World Keeper

On my initial read-through, I dropped this fic around chapter 30-40. The main character repeatedly made stupid decisions, and was walked all over by everyone around him, regardless of what he did.

However, boredom had me turn back to this, and he did get better--the harem oddly turned up the very beginning, but only included two people, and faded to black whenever something beyond cuddling happened.. Very understated, which was a plus for me, though I wonder why he included it at all.

The protagonist wised up at least a little, and the people around him stopped walking all over him. Plus, for a royal road story, the grammar and writing is above average.

So why the two stars, you might think? Well, as of chapter 316, there are a few reasons:

• The main character still makes bizarre, enormous mistakes, which no one points out. He buys an ability that would let him split his mind, and have one portion sped up a thousand fold. This would let him train with the sped up portion until he's godlike without moving himself up the rankings in the "deadly" game he's in. He knows this, and just...stops halfway through, for no reason. He could probably finish it in a week from the progress he shows, and instead trains other abilities he could speed up with this one.
• He rushes into the war games (you aren't forced in until your planets are a certain level of power) instead of training his personal abilities and skills. Again, for no reason. This would easily be solved with the games forcing him in after a certain amount of time. Instead, he looks suicidal and completely apathetic for his people.
• No one has normal reactions or morals. He dies, learns EVERYONE he's ever known is now dead, and doesn't give a shit. Certain Keepers train their personal abilities, and reset the worlds to become "avengers" who target "monstrous" rank one keepers. How is a person who sends monsters to attack worlds worse than genociding worlds by resetting them? It makes no sense.
• Worst of all, there's no conflict. The horrifying keeper games that are threatened show up all of once for real in the time I read (the rest are with friendly people), and it was a joke.
• I don't see how the author can possibly scale the power levels or ever realisticially finish the series, from what we see of the higher levels of keepers.

TL;DR: For those who push through the first several chapters, trying to get to the games--don't bother.

I'm rewriting my review due to being tired as hell and missing a few points. I'll list them all quickly here:

1. All the characters feel the same except for one chick who's a kid, one chick who doesn't like being brainwashed by Dale but still wants to fuck him, and one chick that's not a chick, but is a steryotypical MANLY MAN DWARF that probably talks in a scottish accent.

2. The story has an incredible premise but doesn't use it.

3. There's no stakes.

4. There's no plot.

5. There's minimal buildup.

6. Theres minimal and no payoff for the whole 2 potentially exciting points of the book.

7. The character is not only not creative, he's stupid while creating Earth.

First of all, all the characters feel the same except for their differing relationship to Dale. I have resorted to telling the goddesses, god, and single actual character apart not by their character, but if/how much Dale fucks them. The demon chick get's no action and is just locked in hell. The furry chick that gets loads of action because she's got nothing better to do. The techno-demon chick get's no action because she's Dale's friend. The loli chick get's no action because the author probably has vain hopes of selling this book on Amazon, and the dude gets no action because Dale isn't gay. The golden chick is totally going to fuck Dale eventually, but not yet. The only reason I remember her is because the author did the bare minimum of characterization and assigned her two whole character traits. Determined and subservient. That's the entire nuance of her character. Is there any reason why she's determined? Nope. She just is. Is there any reason why any of the characters are like this? Nope, they just are. My suggestion to the author? Write out a google doc of all of the characters, describe them intricately, and whenever they're forced with a situation, look at their character and try to think of what they would do. You may've realized that I've not mentioned a single character by their name, and that's because despite reading a chapter just yesterday, Dale's name is the only one I remember. That and Tsubi or something for the golden one.

The story has an incredible premise but doesn't use it. Basically, this story is alot like Steven Universe, it has a great premise, but for the love of god it can't focus on the CELESTIAL FUCKING WAR GOING ON and instead focuses on Dale playing a videogame, or taming a dragon (which, somehow, the author somehow makes boring. Who knew a battle with no stakes could be so boring? I'll touch on this later). The story has used it's premise all of two times. Once Dale got invaded, the monsters tried to rough up a random bum-fuck-nowhere village, got absolutely destroyed, then some dude made a tracking Yu-Gi-Ho card, found them, and Dale nuked them from a sky fortress. That's literally the entire invasion, which had been built up for a year, and was apparently from a world that spent it's entire time trying to make the most powerful apex predator. On top of this, the story never really follows up on the incredibly interesting worlds or things it has created. The planet with solar powered superheroes which sounds like something out of Superman's wet dream? Who gives a fuck. The intersting as hell dungeon cores? Hell no! The potential race relations of a bunch of different species meeting? How about I just do some random ass shit that somehow solves it forever and never bring it up again! You see what I'm saying? The author deals with the problems of his world in an almost begrudging way, like he'd rather get back to playing a LitRPG in his LitRPG world where he is a literal god. My suggestion: Focus on the intricacies of the world, and intelligent ways of solving them. Don't make stupid problems with mortal antagonists, there's no stakes anyway, how about poverty, corruption (which is a lot less a people problem, and more a systen problem) and maybe even, y'know, world invasions? Things that can't be solved with god magic? Maybe give us a view of an orc that invaded that hellscape planet? Maybe even THE LEADER OF THE INVASION, so we can see him doing actual intelligent things (as opposed to Dale just stomping enemies with his god powers) and also get an overview of how the invasion is going!

There's no stakes. How do you add stakes to a story about a god of gods? Have them fight people on equal level. Yet the story never does this. During the dragon fight Dale made some comment about "I don't wanna accidentally kill him" and it made the whole chapter feel like watching a Predator drone fight a Roomba. Sure there are some cool moves being used on the strong guy's side, but it's just boring because you already know who's going to win. There are zero stakes, and all the one time where there was a stake (a single one, sadly sticking out of the ground) it is promptly smashed by the gods, Dale, and his super-fortress who all had fucking years worth of time to prepare. My suggestion: More invasions. Problems that don't just require assassination or a stern talking-to by god daddy. Maybe even add some random invasions that give no preparation time aside from a week from the perspective of your world.

There's no plot. My suggestion to the author: Add an overarching plot. How about revisiting that whole thousandth or ten thousandth keeper idea or something? Maybe make the goal freeing everyone from the system?

There's minimal buildup. There's just no tension precisely because there are no stakes. You cant build something up if there's no tension. Fix the stakes problem, and you will at least make this problem a million times easier to solve.

There's no payoff. Again. Add stakes. Kill people. Have a neck and neck battle between the invaders and the invaded. Not just a battle that looks less like a battle and more like what would happen if the American Airforce decided to bring down hell upon a random African tribe.

The character creates possibly the worst "world" to defend with. Ok, so for this I'll be assuming that this system judges the power of a world by adding up all of the power of the individuals. Therefore the best world is: An authoritarian state that's similar to a worldwide North Korea, filled with a highly trained and militarized populace that hangs on the keeper's every word and is, at any moment, willing to spring into action. A world that is in a constant state of semi-mobilization, where any civilian would sacrifice their own mom just because I said so, run by a god that I created specifically to be the literal best ruler possible. One filled with either a singular race, or many different races all suited to different jobs, that are all "programmed" to be truly happy with their castes' job so that there would be no exploitable problems with race. What does Dale do? Create a bunch of different fucking races, have them develop in different places, then the author just bullshits his way out of the at least 19 different genocides that should've happened by then. Hell, us earthlings have genocided each other over religion, slightly whiter but still black skin, and so much more! Yet it never even crosses the civilian's minds here. That and Dale never really manages the world, yet having a god micro-manage the fuck out of it would clearly be more efficient. My suggestion: Stop being so stupid. Look up real-world issues, how real-world people solved them, and think about how you would solve them if you were in Dale's shoes. Don't just conveniently forget to bring up all the genociding and crusading that everyone clearly wanted to do by just saying "yeah a god told them not to and that always stops people right? and just glossing over/ignoring a few massive problems the world should realistically have because goddamn, gotta have more videogame time!"

Author, if you're reading this, I implore you, listen to the suggestions, incorporate some of the millions of interesting issues into the story, and stop focusing on the World of Warcraft knockoff like it's a purchase you're trying to justify by using it 24/7. This is a god story. You made a LITRPG, you don't need to add another LITRPG within it like a Russian nesting doll of bad ideas.

The story premise sounds really good. 

Being able to build and influence the world how you like it. Doing it through a system and direct influence. Sounds really interesting. 

It would be if the MC would do something like that. All he's doing is training magic and other energies to grow stronger. So this is just another wuxia/xanxia novel. Really disappointing.

Man... I was planning to enjoy this one, I was excited by the premise but... just why woukd you do it like this?

I realized this was going to be a painfully disappointing one the moment you skipped the blue screen depicting the other races stats and info, and I don't understand, why would you do that? That's like half the charm this story promises, what are we here if not for the world building? The not-real relationships between the gone-from-broing-to-hateful MC and his artificial pseudo harem? Well I'm certainly not.

Dale Mitchell started as your boring average person who becomes your average boring godlike world keeper, there's that, kinda fucked up the fact he likes to implant fake feelings in his subordinates but hey this might just not be my cup of tea. But then what's matter? So to put this way, I have trouble reading your characters because not only they feel fake and cheap, but because they are obstructing what really matters. Most of them. I mean I can deal with Dale and Catwoman weird relationship, but then you give me this group of characters and lets count what they've brought to the table.

The wacky relationship between MC and most females, the loli thingy, the catwoman GRINNING ALL FUCKING DAY, literally everytime she's got her turn to talk she's got some kind of grin for the occasion, Dale not understanding why is fucked up to manipulate others feelings ''wuh wuh why u so mad Bihema'' well fuck how could she not be mad, she knows what's up, actually the question is are we sure the other two are sentient? I can understand catgirl but the other two... are we sure they aren't still some kind of mindless dolls?

Now if you give me to choose between which I should read, read all that stuff or read about the origins of life, the dawn of civilizations, the conflict in the lives of these mortals, the technology advance of the humans in comparison with the elves, the continents, the seas, the cultures, I don't know. And that's why I dislike those characters, they're not that bad but they are an obstacle for what really matters. I mean, damn, I don't have anything against loli or some other anime references but to be clearer, you give me a detailed focus on who are the current leaders of all civilizations on one hand and a loli is justice monologue in the other then I'm not gonna give a fuck about lolis.

Then it comes to the other half of the charm of this fic, being god, or learning to be god and his interactions with the mortals, this is actually there but going slow and gotta deal with the other unwanted bs meanwhile, sadly. But then again there's close to 0 interaction with the mortals, again, what are we here for? The keeper games are still someway far, so I don't see how great is the admin room compared to the whole world that exists outside.

To put it simple, this could be amazing but its not.

I read about 200 chapters because I loved the concept of this web serial, but I stopped reading because the story didn't stray very far from the wishfulfilement themes. What could have been very interesting worldbuilding moments were completely skipped in favour of training sequences and harem-like interactions.

It's still not a bad story though if you are into harems, anime like interactions and light worldbuilding it will be right of your alley. The story is generally well written and the Characters have well defined personalities.

I hate to say it, but Dale seems like a dipstick. I mean, who nods like a mindless idiot when they don't fully understand what is about to happen? Also! Why did the catgirl person not explain everything in detail? Imo It felt so rushed it was almost cruel to the MC. She said a very, and I cannot stress this word enough, BRIEF summary of the trouble he's in for. She jumped from one thing to another with only a few questionably helpful things here and there. Obviously this guy is not very sure of what he's doing considering he took absolutely NO time to think about the advantages and disadvantages of each possible starter package. By the way, Dale, instead of choosing the 'cool' package how about choosing the one that's less likely to get you killed because I would imagine that being priority number one! Plus, who the hell told her to speed anything up! Smh. Like don't do shit I haven't approved of. Especially when I need time to think out strategies on how to create, shape, and develop an entire planet to maximum defensive capabilities.!

This was just after chapter 1. But what you have here is potential Gold. Don't ruin it by simplifying the protagonist's situation and the situation of the developing planet. I mean, give us details about the creation of the planet itself! Not just 'POOF! OK ALL DONE!' No. Be better Author-man. Unfortunately I can't read this anymore because I tried to look at what happens later on (y'know a glimpse of what interesting things may convince me to stay) and I just think that you should start over from scratch and re-do the story with more realistic elements. Like remorse over killing a man or the struggles of coming to terms with being the creator of an entire world with people that will face invasion and whatnot.

All I'm saying is that you kinda butchered the beginning and glossed over the small but important details. Other than that it's A-1 material.

Good concept. Has much more potential than all those dungeon building stories as a world building story in my opinion. It is worth to give this fiction a try.

Writing style is not bad. The author manages to avoid some common style errors. It gets a passing score. But while it is technically not bad, it is also quite bland. The writing could really use some embellishment. Some pretty adverbs in descriptions and all that...

Story is off to a decent start. As I stated above, the general concept has great potential for a world building story. A common weak point of such stories is that they get repetitive and boring rather shortly, but the author is already setting up a system to potentially avoid this by getting the main character out of god/creation-mode and into the personal adventure mode.

At this point, I will go back to the style. So far, when it comes to the execution, it seems that the author is going with a mechanical approach to the story telling, especially to the world building. While number crunching about how to manage a world is fun, this needs to be supported by pleasing storytelling in a literary sense. Otherwise the story becomes too monotone. For example the author just completely glosses over the initial creation of the world, while a very striking and pleasing couple of paragraphs could be written about "the process of turning a grey nothingness into a vast planet filled with lush colors". Missed opportunities like this for potentially epic moments in the story saddens and disappoints me.

Grammar is as good as it can be expected from a web novel. There are some mistakes that I came across so a proofread could improve it further. But they were few and not very detrimental to my reading experience.

The characters are where the story really loses its points. Good thing is, it is still early so this could still be remedied. But so far, I've read 9 chapters (counting prologue) of this story, and I have yet to meet any real characters in it. Terra is the generic anime cat girl stereotype, without any distinguishing characteristic. The protagonist is the same, as far as characteristics goes, he might as well be "side-dude #148" in "generic web novel #72". They haven't displayed any emotion, character quirks, anything that sets them apart as a character really.

What is more worrying is that, character development is also pretty much nonexistent. If there was nice character development implemented into the story starting with the next chapter, the character problem would probably mostly be solved by chapter 20. But so far, things do not look so good on this front. I have just read chapter 8 and I know exactly as much about Terra as I knew at chapter 1.

But I am going to restate this, although this is a problem at the moment, there is still time to fix this problem.

This fiction has great potential, but to live up to that potential some improvements are needed. Specifically the bland writing and nonexistent character development needs to be improved. As a sucker for world building stories, I will definitely be following this one. I recommend that people give this one a shot and I definitely recommend it for people who like analytical world building. 

* Review is written as of chapter 8.

* Hoping the fiction improves, forcing me to improve this review and the score along with it.

The story itself has a fairly interesting premise - MC becomes a "keeper"(i.e world creator). He gets to design its form, rules, power systems etc.

That, in itself could be really entertaining to read if not for one of two giant flaws this story seems to have :

Simplicity.

We're presented with a powerful tool of creation, where he can basically make anything he imagines reality...But guess what?

The first thing he creates is a beautiful female companion (who coincidentally just so happens to fall in love at first sight, has zero personality etc...oh, and did i mention its a cat-girl?)

That's generic to say the least, but it would not matter if not for what he does next - the all-powerful tool of creation presents him some example power systems in addition to a custom one...and what does he do? He does not even take notice of the custom system and directly chooses the, once again, incredibly generic "magic system", without giving it as much as a thought.

He still has an option to customize it though....but he does not, he simply picks another option from a drop down menu. He proceeds to go for a generic game system, without giving it a single idea of his own (levels and classes, skills locked to class etc, like really?)

Then he creates races...or should i say makes elves blatantly overpowered. Like, really, humans have lower stat total, lower lifespan, no special racial abilities, lower everything basically.But alright, elves are meant to be powerful after all...but no, he proceeds to create several other generic races like beastmen, giving it no thought of his own.

What I'm trying to say is, the MC and all characters of this story suffer from complete and utter lack of imagination, are childish and generally dumb. Oh and the kitsune companion of our MC is so proud of him doing an absolute worthless mess of a creation she jumps onto him and they have sex.

...But that aside, other than the characters and their glaring flaws, everything else in the story is interesting, its just that, I simply don't want another otaku simpleton of a unimaginative and unrealistic excuse of a MC.

Pros : Good story and grammar, easily readable as everything flows together nicely, has potential to be unique with the way its going (10 chapters out as of review)

Cons : Anime dolls instead of characters

To sum it up shortly, this story has a lot of great potential but Its completely ruined by the fact that the author likes anime a bit too much.

He spent most of his 'points' (currency used to buy new things to put in his wolrd) on making 'goddesses' and their personalities, which honestly wouldn't be a problem if they didn't only exist to satisfy the MC's Furry/loli fetish. 

I ended up dropping the story at chapter 19 because that's the point that he gets really serious about creating his harem... in a story that doesn't have the harem tag. 

Tl;dr - from my knowledge up to chapter 19, This is a good story if you're not bothered by lots of weeb stuff and harems. 

Very interesting read. The story has so much potential that I am a bit sad that the author has failed to harness it. I think the problem is with Terra's characterization. The author has obviously wanted a harem from the get go but perhaps Terra's character was to create conflict. As of chapter 45 I am not very sure wt the author is trying to do or thinking about.

SPOILER. It's not ok for Dale to sleep with his goddess but it is apparently ok for her to? Like wth is going on, really? Bihena, one of his creations is hostile to him and he just goes along with it. Not even trying to find out why she's hostile or wtf happened. The goddess ask him for something and he does it. They do something, he finds out, not fully on board but yet goes along with it. Where is his voice? What does he want to do with his world? What does he want the goddesses to do? Does he want to just laze while Terra does everything? If so, then his actions are contradictory. Does he want to rule over his world instead of Terra? If so, his actions are contradictory. (see wt i mean?)

I completely understand when ppl review of it's anime-ish characteristics. The characters have minimal to no depth. Cardboard cut-outs. Cliches.

It is still an enjoyable read but if the author is planning to go anywhere sensible and indepth with this story, he needs to do something about his characters. 

Tbh, I just read worm by wildbow (yes, i just found out it exists and read it) and everything currently pales in comparison. To be fair, as my mind is very critical, i can at least tell you there is a bit of a problem.