DeuSJS - Profile

I genuinely don't think I can give this story enough praise. It's truly a shame that the author died, as it's one of my favourite fantasy novels of all time. Writing Quality - Flawless. As in, throughout the 419 chapters, I don't think that I found a single flaw. Stability of Updates - I just put this down as 5* because I remember the story having good update stability until a couple updates before the "end". Story Development - The story in the beginning is meh, but it eventually it becomes amazing. As much as I love this novel- to the point of having read it 5 times now- It's really not the best. It's still not bad, mind you, and I would never say it's boring or unreadable, but it's significantly worse than every other category. After the initial period of getting tossed around like a ragdoll by powers far beyond his means, the story is downright amazing, though. It's a simple Hero's Journey, but perfected and devoid of any of the gimmicks and lazy tricks of other similar story. Character Design - Good. Arran is a simple man. He has average talent for magic, he has average talent for using a sword, and he has average talent for insights. His only real talent is fighting. To say that he is a natural at killing people would be an understatement. And he's not the type to feel morally conflicted about it either. The other characters are also relatively simple. Despite this, I can't really call any of them bad. It's just good, basic character design, to go along with the good, basic story. World Background - Amazing. It's unfortunately never plumbed to its truest depths, but there are plenty of hints of threats that lie beyond the veil of secrecy. Every time I reread this, I can't help but feel like there's so much left untold about the world. I really can't express how sad I am that this story will never be finished. It's truly an amazing piece of writing, and I wish that he had at least uploaded his notes on the story and world somewhere. It takes everything I love about simple high fantasy and puts it all into one neat, simple package. It truly belongs in the hall of fame of fantasy webnovels, alongside the likes of The Wandering Inn and Mother of Learning.

This novel is incredibly well written, always entertaining (even on a second read), and has a compelling story, even despite its repetitiveness. Writing Quality: 5* - This novel has few - if any - grammatical errors or spelling mistakes. Stability of Updates: N/A - Currently(Late 2020, during COVID), the update stability is very lacking. However, as I'm not sure if this is a result of the pandemic or not, I'm not giving this a score. Story Development: 3* - This is the only place where I would say that this novel falls behind. It's not bad, and is written in an incredibly interesting way, but it suffers greatly from repetition. It feels like it's always the same plot lines happening over and over. Luckily, the latest arc (Captain Kaleesh/Wolfsblood Company) has shown to be notably different in this aspect. Character Design: 5* - The characters are amazing. All of them. People have said that they don't like Arran because he's an idiot and makes the wrong decisions a lot of the time, and even though that's true early on, it didn't make me like him less. A lot of the characters often break the stereotype they seem like they're supposed to fall into, and it goes a long way in making them seem like real, likeable people. World Background: 4* - So far, the world building has only been middling, but it seems like the author has laid a foundation for himself to build on, and that there's actually a lot more happening behind the scenes that all connects in a really interesting way. Because of the obvious potential, that bumped it up to a 4* for me. If that potential is successfully capitalized on, it may even go up to 5*. Everything else I want to talk about - The pacing of this novel is great. It never feels like it's going too slow or too fast. On the character front, even though it seems like Arran is only progressing in power, and not developing as a character, going back on a second read-through shows that he really does change a lot from the start. I really like how his true talent is that he's good at seeing opportunities, and is willing to take the risks to turn those opportunities into strength. Also, I wanna see more of Crassus. He was really cool.