He Who Fights With Monsters

Great start so far, im liking this story, certainly a different kind of litrpg that i can recommend others to come read.

The MC, well hahaha. Jason is just such a enjoyable and fun character to read about. Its sort of to be expected from a Australian character. And the other characters arent that far behind in how well written they are. Overall their interactions are fun to read.

Jason is quite confrontial at times and honest about being a atheist, this does really show when he interacts with religious organizations or even the gods themselves, barely treating them with any respect, a thing which is considered suicidial by the denizen of the world he is in, this is inline with his belief of being a atheist, but i feel like its going a bit far. Issues are showing already with this story due to his behavior, i hope its set to change soon, or it could make this story less enjoyable.

While this story started off very strong, while it is still going on strong after forty or so chapters, i feel like it is less than what it was at the start.

So far the world this story takes place in, has been shown to be interesting and well developed, with so much more left to be unveiled over the course of the story. The author sort of went for his own kind of unique world, that uses common elements from Fantasy, but also goes in a original direction. Theres the litrpg aspect of this story, which i find to be quite interesting, the author has made his own kind of litrpg system, borrowing ideas from many different sources, and combined that into the system used in this story while avoiding adding stats to the story. Especially the way the abilities and skills are done, is quite different and unlike most stories, i wonder how the author will go with that, without making the MC go absurdely powerful from that system.

Ill be fair that grammar is sort of a problem, overall it is fine, with there being few spelling errors, but there are quite some mistakes overall, with missing words and thus odd sentences because of that, this story could use a good editing round to edit those out, and make it even better in quality. The recent chapters are better in terms of grammar, even if there are still the occasional mistakes that appear, normally they get spotted and corrected quite fast.

Nice style here, no obvious flaws to be found with it. Overall good pacing, even if fast at times, but i dont mind personally. Its pretty easy to keep reading this story without getting bored at all.

A great story, with much potentional yet left to be uncovered, This can be something actually good and fun, if the author can keep writing and not burn out, especially with the current release speed of chapters. There is the risk of the story stopping being fresh and fun, and turning out to be boring and stale while being full of common tropes, i personally hope the author can avoid going on that route.

Recommended for fans of litrpg, you will most likely really like this fun story thats of a good quality.

Generally a very well executed story.  If I'd written this 25 chapters ago I would have scored it much higher.  However, since then I've really soured on certain parts of the story, especially the MC.  Did you know that he's a brilliant social manipulator?  Well if you didn't, don't fret!  The other characters will tell you how smart he is, over and over and over!  Everybody loves him, you see, except the people who don't, and that's how you know they're the bad guys.  If I could find somebody to love me even a quarter as much as these people love Jason, I'd have the best wife in the world.

Update: Couldn't take it anymore and dropped it a few weeks ago.  Updated with my final ratings.

Scores are somewhat based on RoyalRoadl's average level of quality.

Story-wise, world-building, and side-characters are good. It feels like the world is operating on an alien, but coherent logic. The story makes sense for the most part, and the side characters are interesting. I didn't notice any difficulties reading, so grammar is fine as well.

The main character is by far the weakest part of the story. Compared to other stories on this site, the characterization is about average. Most of the dumb mistakes at the beginning of the story are perfectly understandable, and he makes smart tactical decisions throughout. Unfortunately, his main characteristic is that he is a compulsive talker. Worse, it is true to form of a real compulsive talker.

People do not like compulsive talkers, and it makes it very difficult to empathize with the main character. Personally, there was an almost instinctual distrust of the main character once the conversations started going. His inability to shut up showed a lack of respect for everyone else, which implied a lack of trustworthiness and integrity. It's why I think a lot of people seem to be especially annoyed with moral quandaries he faces. He provides his opinion on everything, so it's basically worthless. He's so flippant about everything, why can't he be flippant about this shit too? 

He's told to shut up only a few times (too few to be believable, in my opinion), and it seems to garner zero reaction from him. He makes basically no attempt to improve or even acknowledge the comment and continues to interject every sentence with stuff he should know people won't understand.

He's a snarky character with little to show (mostly luck, even with the salt thing).

He's a talkative character with nothing to say.

I hope he goes through a character redemption arc because Overgeared had a similar issue at the beginning, where people HATED the main character. But for Overgeared, it was intentional. The main character showed growth and got incrementally better.

I hope the same would be for this novel, too. We already know he's going to grow in power/skill. He's got a system set up for that.

(Chapter 45)

When I was a teenager, I was a bit of a smug, self-righteous atheist, over impressed with my own intelligence. The protagonist of this story is something I could shamefully picture myself writing back then.

His every half baked, awful plan at "social manipulation" of the local nobility and other elite is a success, and what should result in him getting punched or socially ostrasized instead results of some more politically savvy character cooing over how smart he is.

He's openly insulting and heretical towards members of the clergy and actual gods, despite having pretty good evidence they could smear him across the pavement. Besides intentionally getting himself beat up by two priests, he suffers no consequences for this, and in fact the gods like him for some unfathomable reason.

This is a world with cultivation tiers, where each level is vastly above the one before, and might makes right--none of the above makes sense, even with his connection earned by saving the lives of a few powerful people in the beginning. He should be dead or crippled, and I found myself rooting for his opponents.

The initial monster hunting, progression, and joking interactions were good, and it's a shame the character turns into a black hole, as everything revolves further and further around him.

Cons

Death by exposition. I didnt mind the exposition for the system, but now its every little thing. 

MC can’t shut up. He talks a lot and with no respect to anything at all. Some God just smite him please. Everyone likes him too much. He’s far more interesting to people than he ought to be. Thats the plot armor. Stop it. 

Side chick and her story were introduced way too early. Heck now everyone that no one cares about gets their own half of the chapter (mostly all of it). This coupled with the exposition slows the pacing out to a crawl. 

Pros

The first 30 chapters. 

System is unique. 

‘Class’ choice isn’t a magical swordsman, close but not quite.

Fun dialogue - up until it wasn’t. 

I felt it was interesting initally. The magic system is good. The main character Jason seemed likeable. It's overall a nice read. The style, and fights are engaging.

There were a couple of characters introduced in the initial chapters who I thought would be more fleshed out eventually. But they have nothing going for them. No personal ambitions, no interesting character traits. The entire time they're discussing and worrying about Jason, as if their entire world revolved around him. They're merely acting as automated tools for Jason's progress in this story and nothing else. Can't think of any unique quality each of these characters have that makes them integral to the story or to the MC's character development in any meaningful way. 

As the story goes on, Jason becomes less and less likeable for me.

The magical abilities he gains are indeed interesting and used in creative ways. Character wise, He's an abrasive talker and all dialogues he's involved in seems a bit forced. The dialogues try too hard to be clever; so in the end comes off as either boggling or annoying. Thus, the politics and socializing stuff gets very boring.

Jason's views are sort of the embodiment of the immature liberal atheist who rejects authority, and he goes about expressing his view of ethics&morality in most annoying ways.

He also gets rewarded for being annoying. The story is trying to push the MC into the top ranks of social standing through his abrasive actions, which apparently are supposed to be well thought out. 

I would suggest readers to pick this up only if they are interested in the magic system, style and the fights. I will be sticking with this story for a while because of the consistent update schedule and the fairly interesting magic usage and fights.

--Will be updating this review as I read on.

Review at chapter 31

So here we go again for a classic litrpg except this one is a bit different. Anyone on royalroad should appreciate this. Instead of the 1000th copycat of the same stats and classes taken from a DnD manual, the author actually put some thought into it and gave us an original and engaging new system.

Of course litpg is just a mean to an end. What matters is the story. Unfortunately, the mc just arrived into this unknown world. That means he doesn't really have any particular goals yet and the world building is still shallow. Until now the author has done a pretty good job at spreading information without any excessive exposition. Those first 31 chapters had quite a lot of action and it was a smooth read. I thorougly enjoyed it. Interested to see now how the author will develop this world and also Jason. Until now Jason is just good and exceptionnaly outgoing with a bit of sassyness.

Worrying flaws

A big worrying flaw I had almost immedately is about the coins. They are op. Overpowered tools are a detriment to any story because the characters should just use them all the time. For example,

 It reminds of the second Harry Potter book with the rewinding time necklace. That necklace was never used again in the series because it was too op. It will probably be the same with the coins. They are too op.

My other worrying flaw comes from the number of abilities. He is supposed to get 20 maybe even more layer. That's a lot and I'm afraid it might bog down the story especially if he uses them actively. If in a fight he uses 10 abilities for example it would be annoying. Even more so because readers will probably forget what they do and you would need to add the description all the time. Imagine having to read through 10 descriptions each and every fight.

EDIT: Was waiting to see how Jason most importantly evolved and I was disappointed. At the start, he had the excuse of a concussion but apparently he is just dumb. MUUH I'm an atheist while there is gods right in front of you...... please.

He has apparently a passion to protect people but never was interested by being a policeman. He is so outgoing but didn't have friends on earth. Did the travel in another dimension changed his soul with someone else or something?

Lastly he has to be funny. In every dialogue the mc has to be funny. He is a funny guy you know.

My conclusion, good start, interesting system, when it comes to characterization though the author has at the moment no idea of what he is doing.

First of all, skip chapter 9. It does nothing for the story, except be unbelievable unrealistic.

Now, let's get the easy ones out of the way quickly:

Grammar is exellent, no mistakes I found (didn't specifically look for them though).

Writing style is overall great, but has some parts where the infodump is a bit much. Fitting for the story, but too much to be enjoyable to read.

The more difficult parts are story and character scores.

Story: The world and the LitRPG-System are great. Rich in new ideas and interesting mecanics. The overarching plot however is somewhat weak, not bad per se, but lacking in ... motivation? I think is the best word for it.

Character: Let's start with the side characters. They are decent. They fit neatly into the world, but most are too nice to the MC, in a trusting sort of way. They also seem to be affected by the mood of the MC way to easy. Apart from that there hasn't been enough focus on them to say more.

The MC however killed this fiction for me. At first (8 chapters) I really liked him. Snarky, level headed, confused, scared, everything you expect in an isekai situation.

After chapter 8 his fear simply got switched off. 

And in the following chapters he becomes more and more insane or rather his entire persona became compulsive snark.

Further, pain doesn't effect this MC. Sure there is mention of "it hurts", but it effects neither his movement nor his decision making.

At some point I simply didn't enjoy the MC anymore. I still kept going because I wanted to know more about the world and system. But when he started picking fights with every religious person he met it was too much for me. 

The MC thinks his ideals are right and argues with everyone who disagrees. Which would be ok, if his arguments made any sense, but in the world he is in they don't and if he would spent 10 seconds thinking about it he and anyone really would realize that. 

-------------Dropped at chapter 46

Fairly interesting, but suffers from somewhat bland characterization and dialogue that tries too hard.

Ostensibly every character is quite different, but in pratice all the dialogue sounds and feels like it’s spoken by the same person. The humour, cadence, and disposition is pretty much exactly the same between all the dialogue leading to this somewhat awkward feeling that it’s just someone speaking to themselves.

The dialogue’s perpetual attempts to be clever further exacerbates the issue making the singular voice even more obvious. No living breathing person speaks like that.

TL;DR:Okay Isekai marred with character problems.

 Updated after chapter

Style: This is style is quite odd.

Environments are detailed enough to give you a good view of the scene, so does the actions, allowing you to properly imagine everything.

Except facial expressions and body language, because of this the dialogue stilted and uninteresting, it's only "Jason said", "Other person said" and etc., nothing else to spice up our imagination.

It gives you the feeling of something missing, you also quickly forget the faces of characters since there's no glimpses of descriptions to refresh your memory.

The personalities of characters also feel bland since there's a lack of quirks being shown, like for example a person who smiles a lot, other who's always smirking, another who's always serious, things like this.

Grammar: Better than mine. Basically perfect but I'm not a native English speaker.

Story: There's no real ovearaching plot yet, just a story of Jason getting over the shit that has been thrown at him, then learning about this new world and training to get stronger.

Character: Jason, the MC, the problem.

Jason is annoyingly idealistic in the face of death and evil. He also lacks a proper survival instinct.

He might as well be autistic or emotionally stunted. He even does the thing where he doesn't read the situation and spouts memes to people who would never get it, only to receive looks as if he's a weirdo (because he is).

In the end, he's an asshole. It's okay to write assholes but Jason is surviving his assholishness by pure luck, no way someone is that cunning to take to so many gambles and come out (relatively) unscratched. His plot armor is too strong.