Exodian - Profile

This story is entirely centered around a single main character and as such, we mostly see this story thru his perspective. Here it's a problem. Because MC... lacks personality. He's nothing more than a husk of a human. At first it's not obvious, but as the time goes, more and more of this is revealed. At many points just reading his thoughts made me feel unclean, let alone his actions. This hero is not sane, and he is not getting better. He has no personal interests in life. Not even one. No curiosity, no joy, no goals. Even his development as mage is nothing more than a means to an end. The only thing he got is an obsession to not get personally hurt by people that manage to convince him of their love. Either by betrayal or by them dying on him. This is literally all he got. A husk is no exaggeration. That's not all. A lot of the plot consists of his moral dilemmas, but they are so incredibly hollow. All smoke and mirrors. Because no matter what thoughts are presented before us, the hero never changes. Again, there is as much as 15% of text centered at this, but he. never. changes. one. single. bit. Never gains even one bit more... content. There is absolutely zero personal development, despite all the attempts to describe various groundbreaking revelations. That alone was more than enough to consider dropping the story, as I personally hate reading from a point of view of less than sane people, but it actually gets worse. The plot itself is inconsistent. Everything in it is sacrificed for the sake of drama. Pace, logic, characters. Hero became too strong for the plot? Not a problem, after a time skip he will be subtly nerfed without any explanation. He is too strong to describe a dramatic fight? Not a problem, he will stop being able to run circles around his enemy due to his many times higher speed, with at best an extremely shoddy explanation of: the enemy is just that skilled. He can fly and as such can easily escape from any danger? Not a problem, he'll always forget about that option at the right times. He can't be ambushed nor lost because he can just fly high enough? Again, he'll just conveniently forget at all the right times. And so on. No matter what it is, it will step aside for even a little bit of drama. Heroes will do ridiculous bullshit at every corner to provide the reader with it. I'll avoid spoilers, so I can only say that it's bad. A lot of time characters will find hilarious reasons to do the exact thing that would cause the most drama, despite the reasons being paper thin and it being against interests of literally everyone involved. The drama is a huge obsession of this story. I managed to read about 240 chapters before getting fed up to the extreme. To me, all the worldbuilding isn't worth anything when I feel progressively worse just mentally touching the plot, the protagonist. I can't exactly rate this too low, after reading for this length, but I really wouldn't recommend it. It's a dark place.

A somewhat above average Chinese translation - while translator clearly isn't professional and has no literature background, at least it's good enough to not second guess the content, despite still making the reader suffer thru quite a few blunders every chapter. The story itself, however, is less than exemplary. Author has ideas, but that's all he got. Characters are shallow, dialogues are boring, combat scenes mostly make no sense (which hints at poor visual imagination of their creator). Bullshit like successfully blocking a chain by a sword is just the very beginning of obvious problems in that department. If you can visualize well what you read, you are probably not going to enjoy this therefore. In general, there are huge logic problems within this plot. If I were to compare this story to WMW, this one would have a minor score for originality, while WMW would have major plot and logic scores.

The good news? This translation is actually of a decent quality. It was clearly done by humans able in both languages. There are quite a lot of mistakes still, but they are mostly not impacting the reading by making you guess what was actually in there originally. Compared, for example, to all translations from Chinese that I ever seen (all of them - edited machine translations, made by unenthusiastic people), this is already remarkable. Bad news? The setting lacks anything new, it is merely a slight reshuffle of some extremely popular ideas. The plot is extremely primitive. Unlike other characters, which are relatively well done, MC isn't easy to see as an actual human, he is more of a plot device with Path to Victory. Which... makes no sense. He has no such abilities, only a limited knowledge of future events in a world where his decisions made no impact. Yet, he doesn't even ever stop to plan, but gets everything perfect. As if nothing unexpected can ever happen. It reads like a walkthrough more than anything. Really, it makes absolutely no sense - the guy is acting like there is a ready script before his eyes at all times, despite intentionally severely violating the original timeline. And there are absolutely no significant butterfly effects despite his actions. Moreover, while on the surface level the characters are done very well, they don't act like like real people who are capable of reacting to new circumstances. They feel more like bots, forever stuck in some prescripted mindset. Again, on the surface level it seems like they somewhat change, but it all falls apart if you stop to analyze the scenes. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it takes a turn to the better in future, after all, I only finished about 45 chapters. But 45 chapters actually contain quite a few lengthy episodes already. With them all tightly adhering to what I described, my hope of seeing an improvement gradually faded.

At first it was alright. I had no awe, but qualities required for a story to be readable were there. Unfortunately, as the time went, my disappointment grew. And mainly it has to do with MC. His "I must be evil to survive the multiverse" philosophy stopped being funny at some point, and gradually became more and more retarded, as it became more serious. What I mean, is that MC is... kind of small minded, obsessed, not too smart, or organized, or creative... basically a joke character with delusions of grandeur, that has to rely on infinite luck. And it's alright. While he is treated as a joke character. But when such story tries to move into a bit more serious waters.. well, it stops looking good. Reading about being forced to do evil in a 100500th time, when he's as usual is way too lazy to even try to turn on his brain, well, it really stopped being fun.