Raycast_5 - Profile

Ok where do I start? The good, let’s start with that. The story is well edited and there are few typos or grammatical errors. The writing quality is decent. That out of the way, let’s move to the bad stuff. The story is very derivative, nothing wrong with that per se, as often many of the stories I like are inspired by something else. The problem here is that this story is inspired by too many things. It feels like the author is taking elements from every novel, manga or anime they have ever comsumed, and cramming them in whether they make sense or not. You can feel it in the way they write that they change their mind quite often about what they would like their story and characters to be. The story feels like one of those games you played as a child where you came up with a character that had x powers and your friend one upped you and then you had to come up with something more outrageous to one up him and so increasingly escalating the nonsense until the character you came up with was ridiculous. The MC in particular feels like a caricature, he starts alright then adopts increasingly cartoonish behaviour, it’s fine for a character to have character flaws but it can reach a point where the character is just a plain unlikeable collection of tired tropes. He is extremely greedy yet incredibly cheap which makes you wonder wtf he does with his money. He doesn’t care about his appearance and has to be forced to buy clothes. He constantly picks his nose and ears in public (Who the f**k does this outside outside of anime) He has always dreamed of being a magus and yet he disrespects and pisses over any tradition and culture magi might have (why did he want to be one in the first place?) He always wanted to attend clover academy, yet he sleeps in all his classes. He’s always drinking and is constantly drunk. These issues are mostly nitpicks that make the MC hard to empathize with but that is not the main problem. The main problem is the inconsistency in the MC’s characterization. When he enters the secret realm and leaves that group of magi to die because they’re strangers, I didn’t like it because up to this point there was nothing in his story that would have made him so callous, but it was fine because I don’t expect him to be a white knight, but when he later mind controls a captive group of magi to fight to their deaths as a distraction so that he could have a slightly easier time looting I was dumbstruck. As I said, I never expected a goody 2 shoes but that is just evil, and came out of nowhere. The main character’s personality did a 180 without any reason. One chapter he is depressed about having killed a vampire and is risking his life every night without rest for over a month to protect innocent people and 50 chapters and a timeskip later he pulls this sh*t, willing to sacrifice people to have a slightly easier time of it, wtf happened?. Lastly, the author made magic too inconvenient to use, having a bunch of stupid requirements, why would you create a world of magi and an intricate magic system just to have the mc fight like a typical xianxia mc with kicks and punches? Easy, writing magic battles with a bunch of different effects and requirements is too hard and the lazy writer decided it would be easier for the MC to kick and punch stuff. Why would Ichigo learn kido when he can getsuga tenshou the s**t out of everyone?. The same is happening here, tne writer made magic so inconvenient that it barely makes sense for anyone to use it.

I almost never leave reviews, but this novel needs one. First off, let me state that this novel is by far the best written I have encountered here. By the standards of Webnovel, it is a diamond. It is so good however, that I’m not holding it to those, I am going to hold it to the standards of actual published books. If you judge it as such, unfortunately, the novel falls short. Let’s start with my number one issue: PACING. The novel is slow, tediously, almost painfully, slow. I know some novels start off this way and then pick up the pace but with this one, I feel that is highly unlikely, mainly due to mthe writing style. The author apparently feels the uncontrollable urge to explain absolutely everything, no matter how meaningless. Everything, from the mechanics of the weather to how the sewage system works is expounded upon with excruciating detail, all while letting us know the mc’s feelings about it, and the feelings of the people who built the sewers as well. At the rate this is going, the icecaps will finish melting before Shang gets anything done. Exposition is like sugar on a cake, too little and the cake is bland, too much and it’s inedible. Info dumps can be useful tools when used properly, in faster paced novels they are meant to get the worldbuilding out of the way so you can get to the action faster, a bit crude, but it works. Another way of exposition (and the best way in my opinion) is to spread bits of information about the world as the character explores it making it feel more natural and engrossing. The operative word being “bits” of information, you can even alternate these methods if you want, along your story. What you should not do however is make every ”bit” an infodump as the action of the story stagnates. Overall, the author is good writer, his style reminds me of Robert Jordan’s, and most people would agree he was a great writer. Unfortunately I cannot keep reading this novel, for the same reason I never finished the Wheel of Time, the same reason Jordan died before he finished writing his epic tale, the pacing is glacial.

The premise of the story, though unoriginal, is always a guilty pleasure of mine, transmigration into a cultivation world with a system, dual cultivation and a harem with r18 scenes, so far so good, nothing amazing, but good comfort food. What I absolutely cannot stand however is the quality of the English in the story. This is Webnovel so I have already massively lowered my expectations, however this is ridiculous. The story not only suffers from typos, but also glaring grammar and syntax errors. Simply put half the time the writing cannot be recognized as English, and even grammarly would not be able to help. The author stated that English is not his first language and I understand that as it isn’t mine either, but he is far off the point of being able to write any story in this language, let alone a Webnovel, so to the author I’ll just say this: please stop writing for now, until your English improves, or get several beta readers and an editor, you trying write this novel with your English level is like a toddler trying to compete in the 100m sprint in the Olympics.

Just started reading. Very well written novel so far, and an interesting world to explore, I can see some similarities with other isekai novels but it has its own unique flavor. Going to give this one a tryKeep up the great work!