Yep.. lots to chat on here. I finished Challenge: Unbound Death Lord. Way better than I initially thought. Infact, there better be a part 2. Great job on bringing that together. Next up, I'm 80% done with Headshot and I have pneumonia and will be off work the next 3 days. I will finish it probably tomorrow. Started listening to the first book of Emerilia... so far, not liking it. I know it has a lot of fans but just wondering, how far in before it gets good?
I only made it half way and ended up dropping it. Bummed because there are so many books and I was hoping to enjoy it.
Unbound Deathlord started weak and got stronger as it went and I agree - there MUST BE another book! Headshot, isn't that the zombie one? Zombies are something I actively avoid, but I hear a lot of good things about it round these parts. How is it? As for Emerilia, it picks up steam probably around a quarter or so of the way through the first book, but doesn't REALLY get going until further in when the antagonist is revealed. Have you met Bob yet? That's when I remember it starting to snowball its way to awesome.
Challenge is worth picking back up and finishing. I didn't really care for the beginning either. But after sticking it out, everything came together nicely. The mc is an anti-hero carrying guilt that is important to the ending of the book. Headshot is the zombie one. I like it. It's first perspective from a player's perspective. The game launches and restarts every week. It's still buggy and has a controversial aspect to the way it works and you have a rebel group who hacks the game. Poor players play free zombie accounts. Rich players buy the survivor accounts. It's all about surviving the week. The mc gets mixed up in the rebel storyline. I haven't finished it so won't have a final opinion on it until later but the leveling aspect is interesting. The players perspective can get annoyingly worrying and repetitive at times and the rich vs poor stereotyping is heavily done here. But it carries over as an us vs them story which is cool considering any empathy he feels for the enemy players is justified as zombies doing what zombies do. Worth a read. I'm about 3-4 hours into Emerilia and I really can't stand it. The MC seems so cliche but at the same time unbelievable. I picked it up because it seems to have a huge fan base and is thought one of the best litrpg so I have no doubt that once I get into the good stuff I will change my mind. Same thing happened with the Land. But it was the very last few chapters of it that hooked me. I haven't met Bob yet.
I don't know how eBook time works, since I'm solely a reader. But Dave is hardly cliche - stick with it, at least until you get to meet Bob? It goes up from there.
@WildAzazel and @VRRanger what did you not like about the first Emerilia book? I just finished it and enjoyed it. I'm not saying you're wrong for not liking it. I'm just curious as of to why? Was it a lack of action or something else?
I've not finished it. I am a few hours into it and I just haven't gotten interested in it. I find the beginning story of the richest man on earth doing nothing but gaming in his free time hard to believe. I'm sure it will get better so I'm gonna finish it to see what all the fuss is about.
I can see that being believable. If you've constantly got people pestering you and spending all of your professional time under immense pressure, and all of your private life is the exact opposite of private, wouldn't you want an escape? I mean, think of celebrities today and the lengths they go to be out incognito. I'm assuming that in a future where we can reliably mine the Kuiper belt, it would be next to impossible to get any privacy or anonymity, no matter how powerful or rich you may be. So he gets onto the game because of that immense pressure - it acts as a release valve and lets him get back to doing what he loves doing instead of running the biggest company in the entire world. There's also another in universe explanation, but it's a spoiler so I won't go there. It is explained in the book though, if I'm remembering right - if not in book 1, still relatively early on in the series.
I just might not like the writing style. There we're parts I really liked, but others that bugged me. I enjoyed the set of of the initial village and some of that 'NPC'' characters, but the storyline got convoluted for me. Maybe to many POV's and jumping around. I didn't feel a real connection to the MC.
I can see that. He does a ton of POV switching, especially in later books, when he keeps adding more important folks to the cast. I think switching to the antagonist works well, but too many viewpoints makes it difficult to identify with any of them. And it's not like ASOIAF or something, where you can skip from chapter to chapter to follow the ones you're interested in, because there's frequently mid-chapter switches.
lol I always feel I am cheating when I do the chapter flip, but I do it often with that type of book. Ironically, the story I am writing involves a party of four, and there are at least a couple of times I want to switch POV. Figure I won't do it much and will keep the focus on one as the MC
It's a tradeoff between readability and making your other party members feel like nothing more than sidekicks.
