The Grand Game

This isn't for me. Can't continue on.

I don't get why the reviews for this are praising the fact that it has a slow burn, cautious, and cunning mc. It doesn't.

The story itself is what's slow. We're 25 chapters in and hardly much has happened at all plot-wise. Not even one in-story day has passed.

Everything is overly descriptive. Every single one of the protagonist's thoughts are explained in detail. Every system message is a sentence and every single one of them are shown.

As a short example: "You have evaded a level 10 goblin archer’s attack. Your dodging has increased to level 4." That's what the system messages are like, with some being much longer. In one short fight (which took an entire chapter) there are no less than 10 system messages. There would be more but some were thankfully combined.

The grammar is excellent and I only spotted a few issues.

Other than that, the story isn't bad. It's just incredibly overly-descriptive.

The only other issue with this is the very misleading reviews. I'm almost forced to conclude that they're either friends of the author, paid off, giga fans of solo protagonists, or drop-dead tired of most of the bad writing on RR.

Give it a shot though. Good grammar is hard to come by on this site.

But you want a show-don't-tell story? A plot that moves forward at a reasonable pace? Look elsewhere.

Seems fine so far but it's nothing like what other reviews are saying at all.
Pacing is almost impressively slow for now. 42 chapters in and the MC has walked down 4 corridors. Grammar is actually quite good and the story uses some tropes which i usually enjoy, but don't expect the magnum opus that other reviews are describing.

The story is great...as long as you are binging it.  The chapters are short, which would be fine with the daily update schedule; however the chapters have nothing in them.  Like a chip, you can eat fifty of them and still not be full.  For example, chapter 45 is solely dedicated to looking at loot. That's it.  

The author also uses status alerts to pad wordcount.  617 of the 1446 words used in chapter 45 are system alerts.  That's only 212 words - a paragraph or two - short of being half the chapter.  

Combined, these two factors make the story so painfully slow, that even 50 chapters in, he has yet to escape the dungeon he entered in the tenth chapter. 

The Author is really good at writing a story which progresses at a decent pace, with a decent MC and decent encounters. It is still early in the story, nothing stands out in particular, it is a story you have read before, just written very well.

That is until around chapters 60 where the MC meets one of the major gangs, the losing one at that. Some of the members in the leadership are so stupid I suspect they would die of oxygen starvation unless someone reminds them to breathe. The MC seems to lose all his smarts as well.

I wonder if the Author will write later that the safe zone lowers IQ of low level players.

Echoing what others have stated my main issue would be how slow the story progresses, 48 chapters in now and the main character has only maybe spent roughly a couple hours in the new world he has been summoned to. 

This isn't an issue really when you're binge reading however once you're up to date you begin to notice that not very much happens per chapter, before you know it you're waiting for the next.

Besides the slow pace of the story, grammer is great, characters thus far have been enjoyable, the premise of the story I personally enjoy. I'd recommend saving up chapters and then reading as so little happens per chapter.

The author has demonstrated a solid technical basis in their writing, but their insistence on using blue boxes to describe interactions between the protagonist and the world shoots themself in the foot. I do appreciate their decision to use mind/magic/faith over Chr/Int/Wis. 

A pair of examples include using blue boxes to indicate monsters are nearby instead of describing auditory cues as well as pointlessly bogging down fight scenes with notifications that the protagonist has been hurt.

Update: I've been swinging through to check some of the earlier chapters, and it looks like the author has been pulling the blue box formatting and switching to using bolded text for system notifications. It's definitely an improvement over having fight scenes broken up, but part of the problem is having so many notifications for small interactions. Thank you for taking feedback, and I wish you luck on your journey.

Writing a review after a binge-high is generally a bad idea, because stories which are fun to binge can be exceedingly frustrating to read in periodical installments.

The story is alright, and the sense of progression can be somewhat intoxicating, but this fades with short, somewhat shallow chapters on a daily basis. Author would do well to pack more substance into longer, more delayed releases.

Update - MC seems to gone down the jelly-spined bend-over-for-others isekai protagonist route. Multiple people called this in the comments and it came about pretty much exactly as everyone feared. Due to the declining likeability of the MC, the unsatisfying length of each release, and the sheer predictability of the plot, I'm dropping this, at least for now.

story doesn't feel organic to me, if that makes sense. Also MC along side every other person in the book playing the game was mind wiped, yet every other sentence it seems like the author brings up that the MC "knows" or "remembers" what type of person he was etc, just ruins my emersion. Though I will give credit the MC questions if the master is telling them the truth when he speaks to them, the author does that well. 

Other notable stuff the book is first person...

Skills and system stuff is average for the site, but I see potential for it to get better.

Finally short chapters.

the story started off too slow for me. nothing unique so far. not for me to be honest. couldnt really see anything unique or interesting. however your milage may vary. might revisit this to see if i was wrong at some point, but for now its not interesting enough in the early chapters. too much info dumps and exposition.

i also have a creeping suspicion that a lot of the raving reviews are fake. this story is barely even good. the action is pretty bad and the notifications are far too frequent and really take you out of the story, damage reports (ie, you have taken 8 damage) are always the first sign of a bad story, and this story uses way too many of them. they have no place in lit-rpg and always detract from any story theyre used in. authors that use damage notifications in litrpgs often show that they cant strike balance between the LIT, and the RPG, in lit-rpg's. this story is a prime example. the story focuses on the RPG elements, and barely uses any literary techniques to create a good story, or even world. it feels like reading about a dude describing his dream game, which makes for very bad reading. the reviews make no sense and do not describe what i just read at all. i have no idea how it made it to top trending, most stories i read on RRL these days are better than this one.

For thing that came to mind while reading this:

The early plot is oddly similar to Dungeon Reset.

As I'm writing this, there is +60 chapter and the MC only experienced three days so it's honestly slow-paced.

Though it doesn't feel slow at all. In those three days, the MC have survived numerous life-threatening encounter, kill more than sixty goblins, made friends, gear up and got plenty of new skills.

So there is actually a lot of things happening in those three days and the only complaint I can think about is that such growth in such a short time feel unrealistic.

But it seem that once the first growth spurt is done, people in that world are mostly stagnating for there is limited slot to learn new skills and such. The game-like world mechanic is clearly missing the ability to forget and retrain which is fairly common in all RPG with such skills limitations.

Or at least, it didn't appear yet as the MC's familiar is holding back a lot of vital information from the MC. So maybe retraining exist and the MC did not discover it yet. But the MC is also suppose to be familiar with game and that mechanic is really fairly common.

This novel doesn't bring anything new. But it's a fair, entertaining feel-good lit-RPG. Easy to read but forgettable. You probably won't regret reading it. But you won't miss anything if you don't.

That is for the story. The MC is equally forgettable with the convenient amnesic blank slate with no background, average intellect and moral value, yet somewhat insanely lucky. As I said, it's easy to pretend be the MC while reading it, binge watch the whole thing and happily go to sleep.

The grammar is good enough for my english proficiency. The style is easy to read and kind of make you crave for more. It's not a masterpiece but kind of a mindless guilty pleasure.

Enjoy.