When driven by a goal, the impossible oft becomes doable, like slaughtering an entire coven of the Twice Cursed God’s adepts without mercy, or leading a legion of demons to storm the last bastion of the Cursed Princedom. But as the impossible hurdles keep on coming, even that drive may not be enough for Krian to escape Demon Grounds, make it to the higher plane, reunite with his sister and friend, and exact vengeance on his mortal enemy... http://amzn.to/2tljhUi
I rather like the Realm of Arkon books. The issue I have with them, is that the demon MC is ridiculously overpowered; a common enough trope among the Russian litRPG authors (if the genre has been around long enough to form tropes, that is). I really hope that all of the characters finally meet up soon though, the anticipation is killing me. I'm also glad that this book returns to the majority POV being the demon character. I just find him more interesting than the "light" characters, for some reason.
That does seem to be a thing. The Eastern LitRPG novel ARK from Korea was one of the first stories I read. it's based on the Korean gaming scene and it feels like those games are all about the grinding. The Russians seem to feel that the end-game content is more interesting, so their stories seem to like to jump up to the end-game. It feels like their stories have a cliche problem where they start at first level to introduce the world, then they leap quickly to level 200 for end-game content. I tbecomes an incredible pacing issue and rapidly gets out of hand in the stories. I think the author changed over to the alternate characters to try and slow down the overpowered pacing issue he was having with the MC in the demon lands...rapidly jumping up into that jumping a shark range. Basically resetting with the other MC and crew to bring things down a notch.
I don't think they're really "alternate" characters so much as part of a split party, if that makes sense? In a way, I'm almost glad that book 4 went so far with them to catch up to the demon MC, because it made it feel like they're actually getting close to joining up so there shouldn't be more jarring POV switches after that. And I'm not sure that it's a matter of being overpowered to reach the endgame as a Russian genre convention so much as it is authors individual writing styles. As far as I remember, Fayroll didn't have that issue, nor does Mirror World or Dark Herbalist (although the Dark Paladin series has a ridiculously overpowered MC and is by the same author). It USUALLY at least makes sense in context. So it's neither a bad thing nor a good thing unless done wrong. It's just a trope and deserves mention in a review.
