Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsFun and exciting with a few reader speed bumps...
Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2021
Overall I enjoy the story. And it is told in third person omniscient past tense. I say the letter because it took two books for me to figure out that he had switched to past tense in book 3. I can see where he's taking time off from the series and came back and not quite read what he wrote before. There he is clear inaccuracies, but there's a few stylistic choices he's made here that feels like a change of format to an extent. That is to say the character stats that was never fully explained and still has not been in terms of how the character sees them are now referred to "character sheets" as well as at one point the main protagonist Daniel is looking at his "Mana bar. " It did pull me out because as the fifth book of the series it is long past time to introduce new features. I believe it happened in the previous book and this book also has the new features of the times giving a health bar and status of an enemy. In fact it felt like the author wanted to push the RPG aspect of lit RPG a little bit more unfortunately it just felt off balanced. The author is a very good writer and I have seen his other work the Thousand Li series. That work is more of hey martial arts collivation novel series that I highly enjoyed even better than this one I believe but this is still very good.
I do believe Wong is a great author and I do wish he would have reread his own books in the lead up of writing this. truthfully though I suspect he is always working a bit on all of his projects so that may result in some of the change in stories telling style and formats within the story itself. Reading a story that is a mixture of literary and role-playing games I do wish it would have stayed true to itself a bit more in this book. There are certain things again that the author has forgotten he has given to the character most notably certain magic ring the character earned at the end of the first book which was mentioned in the second book a few times but has never been seen again. The ring itself is particularly impressive.
The story is full of action and some character development for some side characters that were interesting and made the story itself feel stronger. I enjoyed it and can see this being successful series even though it's some shorter stories for years to come. The one thing I wish the author would have done was either go back and format everything stylistically or have reread his books enough to know sort of what he's written in how he wrote it before. I do enjoy the breakaway from presidents that was in the first two books but I feel like the newer aspects he's added to book five while interesting feels wonky when they were not present in the previous books.
nonetheless I would recommend this book for anyone young adult and above it is not a children's book or book series despite it having no curse words. There are some more adult situations that have occurred a few times that I do not see as children appropriate.
