Worth the Candle

One of the best I've read on RR so far.

Has an interesting/innovative premise for the setting and characters feel very well fleshed out.  Some subtle character progression for side characters and more thorough/in depth progression so far for the main protagonist.

Action doesn't draw out unnecessarily long, overall having a good pace to it in my opinion.  World building also feels ※right※ with not too much extrapolation or meandering fed to the reader like in some other novels. Basically, the story flows naturally where nearly everything introduced has context as for why it's being brought out to bare.

I would say that the writer probably has quite a fair amount of experience sitting in the GM chair and it shows.  Flavor text is abundant throughout giving vivid imagry for what is going on and the game systems don't feel wonky at all (for me at least) as it's something of a conglomeration of pathfinder, d&d, and a hell of a lot of homebrew thrown in.

Story-wise, I also feel inclined to applaud the author.  There's a fair amount of an undercurrent of intrigue and mystery thrown into the mix as the reader is left wondering along with the protagonist as to what exactly is going on as well as why/how and will he find what he's looking for or does he even want to?

(Read up to the end of "Book II" as of this review)

Having read ahead from Alexander's website (up to chapter 165), i would say that the experience starts to wane later on. 

This comes from the introduction of certain relevations that start to cause nearly all the main characters to ponder upon the meta aspect of the story.  It quickly snowballs in such a way that the pacing suffers quite a lot in my opinion.  Said relevations also snuff the mystery/intrigue atmosphere much earlier than expected since the reveal was pretty much unnecessary to plot developments, serving only to paralyze the progression of the story at many junctures.

Characters meander to and fro at every crossroad before deciding to do what they were going to do anyway.  The weight of all of the succeses that June and friends achieve is also rendered nigh meaningless in the face of what they and the audience know.  Furthermore, I believe the story starts to suffer from the protagonist becoming increasingly introspective as time goes on.  He noticeably thinks in circles, often repeating and rehatching old thoughts.  While realistic, it can (and does in my case) begin to chip away at the audience's patience, distancing us from viewing June in a favorable light.  It also serves to exacerbate the pacing problem.

I would say overall, despite these later setbacks this story is still a good read, just not as magical as in the beginning.

It's a really enjoyable story some of the time, the action, the character interactions, the overall plot, it is quite good when it is good. 

However, there is just. So. Much. Talking. Meta discussions blah blah blah, narrative blah blah blah, game design blah blah blah, it's like taking all of the overthinking and over-analyzing that sometimes happens in our brain and dumping it onto thousands of pages.

This kind of thing is fun in certain doses but the book is really more about those meta-discussions and self-therapy than about anything else. It's like reading someone's extremely well written diary - intelligent, occasionally interesting and insightful but written for the sake of being written out of author's mind and soul to give him closure, not for the sake of readers who will get bored to tears trying to consume thousands of pages of a diary and self talk disguised as a fantasy novel. 

So I'm reading this, I'm over half-way through it and the MC is still immensely entitled and whiny (plus a rape arc that wasn't handled well in my opinion where it feels like the author just has a checklist of things he wants to add to the things the characters must go through, it wasn't compelling, just hollow) so yes, I'm half-way through and the MC is still whining and I remember that it makes sense narratively because it's only been 5 or so months in the story so of course the MC will still not change that much. . . BUT, there's the disconnect. Because yes, with a narrative sense, it's reasonable. But physically, it's been thousands of pages and it's only been 5 months and not much growth.

So yeah, lots of great things about this novel. Definitely well written (for the most part) but you need to sorta temper your expectations that the MC will be whiny for a long time and that even tho it will make narrative sense, it will also grind you down because of the page count where he's still whiny and the page count dedicated to his whininess.

It's not bad per se, I just hated the MC. I wouldn't like him as a real person, and liked him less as a character.

He didn't seem real. I know other people feel differently, but it seemed like more of a thought experiment by someone who hasn't actually experienced life, rather than actual emotion.

But I'm 50, so maybe I see things differently.

[update -- no spoilers: as of the official ending, I firmly recommend against reading this novel. The last couple dozen chapters did make up for a few of the issues with style, but the story kept going downhill like a car without brakes. Tons of loose ends, an unsatisfying ending that felt like it was there just for the sake of ending, and a rushed, "meta" last chapter that explained everything for the sake of explaining... I feel like I wasted a lot of time reading this novel, and I strongly believe there are better alternatives for people to spend their leisure time on.]

I want to start this by saying that I enjoyed reading it up to a certain point, though it's become a hurdle as of late. The references, and the humor, though? On point.
Grammar is great. Honestly, it is as good as it gets on this website. While there are a few hangups with punctuation, they are minor and can be overlooked in favor of the better state of overall grammatical structure. Another minor gripe is that the author tends to overuse latin words and convoluted expressions, and sometimes they're just outright wrong/misused. Again, that's a small complaint, doesn't really detract from the novel. This last one is just an observation: every character talks exactly the same, and the author absolutely LOVES to say "so far as I know". If you made a drinking game with that sentence, you wouldn't last a chapter. Party members say it, shopkeepers say it, the young and the elderly say it. I wouldn't be surprised if, on a quiet night, the wind whispered "so far as I know", in Joon's ears.

My real gripes are with character development, the story, and style.
Sometimes, when a character has a revelation, it feels like they will just take five steps back in the next few chapters. For some characters, there's no depth in which this can happen; for others, the depth just seems artificial, crafted... It is a rehashing and replaying, or at least winking at, of conversations that, sure, could be found in a therapy session, in real life, but that's not what I, and I'm only speaking for myself, want to see in a fiction. It takes the enjoyment out of it; it is just repetitive, and it adds nothing -- it feels like filler.

The story... It started out very strong, and I mean it. I enjoyed almost all of it. All that flashing back to his time on Earth, though? Hated it. It is nice to know what happened before Aerb, but it's mostly blurb. I started skipping them all after the fifth one, and I honestly don't feel like I missed on anything. As was mentioned in the paragraph above, everything is rehashed, and you can just skip those sections, because it's just some flavor that will be brought up again at a later date, if not in full, at least with the important-ish pieces.
Anyway.. After the fallout from the first big enemy, I started having doubts. After that useless entad business, I felt I was reading a story about retconning... And it hasn't really gotten better. Successes started seeming temporary -- every inch of progress has been met with a weird wall of filler, backpedaling and second-guessing that left a bad taste in the mouth. The last, I don't know, 30 chapters, as of Fel Seed Incident, I've just been skimming, mostly reading dialog, skipping paragraphs at a time. It's become a mix of stale and unnecessarily convoluted, and I don't really feel like spending time reading every line anymore.

Now, for style. There are two things that I will talk about. The first one is the narrator; the second is the abuse of something that shouldn't even be used in a novel: parentheses.
The narrator is Joon, our protagonist. Sometimes, there is a change in voice, and it is explained, with an astonishing misuse of parentheses, with something like "(((You might be wondering how I know this, but it's because she told me what happened)))". This is just one of the many examples of the narrator beaking the fourth wall for no reason. Sure, it would usually prompt a connection from the reader, and could be a boon, but in the many instances when it occurred in this novel, I only felt annoyance, because it felt like a forced pull, like it was trying to emulate a tv series narrator. 

Now, for the parentheses. They're an important tool, when used in informative text, to interrupt what you're saying, and to bring extra, generally less useful information. The thing is, you want continuity in a work of fiction. You don't need, nor want, to interrupt yourself during dialog every other line, and you certainly don't need three paragraphs of text inside parentheses. If that information is needed, remove the parentheses; if it doesn't fit, work it out with commas or semicolons. If you're not sure about a sentence, Ctrl+X that sucker, read it again and see if it makes a difference. If it doesn't, take it out. If you want someone involved in your writing, don't break immersion every five minutes to bring trivial stuff. Seriously. I skipped 95% of the stuff put in parentheses (which must have amounted to the length chapter), and I missed nothing. And now try to imagine if I'd swapped the parentheses for commas. It works just like that.

I don't really have words to effectively describe my chemical soup at this time. There is so much about this story that appeals directly or indirectly to myriad aspects of who I am, at such a deep level that I quite literally can't describe it. I guess that would explain the rating I've given.

This story is introspective and meta by nature. Read it if that's your interest.

Did not even get too far into the story but dang the mc is just outright bizarre.  He flies all over the place and feels like he is completely disconnected.  However sometimes for random reasons he gets all emotional.

The grammar is good but I just cannot stand the wordiness.  Tons of explanations and flashbacks to even explain the tiniest of things.

The interaction with the princess is really weird and it gets more weird as time passes. Feels off.  

if you like info dumps and flash backs, this is the story for you.

40% flashbacks / info dump
30% meta talking (characters breaking the 4th wall and talking how to 'game the game')
20% action
10% slice of life / romance

I wish the meta talking was around 5% and there were no flashbacks at all. sometimes the characters will go in a circle for CHAPTERS

when the story makes you feel like you are wasting your time it means its time to drop it.
since the story has great reviews and lots of people suggested it to me, im assuming that im in the minority, so I suggest trying the story for yourself and judge it from your own perspective.

I really liked this story for the first 40 chapters or so. Then things started grating on me.

• The trope where his companions get random power ups in order to keep relevant.
• The increasing levels of obsession with trying to game the system and the endless discussions about narratives. (far too meta and immersion breaking)
• The MC becomes increasingly sociopathic in trying to manipulate higher levels of loyalty from his companions.
• Mary kept keeping things from the group for 'reasons'. 
• The endless whining about his cheat level ability to gain aptitude in basically everything isn't fast enough or good enough.
• The crowning moment of "nope nope nope I'm outskies" is when he meets God and whines about evil and suffering. It's not so much that I mind objecting to suffering per se, since I'm whining about my suffering from reading this story. It's the hypocritical nature of it. He wishes to erase suffering from the world and clone his ex girlfriend while keeping his current one, while also complaining about his budding harem. I'm sorry but if you don't want to hook up with someone, all you have to do is say sorry not interested and move on with your life. Then there's the preoccupation with everything being a Clue or that his piloting skills should come into play and I just find myself thinking. "I don't actually care about any of these characters, I don't care where they end up, so I should just stop reading and put myself out of my misery. "

Spoiler alert, this story is apparently going to be at least 160 chapters and a million words. 

In short, this is one of the best written, near perfectly edited stories with characters that will constantly talk about the nature of reality and narratives and will bicker endlessly. As of ch 79, I don't think the story or characters have progressed that far. 

This one was hard for me... For the most part of this story I could not make up my mind if this was good or bad it was sitting on the middle of it. In the end it is not really good it starts strong but get convoluted and stuff happens just because... One part it makes sense story wise but the other part is that it does not give the reader breathing room. But the biggest flaw in this story are they chars and at the top it is our male lead Joon. The problem with Joon is that he thinks of himself as the center of the universe and does not treat other people in this story as real people. I liked at the start the romance with Fen but that was handled so poorly in the end with the MC acting like he was the best and did not need to learn anything...  It felt wrong how it was handled. It also does not feel that our MC grows trough the story because the story makes a point to make the MC right in one way or another. Tbh would like to say a lot of my frustrations with this novel but would take me too long. 

Give it a shot if you want but can't really recommend it.