Chrysalis

This story is the best type of popcorn flick. It is an incoherent, adventure packed ramble by a mildly insane MC who becomes an ant, loves his colony, adopts a lightning shooting ape, and end up spewing out gravity bombs with the help of his second brain.

The writing is serviceable. There are frequent grammatical and structural errors, but the breezy narration and fast pace mean you’re not lingering on the prose. The MC might be cunning, but he completely submerges himself into the mindset of a monster ant fighting for survival in some mana-fueled battle-royale. This leads to rationalizations that don’t make much sense from a human’s viewpoint, but that always manage to pull the story forward.

There are constant hints of world-building. The break into human perspectives are enough to flesh out the world while not being too much of a distraction.

It’s probably one of the most charming and fun stories I’ve run across on RR, which more than makes up for its flaws.

A fun afternoon of reading, except for the formatting problems. The font size changes every couple of chapters, even when the override formatting option is turned on. Can adjust manually, but it's still an unnecessary interruption to do so.

The style is appropriate for the type of story, few significant grammar errors(a couple of missing letters and I-s). The general story is the very bog-standard Human->Monster reincarnation so go eat and grow while using human mind powers for advantage over the competition, the long-term interest is in the eventual reconnection and co-operation with the colony instead of forever being alone and unique. Human interludes provide greater world context and plot hooks, I have great hopes for the development of your Legion of the Dead.

I'll try to keep this short.

Chrysalis is a pretty interesting transmigration novel that manages to elude any of my attempts to rate it.  It starts off with a distinctly Japanese light novel feel*, before branching off into a somewhat unique tale of a giant monster ants rise to power.

Having binge read all 482 or so pages already released of it, I fail to put into words what kept me from dropping this novel to go to bed. 

The plot while interesting, often comes off as decidedly average. The first-person presentation of the novel leaves us rooming with Anthony, a roommate partial to bouts of rampant annoyance. And whilst not rife with them, the novel does have it's fair share of spelling and grammar errors (not anything immersion breaking, mind you)

And yet, there's just something charming about this novel I can't quite put into words.  Almost like a younger sibling, you're left unable to ignore its frequent and annoying faults, but something about the way it all comes together just leaves you smiling with a warm feeling in your heart.

Chrysalis. the tale of Anthony the ant.  It's not going to win any awards, but it's an interesting read I wholeheartedly recommend you give a try

...

Just be a little patient with the first few chapters, those honestly are a bit of a slog, even on a second pass.

One of the best stories with non-humanodal, non-bipedal MC where author delivers and don't go hiatus after 20 chapters on his readers. And updates daily. And probably the only one story where monster MC strives for community rather being loner.

I'm mentioning it, because writing story fantasy story with human MC using western'ish culture is easy. Authors have entire legacy of literature, stereotypes, values to back on. But writing story about other species that is not elves, dwarfes or other bipedals is really hard without going into bull*** or burning out after few chapters.

I sorta do enjoy reading Chrysalis, but there are just many issues that make me sort of dislike it as a story.

The main character is the biggest of those problems, he is simply said, stupid and insane, and i dont mean that in a good way. He goes in utterly irrational decisions, all for his hive, he like has no sense of self after joining the colony.

Theres is the 'Gandalf' thing that has beaten to death already, through it is appearing less and less at this point, so it does not annoy me anymore.

I will be fair that not all is bad, theres the human side of the story with the Deep Legion part, and thats actually well written, and thats also the part where the story does truly shine, for the author has made a well thought out world with some interesting idea's used.

The best written part of this story is the world, even if it aint completely unique it is well constructed for a story of this quality, for example the Legion Abyssi, or the entire Dungeon.

Grammar also has massive problems, there being a ton of grammatical errors, and even missing words, and after all this time, despite many readers pointing out those errors, not even a single one has been fixed so far, this does get disheartening since it shows the author is not interested in making the story easier to read for new readers, though it also could be due to the fact that the author has no time to edit the story thoroughly.

The formatting is a plain mess, it switches font size a lot, with the majority of time it being a huge font size which is hard to read, but again, this is barely a problem with the newer chapters.

For those who dont care about the quality of the story, that just want something enjoyable and fun to read, this may be for you. However if you want a well-written story, turn away now, you will not find that here.

An entertaining novel similar to the others in the genre. Fairly unique in that the MC embraces his inner ant, and there are hints of worldbuilding and lore through interpersed interludes. The writing is casual, and has decent humor mixed in. Anyone who enjoys light litrpg elements and a reincarnation into monter story will enjoy this one.

A glaring issue is the formatting, where it clearly shows that the author copied and pasted from the site he originally published on, without fixing any formatting issues (like font size and paragraph spacing) that arose from that. There are also a fair number of typos.

(Review as of chapter 100)

Good story, but you lose focus on what made it good

Anthony is a lone ant surviving in an impossible environment, using his human intellect to outwit all other monsters. With no colony to back him up, he showed surprising ingenuity along with his epic Ant vs Goliath or Ant vs Many fights. There's also a fun mutation system revolving around biomass that is only acquired through eating! This sets him up on an epic adventure deeper and deeper into the dungeon he's been placed in.

Until...

He meets his colony, and the story lost complete focus (became frustrating and boring).

The first time he sees other ants, he goes on a suicide mission to save them. Why? No one knows. For some reason the author wanted to start writing about the ant colony so badly, he forced it down our throats. Anthony was apparently so pathetic in his past life that he now starts to see the colony as an actual 'Family' within a few days. His pathetic 'loneliness' was further reinforced when we see how mindless the ants actually are, yet it doesn't bother him one bit. 

He stops adventuring like he used to. Almost everything he does is 'For the Colony' now. He buys upgrades and evolves to align with the colony better. Then he gets a pet... and doesn't mind if it's in his way, ruins his stealth skill, freeloads off him, eats his hard earned biomass, steals his xp, and he even starts wasting points and buying skills for the pet!!!.... (Seriosly, why add this to the novel?)

All sense of excitement of a lone adventuring ant is gone, and replaced by this annoying need to uplift his colony and pet.....

While the direction you took the story may or may not be the problem, the way in which you presented it is.

Because of the way you presented both the colony and his pet, I started to hope for their eventual death. Then I realized you were keeping them for good, which made me frustrated enough to write this review...

Read at your own risk.

Ridiculous things not found in this review due to brevity:

• Anthony's many MANY idiotic actions
• Whimsical Author's evolution and skill choices/direction
• Jokes that are repeated so often they make you cringe instead

When I read the story's summary, I thought it was one of those cheap 'I've been reincarnated in a fantasy world' books. Which is to say, unoriginal trash. I was wrong. The story is well-written, has a great plot, realistic protagonist and fleshed out side characters. Light novels have a bad reputation, but this one is great.

Chrysalis is a pretty good story set in a very well-built world that is dragged down by a very poorly written MC and a few other issues.

The story starts off very strong, with a human being reborn as an ant in a fantasy world with a litRPG system. He uses that human intelligence to survive in situations where he's out of his depth, and focuses his skills and developmental path accordingly. His actions are rational, strategic, and well-thought out. The style is fun to read, with well-integrated humor and puns.

Before I continue about the MC, I'll take a moment to discuss the other POVs. The story mostly follows the Ant MC, but often spends time with a variety of human characters, including a legionary, adventurer, priest, and queen. Those chapters are consistently excellent. They do a great job expanding and fleshing out the world, as well as putting the events of the story in a larger context. 

Returning to the MC, there was a lot of great stuff about him and his POV, but the moment he meets the ant colony all of that great stuff dissapears. His intelligence seems to reduce itself to a fraction of its previous amount, and he just becomes an idiot who runs around willing to die for random unintelligent ants and screaming "For the colony!". This shift is explained by the claim that the MC didn't really have a family on Earth, so hes super into this ant family, which is pretty weak logic to justify the degree to which his behaviour changes. This logic is also reiterated and repeated every other chapter.

The MC's personality isn't the only thing that suffers at this stage. The writing style that was so enjoyable to read early on is much less so after this point. That well-integrated humor and those puns that were funny early on? Those same 5 jokes and puns are repeated over and over and over and over, despite the fact that they switched from funny to annoying a long time ago.

The plotting of the story has been decent, with the general plot moving in a good direction despite the MC losing most of his independence and personality. The pacing can be a problem, depending on how you view it. The story generally releases 4-5 chapters a week, each less than 1k words. The short length of chapters causes the pacing issue, since the highly repetitive style leads to very little happening in a given chapter. This means that a single fight or event takes multiple chapters, and really slows the story pace.

Just to reiterate, the human POV chapters are excellent and very well done. It's feels like the human and ant MC chapters are written by different authors due to the difference in quality between the two.

Overall, this is a decent story with great worldbuilding that really suffers from an idiot MC and a repetitive style.

(As of Chapter 340)

I got up until Storm of Blades, and to be honest I was really enjoying it. The journy of an ant gaining power to try and find his colony was pretty entertaining, up until he actual found it. It wasnt a drop in quality or story that turned me off it, but the mc. Once he found the colony he seemed to fall into a 'for the hive' mentallity where he threw himself into protecting the hive, even going as far as to make almost suicidal decisions to potect said hive. But they are just ants. There is no super intelligent ant he can talk to or build a connection with, there is no bond that could expain his thoughts. They are just ants he keeps throwing himself infront of in order to protect. It would be like me fighting a bear to protect a duck, sure I'd be sad if it died, but its only a duck. 

Can someone explain this to me, because it really brought down my enjoyment.