Defiance of the Fall

I really like this story. Here are some bullet points of the things I like about it.

•  Survival- The MC is lost in the woods during a system apocalypse. Always like when a character needs to survive and acclimate to dangerous surroundings, both when it's happening and in the future when the MC gets compared to other people. That seems a long way off, though.
• Realistic Knowledge- Related to above, this story actually has an MC who doesn't know how to immediately game the system. There are a lot of functions of the system that he doesn't know, and even more that he doesn't know he doesn't know, simply because he missed the tutorial. Rarely, you'll see him do something and say, "what an idiot that's clearly not the optimal choice", but all his choices are rational given the amount of information he has. He's super ignorant of what's going on, but using context clues to help himself rather than an deep knowledge of "What to Do when the System Arrives for Dummies".
• System- Its a cool system, fairly background, and kind of sentient. He doesn't immediately get skills and upgrades, it's honestly him surviving as a (albiet super strong) human.
• Struggle- The power creep is good, he struggles for a while, figures out ways to overcome those struggles, and then new stuff pops up to struggle against. Not in the "he'll never see or get hurt by level one mobs" way some xianxia stories do, more like they're there but no longer as much of a threat due to training.
• Plot- Seems like there's some depth to the plot, he's got semi-manditory quests to complete and that may take awhile, day to day survival offset with hints of all the other pieces of the multiverse.
• Realistic Knowledge- The MC is doing fairly well for himself considering, but is by no means a Mary Sue. He's bled for every step forward he's taken. He doesn't immediately know bush craft or how to make armor or anything, it's refreshing to see someone struggle this long. He actually may be at a disadvantage compared to other humans, but is finding a different path to strength, helped in part cuz everyone else is stuck in the tutorial whilst he suffers. He uses his limited resources pretty well, spear stake traps and such.
• Human Emotions- The character actually seems to have to deal with the fact he's stuck alone in the woods forced to fight for his life, rather than just being a mannequin devoid of human emotions. I stress, it really sucks for him almost constantly for the first 30 chapters, but that makes it better IMO cuz there's actually stress when he gets in fights. He actually behaves and feels and thinks in a way that a guy stranded alone might.
• Consistency- All the system stuff is real consistent. The way skills and classes and items work all make sense in this universe.
• Enemies- The monsters are pretty cool

Those are some of the things I like about the story, so far I only have a couple minor negative things to mention

• Lucky- his initial luck in the system, literally a rigged dice roll he shouldn't have won, but that's over and done with by chapter 2 and the plots gotta happen somehow. There really wouldn't be another way to make the same general character and story in a more believable, less lucky manner.
• Town Building I just generally don't like settlement/town management stories, it's nowhere close to getting to that point yet but it seems like a mechanic that's gonna pop up eventually. That's just something I personally don't want to see happen in any story, and it's barely present so far in this one, I just like to whine.

*Edit: new complaints added here as the story continues*

• Overly Expositional its a kind of take the good with the bad situation, and as much as I like reading about a guy figuring out a System, we gotta read through his every thought process for what the system is an does. Sometimes there are multiple paragraphs in row of him just thinking through what he knows, doesn't know or assumes about the new world's physics.
• Overly Introspective - similar to above and also a kind of "too much of a good thing", but the MC will also think through about 4-5 actions he wont do before every action he does do. It just kind of drags the story down at times, I don't really care why he decides not to buy 4 different things if he ends up getting something else, ya know? To me this writing feels like a defense mechanism to shield the writer from RRL comments.
• Weirdly Competent MCs getting real good at murdering demons with an axe/throwing knives for a guy with a pretty hands off system, real quick.

All in all a very well done survival litrpg, with some wuxia elements blended in.

The story had a good start despite it being somewhat of a cliche. Apocolptic-litrpg where the MC is off on his own trying to survive in this new dark and gritty world. The author blended a few elements of eastern fantasy books with western litrpg and it came out pretty well. I did enjoy the story a lot, which is why I'm more disappointed as I got my hopes up. The story started to take a dive in quality when the MC made poor judgements and out of character decisions and the author started to handwave details too big to ignore. The problems I had with the story are pretty spoilery, so I wouldn't recommend clicking it if you're a new reader.

 There's a bunch of minor issues that just keep piling up and it's hard not to be nitpicky about it when they're so glaring. It's not allowed me to fully enjoy the story and after writing this review has soured my taste for this story even more. I rated this story as a 3.5/5 stars, but as I wrote this review and looked more indepth in the issues I had with it, lowered it to 3/5. I imagine many users on this site can overlook these problems and rate it 4-5 stars easily. I would recommend this story to readers very familiar with royal road, but I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who mainly reads published books.

The story really hasn't progressed far enough to rate the characters but from what I've seen it seems like they're gonna be somewhat better than in the average rrl story.

Other than that, the story is a pretty basic New World/Ghosthound style deal. Everyone gets a system and is teleported to a tutorial while the earth gets fucked up by monster hordes and stuff. Everyone except for the protagonist of course, he doesn't get a tutorial (lol).

Other than that I am fairly impressed by how the story is relatively gritty (and sometimes defies logic, like how the guy used the same hatchet for over a month swinging it with superhuman strength against monsters that are definitely tougher than your average tree, considering they can break them apart by running into them...) the protagonist is powerful, but at least so far he is not overpowered (he has the promise of becoming overpowered later tho if he plays his cards right). He has to survive by the skin of his teeth, he'd die on a daily basis if he didn't have the system giving him a 'sleep and your fatal injuries will be healed' trope. The author basically hands the protagonist everything he needs on a silver platter like in most stories like these, what he has not done however is give him anything more than what he needs, he's given him exactly the bare minimum and nothing more and I like that. It's pretty decently written too so you can feel the protagonists struggle as he suffers for not getting to do the tutorial like everyone else.

Unlike him however, we do get a tutorial, we get all the basic RPG stats eplained to us as if everybody doesn't already know it and the story is chock full of wordy explanations about the most mundane things. This was my gripe with the story, the pacing feels like it's snailing along because sometimes entire chapters are devoted to just seemingly meaningless exposition. Hell the last chapter I read (37) was one such chapter (edit: and 38 was the same. And 39.). Literally nothing happens in the entire chapter.

This kind of stuff is a huge pet peeve of mine, when authors do too much exposition, spend too much time on explaining or detailing things that don't really warrant that much text.

Good writing is a balancing act between colorful wording and effective pacing, this author leans a bit too heavily on the former for my tastes. The only reason the story even progressed anywhere for the past 30 chapters is because the author at some point went 'fuck it' and did a month's time skip. (Thankfully, or we would have had chapter upon chapter of the protagonist doing the exact same thing)

Like others have said I share the opinion that this story has potential, it's too early to tell if it's worse or better than the works it seems inspired by, but I'm worried it will never be finished with this focus on overly detailed explanations.

I would advise the author to show more, and tell less. Not everything needs to be explained in full detail, let the readers imagination work out most of the things and focus on what's important to the main plot progression instead. If you look at some great artists (like say wlop for an excellent example) if you look closely at their artwork you will find that sometimes up to  80% or so of their pictures may end up being just blobs, anything that isn't the main focus/character of the picture is only vaguely defined. And it works, your brain will fill in these details when you look at the picture as a whole, but zoom in on it and all you'll see are blobs.

With the decreasing attention spans of humanity as a whole in our current society, it's vital for writers to adopt a similar strategy in their writing to keep the attention of readers.

This is a really great book that has many of the traditional litrpg/xianxia trappings but also cuts some of the more unrealistic ideas for enhanced realism. The writing itself is excellent with very little errors that I could see. The story is great with a likable and real feeling mc who is neither a "genius" or dumb as bricks( which can sometimes be one in the same). I think most importantly of all you can really feel that the author cares about the novel so far. He reads comments, answers questions and most importantly he sometimes goes back to clarify or lengthen parts that are vague/unclear in the novel after seeing a helpful comment. Great novel and hope the author keeps it up.

As of Chapter 49


This story is fairly interesting and well written. It's a bit of a slow burner, but overall the pacing fits the style/genre.

It has clearly been influenced strongly by other popular stories; it's got a strong early-ghosthound / Tao-Wong System apocalypse feeling about it, with some fairly light cultivation thrown in.

If I was being particularly picky, I would say the cultivation aspects are not handled particularly well, and are somewhat glossed over by the story / the introduction of a magical doo-hicky. However as that is such a small part of the story, it doesn't detract much from the overall experience.

Wasn't sure whether to go with 4 or 4.5 stars, but decided to be generous, as this really is rather well written, especially for someone writing in a second language.

Overall, well worth a read, and I look forward to seeing how the story progresses

Very high quality. Grammar has next to no flaws. The tone is easy to read but complex enough to make it interesting.

I would like to believe there is a limit to just how much of a novel you can read that just seems to be stretching the solo act to the max.

If you are into something that takes a person and puts him on a island where all he does is fight and fight and fight, with no human interaction or any sort of communication basically, and things don't seem to be changing anytime soon 370 pages in then, this is definitely up your alley.

But, if you like having dialogues in the chapters you read, then move on.

CIVILIZATION!!! IN TATTERS!!

But hey, it's finally there...

So, I ended up subscribing on patreon when I saw the god damn battle royale mode ending and trust me folks, it's getting a lot better. There are people! Community! Buildings! World building! No more of all-i-do-is-sharpen-my-blade-in-a-dim-lit-space!!!

All I am trying to say is now it is a story I don't mind paying $10 to read ahead.

If you're like me, you scan this site all the time for good series to read but constantly find at least 1 or 2 things about each that are dealbreakers. For me, it's stupid MCs, harems/annoying "romantic" plotlines, and annoying side characters. After having read 30 chapters of this series, I can safely say, for now at least, that it has none of those things. Instead you'll get a visceral story about a pretty realistic MC trying to survive in a hostile world. Just give it a try, I think you'll like it.

Great story!

So much potential in the future of the story, can‘t wait to read more :)

Best thing about it is, that the author is considering critiques and acts accordingly. So everything out of place is rewritten and made better, as good as everyting negative in other reviews has already been taken care of!

Tossed in a hard situation,  MC survives 

I am enjoying the tale