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Basiun

Basiun

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2019-03-20 Joined Global

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Posted

It's a solid read, but it also has quite a few annoying parts to it. To define this book is to say "Kingdom builder with reincarnator from the future" There are 4 points that irk me in this novel: *There's very little dialogue and a ridiculous amount of narration. The narration is made even tougher due to the 10 line+ paragraphs that it's served in. *Many times we're reminded of the shortcomings of the middle-ages, but somehow the town smithies seem capable enough to practically mass-produce high-quality muskets, 12 pounder cannons, and even a large scale steel-piped irrigation system only a few days after being introduced to steel which was somehow produced several tons a batch using a Bessemer Process which ALSO seems to have been built in only a few days. *Building on the previous point, the main character is far too knowledgeable about "future stuffs". It's basically to the point of "Oh, a medieval problem? It's fine, I've got the perfect solution for it, and I can provide a random perfect blueprint or plan to solve it" The MC is basically an "Army engineer" who somehow knows: History and geography to a T, can create literal blueprints for cannons, muskets, rifles, an entire irrigation system, several types of textile machines, how to create "White Arsenic" and GOD KNOWS what else the guy will "remember" straight from wikipedia. It's just far too easy to cheat this way, and it sort of impacts the story and the writing quality a lot. *The amount of "foreshadowing" in the sense of "And only in the future would they know the significance of this event!" - It's literally once every chapter. It's annoying. Apart from all of that? it's solid. Characters are quite solid and their positions in society done quite well to match their personalities. The plots/schemes are well done and you can feel the MCs plans for the future building bit by bit.

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Posted

The characters! The oracle paths isn't a very unique type of story, but it certainly tries its hardest to carve a unique spot within the genre. The characters and their relationships are very impressively done. The MC doing a character a favor does not mean that the character will follow the MC, nor does a character being an annoyance at one point mean that they will be an irrelevant side character/villain. Each relevant named character has a developed personality which is not centric to something relevant to the MC. The story is reminiscent of "The New World" @ RR, characters and interactions are quite reminiscent of "Dungeon Crawler Carl" @ RR. It has some other things that remind me of a bunch of different novels but in my experience it reminds me the most of these 2, and I'm somewhat confident that the author has read both of them. There are huge problems with this novels though, and by problems I don't mean things like plotholes or grammar errors - The world being built is simply so big and comprehensive that for this story to end up satisfying and fulfilled, it will need to grow for thousands of chapters. The mere fact that it needs thousands of chapters is almost a gamebreaker in itself as it's very unlikely that either the author can keep up quality or very likely that the author will deviate to a narrower plotline/drop the novel at some point. Around c280-300 I realized that the author already has a slight problem with how to progress the plot, and the following 50 or so chapters became very stagnant and simply had a lot of pointless description baked in. 2 more nagging problems in the novel is how hard it is to compare how strong characters are without having them brawl. Due to the body//aether system and the tons of different races involved, the MC is obviously not the strongest contender, but at the same time he should pretty much be one of the strongest "unprepared" human contenders - but struggles way too much with them in comparison to his stat sheet. The second "problem" is how hard it is to evaluate "time" when the "standard time" should be a few weeks, but the standard+ordeal time is more similar to 5 months. The reader has no real understanding of how long digestors/evolvers have been "active" and whether or not any power scenario that is introduced seems reasonable or "Hmph, you took a year to gain that power? I took 3 days" and vice versa. All-in-all, it's a veeery good novel, but it's too huge to be reviewed properly, as 350 chapters is basically enough for half the system tutorial.

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Posted

It's got good main characters, but I think it suffers too much from the intentional "evil world" design. What I mean is that everyone everywhere are just greedy monsters who strive for power and kill millions of others for shits and giggles. Also most if not all characters somewhat relevant to the story all build their power in some way by using randoms as food for their cultivation. This creates a problem in my opinion since the "MC faction" can't really have greedy power hungry mindless villains as friends, but instead needs to find "unique" people or simply mind-control subordinates. This in turn creates a problem where everyone is mindless and the story predictable except for when the main crew does something smart. Another problem I have is the use of ridiculously excessive numbers such as billions, trillions etc. They are numbers too big for a human mind to even understand the implications of. It's common to use in Xianxia for some reason, but I find it annoying to read as the implication of "billion" becomes a "trivial" thing to the story, making it seem not special whatsoever. Using 10 thousand instead would be a number one could picture in their head and still seem very impressive. "Slaughtering a trillion people in an instant" > ...Uhh okay? "Slaughtering a city of 10 thousand people in just a few hours" > You pretty much see the bloodbath taking place. The story isn't bad though, and DPs writing quality is good, as it was in his other works.

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