Wake of the Ravager

Wake of the Ravager is a litRPG with a great system and an interesting setting that starts strong but is eventually dragged down by subpar story decisions and poor characterization.

The basic premise of the story is that a young boy in a village wants to be a wizard despite most wizards being nobles with significantly more resources. The basic magic system is that being in the presence of a lot of death causes a Break, giving an amount of Warp that can be used to improve one's attributes or learn skills. Each successive Break requires more death, so most ordinary people only get two or three. The MC works to learn magic despite this, and becomes involved in ongoing world events.

The story starts off very promising, with the magic system being the main highlight. It had an likeable MC, a good premise, and a decent cast of characters. 

However, as the story goes on the problems start to add up, or to put it differently the same few problems keep hurting the story. 

The first problem is the harem and its associated problems. Put simply, its a terribly done harem. Its written in an incredibly cringeworthy way, the female characters lack any meaningful depth, and the raunchy humor falls flat. The forced harem has led to entire arcs of characters acting unrealistically, and with no offense intended, reads like it is written by an immature teenager.

The second problem is the main character. At some point, the fun and likable MC genuinely interested in studying magic became a psychopathic murder-hobo who alternates between having enemies behave like idiots to make him look good and being convolutedly forced into difficulties, and whose personality is just not fun to read. A well done villanous/anti-hero MC is great to read, but this one just feels weird because he's had no character growth or development since the first arc of the story, and just has his personality adjusted to suit the current plotline.

The magic system is an incredibly interesting one however, and has a lot of unique ideas. Reading the magic system and the evolutions of the build and skills has been the highlight of the story. 

Overall, I would not recommend this story despite it's great magic system.

This novel could have been one of the classics of RR, but the author lost himself.

The story is all over the place.

It feels like the beginning of this novel was written by someone and at one point in time someone else took over and that person is doing a terrible job. 

The only good thing so far are the villains.  

The Mc and his sidekicks are like a bunch of 11 years old kids with super powers disturbing the peace in  the neighborhood.

As typical of many fictions of this genre, started out with interesting character, world building and sets of challenges. Unfortunately, also like many other stories of this genre, quickly devolves into a shounen anime power arc, where the character suddenly gains plot armor and nothing is threatening anymore. Then obviously add a sprinkling of hastily done harem just for the sake of it, and of course murder hobo tendencies. Pretty disappointed as it has happened to many stories with great initial worldbuilding, probably check in after a few months to see if storytelling picks up but I have my doubts. 

There are good parts and some bad parts. At the end of the day, the problem for me personally was that it felt like the story committed to nothing really, and did a lot of things half-assedly. First, the girls play a big role, the story even added a harem tag. Then it suddenly scales it back a lot. Has them sleep with other guys and each other. While the MC is still a virgin 100+ chapter in, then the girls become important again but with all the added baggage. In a way, the story found a great opportunity to alienate people across the spectrum. Those who disliked the romance/princesses/harem aspect were put off by it. Those who were fine with it don't particularly like them sleeping with other people, for the most part, bonus points for not sleeping with the MC while "being his girlfriends". At the end of the day, the story has some solid ideas. And some very flawed, ill-thought-out, mutually sabotaging executions and weird twists and turns. It never really commits to any one thing, it does things half-way, and then does things completely opposite of what it established prior.

The story just seems very, disconnected, disjointed, and as if it has zero real goal or idea how to get there.

I really enjoy the storytelling and the comedy. All the situations, the characters, the world. Worth reading or at least trying out. The writing is constantly improving too, with almost no errors or none at all. 

So many of the scenes are vivid without using too many words, the author is very good at that. Despite it being a harem, the characters feel real and unique instead of being 2 dimensional and slot filling.

The characters have only gotten more realistic and enjoyable, same with the storytelling and worldbuilding, it's never felt like too much of one thing. Every chapter has been immensely enjoyable and entertaining. If you were put off by the harem tag, don't be. If his relationship can be called a harem then the word has been done injustice for a millenia.

The first 50 chapters? I couldn't get enough, was reading till 5am just to see what happens next, It was great, but then the problems came .

 Problem 2 relates to the poorly implemented harem, none of the harm members have any real depth to them, and the mct into typical anime MC where his girlfriend's can tell him everything he's doing, beat him up, and do basically anything they want, and MC is just like yeh this is my life. 

Goals: MCs goal from the beginning is becoming a wizard king, but he barely learns any magic at all, the intro to the book made it seem like he will learn bits of all magics and fuse them into his fighting style, right? Well no, he learns magic from 2 places, his country and a tribe near him, that's it, he discounts all other magic due to skill system made by author with limited numbers of stuff you can learn.

MC doesn't take advantage of the crazy, and I mean CRAZY power he could have, which is bowser if you've read the book, where after a few years of work he could essentially become a god, stronger than all others, also doesn't take advantage of the siphon at all. Book essentially goes from a power gaining book, to a pseudo politics/kingdom building book, where the MC literally has 0 skills that are designed for it, and he completely ignores the one thing his build is for. Magic. 

Then there's the pov swaps, there's so fucking many if them, even characters that die within 10 chapters, get multiple chapters worth of their pov, just what? There's points in it where you can go chapters with short paragraphs of the mc

Essentially the book goes from a hardcore adult thriller, with dark elements, to a shonen anime harem with bad elements of comedy, and sexual themes that are skipped due to it being shonen,

that sexual content tag? It means kissing, if your going the harem rout, and it's it's mediocre, lean into it. Only way you could pull off what you want us if you had a good harem, with interesting 3 dimensional, interesting characters, that really add to the book, that just aren't there.

I honestly think the harem members are there, as reasoning to force the MC to do things that are outside what the developed character is.

Honestly feels like author is just writing ideas for short stories on a pad, and jumping from one idea to another, started with magic, then harem, then kingdom building, then slice of life, then back to kingdom building

Ima read a bit more, and hope it gets better, but it's been a steady decline for 60 chapters so I doubt it

Ehh, kept reading, had 0magic in the past 6 chapters, and someone who rapes minds was added, I'm done, this story had no direction, and the MC is like a whole new person, haven't even seen a fucking skill or stat improve slightly in many chapters, it's now 100% a slice of life, and considering the fucking intro is about him learning all kinds of magic and making his own style? This ain't that

Started pretty damn well, but it's getting increasingly clear that the author learned NOTHING about proper story structure from his previous works, that all got thrown away when he grew bored.

Throwing "cool concepts" around without having a clear idea of a beginning, transition and end is nothing but an exercise in folly.

You are getting once again close to the breaking point, where you start to find the story stale and decide to flip the table. One of the rare occasions where I feel bad for having used patreon because reinforcing bad behavior is downright criminal. 

Don't try to prove me wrong, you will only drag it out even more and make it miserable for everyone involved. Sit down, write the skeletal structure of a frigging end, and work freely within those parameters. 

Winging it, is not a good strategy. 

I honestly cannot recommend this work knowing that most readers will only feel disappointment after being strung along. 

 This started out quite good, first chapter actually made me laugh a bit but I guess it's never good to judge a book by its first few chapters because this spiralled down the toilet so fast I suddenly remembered why I never make it past any if the authors first 20 or so chapters.  

Calvin started out as a likable character, a little weird but in a good way imo, knew what he wanted and actually tried taking steps to get there but as the story progressed I just can't fingale what made me start to dislike the character, maybe it was the constant need for the author to make him everyone's plaything or excuse my French 'little bitch' or the fact that one moment his gritting his teeth in anger and swearing vengeance on the cannibals that devoured his friends and plan to make small chops out of him then the next second his thinking about humping the "somehow' bootylicious cannibal chiefs daughter, how terribly convenient and extremely foolish, but since the author decided that after writing or thinking up the sexy babarian chick and that he wanted a harem but couldn't see anyway to erase the fact that said vixen and her people just wiped out his village and are having his friends for dinner, he decides that a love potion is the way to go. 

 It just feels like the author has no plan and is jumping from idea to idea while trying to force it all to fit. I will say that I did enjoy the magic system, seemed fresh and really makes for some cool synergy.

I was originally going to pull another star for the bait and switch because I thought the author was writing a harem but didn't want to tag it as so for whatever reason but I can see the tags have been updated which further proves that he doesn't really know where this story is going but is following his lower head and whatever his patreon supporters suggest. 

All said it a mediocre tale and hopefully I'll forget about it again soon. Have a nice day. 

There's a lot to like here. The setting is fantastic, it's got one of the most interesting magic systems I've seen to date. I like the central conciet of the plot, there's some genuinely interesting intruige with some hints at the grander picture here and there, enough to keep you curious without giving the game away. The writing itself is for the most part very good, so why do am I so down on this?

Everything good this story does is held back by the fact that the focus is being shifted towards making a harem happen, and the author is letting his desire for powerful women who actually secretly want to be abused warp the story and the characters. Let me make it clear, I have nothing against there being sexual content in a story, I enjoy some good smut as much as the next person, and while harems aren't my personal preference I can deal. But the writing quality dramatically dips from time to time so that the writer can get some of his personal fantasies in, and it's getting worse. From around chapter 75 onwards it's getting incredibly bad, especially focused a particular female character who is at this point the essentially the main character's slave.

I liked this story a lot when it started, but lately every chapter is making me less and less interested in seeing it through to the end. It's a good "anti hero/villan protagonist tries to get obscenely powerful" type story, perhaps even a great one, but it's quickly becoming lost to the author's desire to get off.

Well it was a pleasant read, zany and all, but introducing a human pizza character jumped the shark in my opinion... I ignored the bit at first, but the human pizza keeps reappearing :-( I would otherwise give it a 4 stars for being a fun unserious fantasy/ scifi