Retribution Engine [Martial Arts Progression Fantasy]

This is a fascinating story with some things that could be improved.

The setting - a mashup of magitech/mad science post-WWI intrigue, cultivation, and fantasy litRPG - is the glory of this work, interesting both for its own details and mystery and for the new light in which we see the tropes of its constituent genres.

Characters are distinct and well done, and Zelsys, with her self-possessed directness and slowly-filling-in ignorance of the world, is a central figure who perfectly sets off all the complicated stuff around her.

Finally, the first part (the numbering is confusing but 0._ is part one and ARC 2 is part two, directly picking up) shows the author's ability to write great fight scenes and confrontations.

What's the issue, then? Well, first, updating both the revised first part and the current second part makes it a pain to read the whole thing through, as you currently have to go back to the deprecated initial version of the first part to read the part where it leads into the second part. This will fix itself soon enough, though.

The major issue is that the author can't ever skip to the next important thing. If there are five floors to a dungeon with multiple paths, we're going to see every single one. Perhaps the author saw that the first part got really unbalanced by the sheer length of the dungeon crawl - some of which had key powerups and world revelations, but not nearly all - and is revising to cut some of that, but even in the current part he is unable/unwilling to skip anything (or any amount of time). If a character talks about doing something, we will not only (eventually) see that but also the leadup, some incident in between, often the literal walk to the thing, and sometimes an alternate character's perspective on the same as well. This worked at the world and characters were coming into focus, but is becoming more of a liability as more characters and plot threads come into play.

Quite like it's name the novel story goes like an engine. The world, it's events and characters are there for a reason and they work. The litrpg is there but it's not that blue screen that keeps popping up and eventually gets to big/full with things most won't remember or care. Love the combat aways exciting. Can't say I've seen anything bad with the grammar. There's no pointless filler drama. The characters are more than interesting enough for me to want to see their journey to the end.

Certainly one of my favorite stories here. Very enjoyable blend of action, romance and THE SMUG. Only complaint would be the downtime and setup, which can get kinda long, but honestly I don't mind that either. So I'm not complaining. It's like an old unboosted diesel, slow but it'll get you to the action guaranteed. And when it gets there, it really gets there. The action is superb, really well detailed and immersive. 

The story itself is great, it had me hooked from the beginning. Progresses along nicely, again, sometimes slows down, but you never get the feeling that it's spinning in place. 

I'm really bad at reviews so bear with me...

The grammar is good. A typo here and there, but sentence structure and tenses are usually on point. My brain kinda glosses over the typos anyway. 

The characters? Well, they're probably my favorite part of the story. All of them have their own roles and never feel redundant. Zelsys, the main character, is amazing, headstrong and SMUG, very confident and capable. None of that "your average Japanese highschool boy/girl" bs, there's nothing average about her, and she's not letting the uncertainty of her origin mess with her confidence. I won't go too in-depth with the rest of the cast. I'll just say they're all well thought out and incorporated into the story. They all have agency and never feel like dead weight. 

That's about it, I highly recommend giving it a try. Note that as of writing this the prequel is being added to this entry, but isn't all there yet, so I recommend reading "Rising from the war of Fog" first. All the chapters of that will find their way here eventually, of course. 

I haven't been reading this for long, but so far the development is very organic, the characters are very fleshed out, and the worldbuilding is quite detailed. The magic system has a lot of thought behind it and is internally consistent, which is always a plus. I haven't gotten far in but due to the length I figured I would go ahead and give a review now and just edit it later once I finish the book.

I enjoy both the story and world it is set in. The Worldbuilding is coherent and beautiful. Both the fights and the downtime as well as training are well described. The Characters have depth and motivations that drive them and cause conflict to occur naturally and organically. I look forward to seeing this story continue.

This is apparently a sequel to previous works I have not read, so take that into consideration.

Style: Akaso is a very effective writer, I read about 20 chapters in before I felt the need to look at the glossary. The world itself is incredibly detailed, I don't think i've seen this much worldbuilding effort on RR before. If you want a rich, lore-heavy story, this is definitely for you.

Story: My main criticism with this story is the pace. 40 chapters in and the plot has only inched forward, its just a whole lot of setup for what I assume to be the action packed back half of the story. I can't give less than three stars for this because its a sequel and I'm guessing the idea is that readers will already be invested in the story, world and characters. That's perfectly reasonable imo so I can't really penalise it too hard but new readers should know what they're getting into and ideally read the first installment before this one.

Grammar: The grammar is polished to a degree that implies professional work, I wouldn't be surprised if Akaso hired an editor or is one themselves. Easy 5 stars

Character: The characters are another strong point. You don't often see fics on RR that really delve into political and ideological tensions and I love the fact that each character has a distinct set of beliefs and ideas about the world, and they make congruent sense when you take into account their backgrounds. An example of stellar characterisation imo

Tl;dr - This is worth a read. If you can handle the slow burn pace of the story, read it now, if not, read the first, then read this one

A story mainly following the travels of two women in love, one being a hulking mass akin to Guts with lightning powers and the other a more dainty, though not much, shooter. Not entirely my preferred genre, being that it holds written-out sexual scenes, but the rest does well at holding my interest.

Style: Rather than reading like a chapter-by-chapter release, each part feels more like a page in a book. This has its pros and cons, the most notable downside for me is that 3 segments make up an entire scene at times, creating a weird disjointed feel as it progresses. I end one page with dialogue, for the next to continue it. Since I can binge tons of pages at a time it isn't as bad, though I can see faint memories creating some issues here going between releases.

Story: Since each release is shorter than most, around 1000 or so words, the story goes along slower than usual. Even more so when just like in Style, a scene can take over 3 releases to complete. This isn't a bad thing though, some like slower-burn stories and it just appeals to them more.

However, the constant jumping between the views of several characters is a bit jarring, from the main party, a scientist in his lab, talks between military folk, to a shopkeeper Zel and Zef just met. Without reading the previous story it can be hard to feel anything for these "random" people we are learning about. For the most part, you don't need to read the prequel story, however, it feels like I have missed out on a lot of lore and backstory. My personal preference for this would be that it is clearly stated when a change of view is made, since one of these happened and I didn't know who it was until 3 paragraphs in.

The author has written up a key as it were for major names, but without living a story with those in it, the key does only so much to help. The repeated references to Elixirs or Vitamax and the like have me at a loss too, as I was unsure at the beginning if they were just snake oil or true magical potions that helped bodily functions. There is also little to tell me of what has happened or the current goals, until several chapters into the story, I was just following some adventurers in a Metro 2033 style traversal back to town.

My cons of this are more on me not reading the prequel, though the note in the blurb does state this is intended to be read without a need of the previous story. Some refresher text spread about would be needed to make that a solid point of the design, but right now it takes quite a few chapters to learn about the referenced items/terms.

Grammar: I found very few issues with the grammar, I pointed out at least one, though other readers found more before I got to the story. Some of the sentence structures also made it hard to read at times, though wasn't a major hurdle.

Character: There's a whole lot of characters to go through, we learn about 4 in the beginning parts with Zel and Zef the duo-leads taking a major part of that time. Without a full of description of their looks, simple notes about hair and such, it is hard to get a clear visual of the characters aside from their art. Again, I feel like the prequel story may have filled me in on more of these details. Thankfully, their aesthetics are referred to later on, both the duo leads and side characters, but it often feels a bit late.

This is honestly one of the best stories on the site. 

it functions initially as a deconstruction of what cultivation novels are, then moves on to what feels like an off the wall hybrid of traditional sword and sorcery, cultivation, and industrial revolution fantasy. 

the setting is post-War of Fog, a WWI equivalent where the Sage of Fog sparked a technological revolution in some podunk country, which allowed it to fight on close to equal footing with a massive empire. They lost, but it was damm close. 

Now, thanks to the fact that ancient magic was used to isolate said country, cultivation has mostly disappeared.

Enter Zelyes, a homunculus created as a living weapon by the mysterious Sage of Fog. 

Do you think that this is going to be a tragic gritty hero story where the protagonist has to find themselves? Nope. Zelyes is a 6.5 foot battle maniac Amazon barbarian with an aversion to wearing shirts and a cheerful mindset. She doesn't give a damm about the method of her creation, or particularly about the Sage of Fog. She's not stupid (far from it) but she preferres to live in the moment. 

Zelyes is to normal cultivation what Krav Magav is to martial arts: stripped down, brutal, and highly effective. 

This isn't a one note story either. You've got multiple perspectives and points of view from Zelyes to an actually decent Gekurian governor to an ex war criminal piloting a semi-sentient mech that sustains itself upon the blood of its enemies. 

the only problem is a tendency to get bogged down in the details a bit (the author seems to be allergic to timeskips) but to their credit, info dumping is minimal. You instead learn about the world in a steady trickle (for the most part. 

all in all, a well thought out, well written story about a combination of mysticism and practicality at a time of upheaval. 

Seriously, top teir work. 

Honestly, just who comes up with this stuff? This might just be a genre I haven't delved into ever before, but just where did the idea of Fog come from? Seriously. It's some cool stuff, even if I didn't understand half of it(purely my fault. No shame to the author for my own incompetence).

To sum up that point, I like the system laid out for the magic, or whatever you can call it. It's cool. Love it. And there are other aspects that I should mention as well. The characters, as an example, are great additions to the story. Especially the descriptions, though that might be due to my love for tattoos. Love the art for it(except the one with the homunculus eye or however you spell it. That one creeped me out).

Nothing else to say. Style? Great. Grammar? Couldnt find any mistakes. Pace? Pretty fast, compared to the other stuff that I read. Overall some nice stuff. 5/5

I want to preface all of what I'm about to say with this is MY opinion, my opinion doesn't have to be your opinion. With that being said in the effort to be as honest and as forthright as possible I'm going to be extremely blunt on what I want to say to the point of an unpleasant degree.

The overall writing and world building of the story is extremely amazing, with industrial/magitech fantasy vibes it's extremely interesting seeing and hearing about all the technology the author comes up with along with new abilities. The abilities put in place and used in the series are extremely original from what I've come across in any writing or show so far and is definitely a nice breath of fresh air in that regards. None of it feels like particular plothole developments although some things within it could stand to be explained in more depth, although this is probably leaning into the fact that the main character doesn't know what she doesn't know and is still trying to figure out along what lines of knowledge she has hidden away.

The grammar is as should be, there are some typo's here and there and some sentence structure is a bit strange, but nothing that will make you hang up on and bother you in any capacity.

Characters are relatively detailed although sometimes a bit too unrealstic, I only found this to be the case with a couple of the characters of the main cast and not a problem that related to the authors designing of characters as a whole, maybe it stemmed more from an issue of trying to progress the story in a natural way, but this problem hasn't bled over to other characters at this point  of around chapter 160 so I look at that as an outlier.

The story... This is where I have the most negative things to say and probably the harshest ones, a reminder this is an opinion. Take it with a grain of salt. The story pacing is completely out of whack at points. The author feels the need to explain everything, especially things that wouldn't necessarily needed to be detailed. Characters go into a dungeon and we have to know every small detail that happened to every single person that goes through. Leading on into volume 3 only serves to exacerbate this issue to the maximum.

Instead of alternating chapters as had been up to this point on supporting cast to main cast, as had been done up to this point, the author completely drops the main story as if it's an afterthought and spends 27 chapters straight on the supporting casts escapades. I very quickly found myself just starting to skim until I was just blatantly skipping whole chapters, reading the important stuff, and then moving on because I wanted to see more Zel. Alcerys is an extremely cool and interesting character and I would definitely have been interested in seeing more development of her character, but I'd prefer that to be the secondary objective of the story. Not the primary one. Outside of instances like this however there's not terribly much more to say, most of what I say on the pacing is my personal tastes, a lot of people may enjoy learning more about the support character than the main character and if that's the case who am I to judge.