It doesn't just rain overpowered abilities on the MC because of his future knowledge and actually pushes back to keep him in line when he goes too far.

All in all it's a good story with quite a decent number of chapters already released. I'm surprised this isn't more popular.

Read More

Worth every second.

Read More

astonishing world building, I really suggest a try

Read More

Just going to do a quick early review, as I'm pretty sure I might unintentionally drop this as I pay more and more attention to other hobbies.

The story is pretty good, so far, but the premise is incredibly stupid. To make things worse there's a massive 30 year time limit and almost 100 chapters in we're not even 3 weeks in. It seems the Author of The Runesmith used this as inspiration, because we're shown most things once and then it's skipped from then on in favor of "world building" from then on. If they're doing dungeon runs the main mobs get shown once, the bosses get shown once, and then we're just casually told they ran it another 6 times and this is the loot they got.

At the same time though, the author does the opposite of The Runesmith by showing each and every day in incredible "world building" detail. The world building? It's usually just the main character inner thoughts or sometimes he's talking to someone. What you expected to be shown something? Lol

Overall, it's okay. Extremely slow, but okay. I wouldn't recommend reading though, unless the author rises from the grave and continues it. If you've found this, you've already found the story that's basically this, but better, in the #1 most popular this month.

Read More

If you're looking for a good MMO-based story with likable characters, good game mechanics, and good pacing... this is not that.

It has good elements; the writing is solid, and the plot and story on the whole is okay.  The characters are reasonably diverse, and some are decent people.  However, the main character is very unlikable, and while the first dozen or so chapters are good, the pacing afterward feels both slow and overly rushed at the same time.

The point where it really, really fails though, and gets a bad rating... is the game mechanics.  Simply put, this story features one of the most unrealistic, worst-designed game systems I've ever seen.  Character classes are radically imbalanced in relation to each other, characters can be put into prison where they can't do anything for weeks or months at a time (effectively a ban from the game even though the player didn't break terms of service), and characters get a logarithmic increase in stats at a certain point, such that level 27 is over twice as strong as level 24.  On top of that, it suffers from the ever-common "unique skills / titles / bonuses / whatever for the first person to achieve this or that" problem that almost all stories about MMOs feature to make their characters special, but that no real game would ever consider adding due to further imbalance.  Nobody would ever play this game, even without the issues that cause it to nearly crash and be patched a month after release in the original timeline.

Read More