Shovels In Spades

My main issue with the novel is the MC's decisions of how to use his points, the way he acts, his personality and the nonsense that goes throughout the whole story.

 I understood that you got quite offended by my review, it was never my intention to offend you so i apologize for that. I tried to soften my message to be less offensive and added a few things I actually liked in the story, good luck.

First off, the intent of this review is primarily to analyse what I did not like about the story as I enjoyed a good deal of it and would like to see the author improve. Also understand that my only credentials are a healthy addiction to books and my own views. I am on chapter 40. This review contains spoilers.

That said, what truly kills this story is character development and world balance. 

By 'WORLD BALANCE' I mean the degree that the rules of the story's world affect everyone else compared to the degree they affect the main character. I.e. How much plot armor the m.c. has. Mostly, this imbalance is displayed through the distribution of merit points. For example, the mc constantly attracts the attention of gods which nets him about 50k merit points every time. This is fine by itself, but he usually catches interest of said gods by doing very little. The god of madness, for example, is interested in him because he talks to a clearly intelligent and actively communicative golem. This is a problem because, as of ch.40 no one else has caught the attention of gods. One dude stabbed a wooden dummy until exhaustion and uses a syringe as his main weapon not to mention his fanatical loyalty and the god of madness doesn't care. 

Another issue along the same vein is that the 40 survivors lead by the red haired lady "just barely" had enough merit points to buy the zombie cure at a cost of 1500. As evidenced by Ger's merit screen, simply surviving for 12 hours is a reward of 3000. Not only had those survivors lasted 24 hours, but they had done so under constant strain and even successfully killed several of the monsters. The red haired lady alone should have had thousands of points simply from extended resistance of the zombie virus while fighting zombies AND leading survivors the entire time. 

The issue is that Dez's returns indicate that the system is incredibly generous with merit point and rewards basically everything, so it SHOULD be giving a lot of points to a lot of survivors. In a world where you can buy a permanent summon with enough strength to tear a bank vault door off its hinges for a paltry 7k, that means almost every survivor should be basically at Dez's level or at least close and have their own unique powers. They are not, and do not.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT is the other major failing of this story. It has many tie-ins with the issue of balance, but many characters have little to no depth. I think this is perfectly demonstrated by our main man Rimmy because he is actually VERY WELL DEVELOPED at this point in the story. RImmy is a huge crystal golem with a couple of slits for a face. Despite being completely unable to speak, Rimmy demonstrates through casual actions like giving the mic a thumbs up not only how he feels about complicated issues like murder, but also reveals that he both emphasizes with the mc's pain AND is familiar with social norms on how to cheer up a friend. It's brilliant. Add to that the novel idea of using identification to give characters a quick backstory and we basically know everything about a seven foot mute statue. If every side character was like that it'd be perfect.

Unfortunately, many of the other side characters feel forced. Ger, for example, at one point looks at his daughters interacting and says something along the lines of 'she likes to tease others but can't handle being teased herself'. This is a violation of that old adage 'show don't tell'. We'd already seen the daughter blushing at being teased so the information was useless. It would be like if Ger had seen Rimmy give Daz a thumbs up and monologued 'he is supportive of his friend'. 

As a quick last example of the issue with character depth is the scene with Daz throwing the red haired woman into a door. The woman later forgives Daz immediately after he apologizes with some line like who couldn't forgive you in this situation? I apologize for being blunt but that makes absolutely no sense. Imagine if you were thrown into a door hard enough to take half your health. In the real world that might be equivalent to being grabbed by the hair and thrown hard enough to break ribs and perhaps cause internal bleeding. Would you just hop up and say 'oh no worries it happens every Sunday can we all go stay at your place?' Of course not. This woman is in charge of not only her own saftey but also 40 other people. She wouldn't risk those lives for some clearly violent stranger simply because he killed some mons. Daz had shown his strength so maybe she wouldn't demand compensation but she would be far more likely to simply thank Daz for his help then attempt to find he own base with the other survivors, especially since they apparently had someone with a skill to reinforce barricades. Why risk their lives with some apparently insane, violent stranger? On top of that, why would 40 other people want to follow someone who introduced himself by nearly killing their leader? These aren't a bunch of goblins who only follow the strongest but a scared group of day to day citizens who already had some semblance of confidence they could defend themselves? 

overall I did like your story and especially in how thorough and creative you were with the system I was pleased, but I need more depth to my side characters yo.

EDIT:: I've read past chapter 40 a bit and was pleased to see that my review was somewhat premature. The author does much better on world balance than I thought.

When I read the first few chapters of this story it was pretty fun. And I was really looking forward to how it would develop and how Daz would adapt to his new world.

But as the story goes on I am starting to have the same issues with the MC that I do with the MC's of the other storys by this author. They dont react in a way that I feel a real person would in the same situation. And while it could just be that the MC is very unique.... I just dont see it.

Normally when reading a story of any kind I want to identify something with the MC. Have some kind of connection. And this story just doesnt have that connection.

A story to read while waiting for others to get updated but not something I would go out of my way to recommend to anyone. Definitely not something I would Patreon with how hard he seems to push it.

Trying to avoid spoilers

Alright there are two big reasons I stopped reading this story shortly after getting to book 2. Upfront this is a pretty good book, it has some rough edges however I have noticed an increase in quality. Firstly the military is just... wrong. While it’s probably not the authors fault since most civilians barely know anything about the military, but because I know a great deal about the military reading their parts is like having a migraine and a massive cringe along with wanting to strangle something all at once for me. Again not really the authors fault it’s just very far off the actual real world U.S. military. Secondly I despise the mc’s character. This is not due to bad writing or the mc being an idiot ( he made some mistakes but he ain’t stupid). It is because his character and actions make me genuinly disgusted with him. Many other readers really like the guy and that’s ok, but to me he is someone that once I understood what kind of person he is I would never to try to befriend. I won’t put any spoilers since the military one is already one to many but I just can’t root for the guy. I wish this story and its author good luck but I will not be sticking around to see how it goes.

Generally i would say the premise is not much different from the other Apocalyptic litRPG novels on this site, but it can hold on its own.

The story so far has been fine, through there were moments in book 1 and 2 that i did not like reading at all, and those books could be improved a lot, the later books have shown much improvement over the first 2, that it does even out. Through im waiting for the most likely incoming rewrite to form a final opinion on the first 2 books.

The characters, oh god, here we have the same problem as with the story. The MC at first is fine and quick at adapting to the Apocalypse and establishing his base, but later on his personality takes a large turn for the worse and near the end of book 1 the MC made a choice that really annoyed me. Took some time, but since then it got better, althrough that moment still remains as a problem for whoever is going to read this novel. The other characters are decent, but could be improved on althrough they are nowhere near as bad as the MC was near the end of book 1.

The writing of this story has been overall of a good quality, so no problems on that front althrough word choice could be better and some small mistakes fixed.

Keep writing like you are now, you have improved much since the start of this story, and please do keep improving since later chapters are so much better to read than the early ones.

Fun read, if still a bit short at this point.

I look forward to future chapters.

...

...

Even if the MC's name does make me feel like it should belong to a muppet.

Darenzooo~~ 

Not that I'm really criticizing. It's seriously hard to come up with names that are somewhat original.

I mean, I read this one story with a MC named Randidly.I couldn't help but think that the poor kid's school life must have been hell.  

*Stares hard at random space*

That's right, I'm talking about you Ghosthound.

I recommend reading the story if you like the premise. Yeah the first book has flaws and the MCs does pretty dumb stuff and his interactions with other people is in my opinioen pretty shitty. But the Rest is rather good. The System is an intersting take for the classic RPG system in such novels and has a minor flaws in the beginning, but is overall pretty good. So if you like the system dont quit in book 1 and read further. Book 2 is really well written and one of the best characters in this story only shows up at the end of book 1 and this person is worth it(I admitt that i am a bit biased, because i really really like this character...).

I love the story, the characters and the idea of the 'System'. It gives the author the opportunity to introduce new and exciting things to the story without it seeming weird or out of place. Because of the freedom the author has to introduce new things almost every chapter, I feel lots of anticipation every time I read this. 'world building for an endless world' is what I would call it. overall this is an amazing story that didn't annoy me a single time with needless characters or story arcs (which is hard to do). definitely worth reading.

This is one of those stories that confuses me on a personal level, because I don't know if I can coherently explain why I like it. I can come up a reason to NOT like it, yet I've read the whole damn thing from Start to Book 3 Chapter 21 over the course of a few days. 

So let's get the bad bit out of the way. 

The characters are universally Weird, and I've capitalized that W with intent. I'm going to try to provide a sanitized, non-spoilery example here out of respect for potential readers. If the author feels this is giving too much away, I'll happily edit at his request.

My take: The MC is a semi-reformed sociopath, with a disabled super-genius little sister, and a jailbait girlfriend with a speech impediment. All of them have mysterious powers and horribly traumatic backgrounds BEFORE the usual distribution of classes and skills and magic doodads turns everyone into sword and sorcery alphas. The other characters up and down the line have me wondering if the "now you're a game world" event killed every person with a modicum of sanity on day zero. For the life of me, I can't think of a single character that doesn't come across as being nuttier than squirrel poo. 

So that's the bad.

AND YET. The author has something. It's a very similar feeling to Legend of Randidly Ghosthound, a summer blockbuster movie style of reading where you just check your common sense at the door and have some damn fun for once. Then next thing you know the bloody movie makes a trillion dollars worldwide.

So I leave my usual cynicism outside the theatre. I reach in for another handful of that salty, fake butter popcorn and just enjoy the ride. I read the latest chapter within a couple hours of it posting. And YES, I give this lunacy five stars. 

I like the world, I like the way that the competition expands and the fight to protect the population while fighting your way higher in the rankings.

I can't stand the people. The personalities are one-note, never getting any deeper than a single character trait and shifting without any real explanation. 

There's never significant tension. Challenges arise only to be immediately crushed, and by a little bit into the second book (where the author said it would get better) the protagonist has mind control powers, the best base in the world, is super strong, has ladies falling over themselves around him, men worshipping him... it's wish fulfillment that never goes anywhere. "Oh, there's a dungeon? Let me just waltz in and crush it, no problems!" "Oh, there's a rival base nearby? Let me mind control the leader there!"

There is neither buildup nor payoff, and I'm done.