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.

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 read anything of substance.  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. 

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.

Edit: A month later and book 1 is finished. The pacing actually picks up quite nicely, at least when compared to the beginning. However chapters also became ridiculously short so that the author could get the book published quicker. Hopefully book 2 feels less rushed.

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.

I appreciate the action and levelling but the plotting and characters are quite bad. Mainly the intelligence of the characters. There's so much dumb stuff and plot holes that go on, I'll list a few in spoilers

 I guess it's alright if you binge through it and don't mind a YA sort of fantasy with characters slow on the uptake.

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.

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 grammar was fine and the style was ok. The first arc was actually good, with an interesting setting, concept, and system, but that only makes the following arc all the worse.

In the first arc the MC is a very distrusting and selfish individual, spending most of said arc on his own. It allows him to accomplish some near impossible things while still staying within the worlds realm of belief. And then he enters a new part of the world in the second arc where that just goes out the window for no reason. In under a day he starts trusting every tom, dick, and harry he meets to the point of quickly equipping and leading an army against a rival faction he didn't need to fight, fully trusting in the leaders of said army he met only hours ago. They seem to win so easily even he finds it suspicious, then despite this goes into a trap, gets taken out by a spell that was super op compared to anything else seen so far, gets most of his army killed after its revealed one of said army leaders was a traitor, and then swears vengeance despite, again, only knowing them for a few hours, at which point the story descends into even more unbelievable shenanigans. And this isn't even going into how many plot holes there are in how this happened, of which the comments section pointed out tons. 

Basically this story starts off making you think its gonna be about a cool, ruthless, untrusting assassin type MC, and then quickly jumps off the deep end into your usual bs, friend making, idiotic, and unbelievable MC that is the exact opposite of the type of MC originally shown. It was seriously depressing and enraging watching this go into the gutters, and I implore anyone reading this review to not waste your time with this book.

P.S. Oh and lets not forget how the author purposely split chapters to be smaller just to get more views to get higher in the trending list. Or how this obviously isn't their first account on here which is highly suspicious and shady, as there usually isn't anything on this site people need to hide. 

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 Grand Game is a solid example of your typical litrpg. Whilst not spectacular the solid grammer and varied language makes for an enjoyable read that flows easily. 

Furthermore, the presence of clear 'books' indicates that this story has been planned to some degree and is likely to have an ending avoiding the typical web novel problem of degredation over conclusion. 

The world has clearly been planned and its introduction whilst slow is engaging. 

In terms of issues, the story is slow which likely makes it less enjoyable for those who dont know consume chapters on mass. Furthermore there are certain decisions by side characthers which feel 'off' and certain laws of the world which seem to be inconsistent. Without going into spoilers examples of this include 'the arbiter' and what exactly they allow/punish as well as 'the master' and his agreement with the MC. 

All in all a solid read.