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Soulbound #1
Soulbound 1: A Fantasy LitRPG Harem Series
My world shattered, torn apart by the maniacal laughter of a wicked man. But I refuse to surrender to despair. Deep wounds fuel my determination as I embrace a new life with a deadly class, ready to take my revenge on everyone who turned my existence into a shadow of its former self.
Greystone, an unforgiving city teeming with danger, becomes my battleground. Treacherous alliances need to be forged, and a new home rebuilt, but I won’t have to do it alone.
Unexpected allies emerge, each bringing unique skills to my path of revenge. A talking pangolin-badger with a sharp tongue, a towering and troubled blacksmith, an enemy-turned-ally mage, and a young healer damaged even more than me.
Change looms behind Greystone’s colossal walls as guilds vanish, arena fighters wind up dead, and whispers of a great war permeate the streets.
I am Cade, a man driven by vengeance, and soon the city will learn that everyone's blood runs as red as that of my fallen comrades.
Greystone, an unforgiving city teeming with danger, becomes my battleground. Treacherous alliances need to be forged, and a new home rebuilt, but I won’t have to do it alone.
Unexpected allies emerge, each bringing unique skills to my path of revenge. A talking pangolin-badger with a sharp tongue, a towering and troubled blacksmith, an enemy-turned-ally mage, and a young healer damaged even more than me.
Change looms behind Greystone’s colossal walls as guilds vanish, arena fighters wind up dead, and whispers of a great war permeate the streets.
I am Cade, a man driven by vengeance, and soon the city will learn that everyone's blood runs as red as that of my fallen comrades.
501 pages, Paperback
Published July 9, 2023
57 people are currently reading
44 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 1, 2024
I want to love this book/series, because honestly there's a lot to love. Let's work though some of the good points:
The setting is fine, if a bit generic. Fantasy world, magic exists, dwarves and elves exist, some magical beasts. Plus there's a pretty crunchy LitRPG system; lots of numbers, and they matter, get reported a lot, and everyone is expected to get thrilled about an extra 2 dexterity or a small increase to critical hit chance. Maybe not my first choice, but it's fine.
The characters are bland to the point of forgetfulness, but at least not annoying. The male protagonist is an orphan (but despite 2-3 throwaway references to it, it doesn't seem to have any impact on his psyche, goals, fears, etc.) and his personality seems to be "generic good guy". Fine. And the female love interests are even more boring, without even a defining personality quirk. By the end of book three, there's the healer who...I think has blonde hair, and was briefly a bit jealous but then stopped for no obvious reason, the mage with black hair who might be marginally more bi and kinky than the others, the barmaid whose appearance isn't really mentioned and is apparently extra catty to the other girls (although marginally, since they're all pretty exhaustingly catty), the assassin who briefly had multiple personalities until the author got bored or forgot about it, and then a half-fae trap expert who apparently has wings (but it's never relevant to anything) and whose main identifying characteristic is that she was slightly slower than the others to fall into bed with the protagonist. It's very, very thin gruel, but hey, not every book needs interesting characters.
The overall plot is...actually quite good, and what gives the book (and series) promise. It's a nice high stakes plot, the fate of the world is in balance, the antagonists are, well, over the top mustache twirling evil, but a shrug at explaining it is made. And the rough details actually work pretty well. The protagonist is doing okay, then gets ambushed as the book starts, comes within a hair of dieing, and then has to scrabble to survive, rebuild, and gain revenge. So far so good.
But there's a smaller problem and then a much more severe problem.
The minor problem is that a lot of the details don't quite work. For example - the protagonist almost dies, but then gets absurdly lucky and doesn't die, gets a rare and powerful class, and also an incredibly rare, absurdly powerful ability that unlocks his potential to become extremely OP if he builds a harem. Which is....fine, but that means the rest of the book is basically "...the stuff that happens after the protagonist won three lotteries on the same day without even buying a ticket"; it's hard to get too caught up in it when he did nothing to deserve it. I'm always much more interested in protagonists who gain power due to determination, hard work, intelligence, or being a good person than utterly absurd, impossible to predict luck.
For another example, the ability that lets him become OP is that he can, basically, form a harem with women, drastically boosting the stats of both himself and his harem members. Such an ability needs to be balanced somehow, and here it's balanced by the harem members automatically and unavoidably dying when he dies which is...a choice, but that ruleset has some pretty harsh consequences, which aren't really grappled with. (For example: Nothing requires the protagonist to sleep with the people he bonds with, so a strict min maxer would bond with absolutely every female he meets, then hide in a bunker and let his now absurdly powerful foot-soldiers fight for him. Which would lead to a boring book, which is probably why the protagonist doesn't do this, but instead he opts to lead the fighting and only bond to a comparative handful which makes no sense.) And it doesn't help that I just got done reading the Dashing Devil: Hidden Hero series which had almost the exact same mechanic and handled it far better.
I could go on; there's a lot of small little hiccups in the plot that hold everything back. The protagonist starts fighting in the arena, then only fights twice. The protagonist arives in the guild hall he built with his now-dead friends and has an emotional moment about how much it means to him before moving somewhere else a few days later without a concern. An author has to make hundreds of decisions when writing a book and ideally they all support the tone and narrative, but that doesn't happen here.
All of which brings me to the much larger issue which is HOLY MOTHER OF CONTINUITY GLITCHES BATMAN. It's a problem in book 1, but becomes a torrent in book 2 and 3. Expect to see - constantly: Characters being talked about before they're introduced, characters being talked about who are never introduced, subplots being abandoned without being resolved, Checkov's Guns being introduced without being resolved, decisions being made and then ignored. A big point is made of everyone evolving at levels 25, 40, and 60, then someone evolves at 45, but nothing is said about it. Even levels sometimes go up and then back down, either because the author forgot that a character had already levelled up, or because chapters were shuffled around chronologically late in the writing process without numbers being changed.
One major repeating thing that happens in this series (as you'd expect given the strong LitRPG themes) is that the protagonist obtains new equipment or upgrades old equipment, and I think the author has about a 50% success rate in remembering to actually give the stats of the new items. Sometimes they'll finally be recapped many chapters later when it's no longer relevant; in other cases they vanish without a trace. In one case, the protagonist gets a powerful spear, had a discussion with his inner circle, and agrees to offer it cheaply to an ally who needs an upgraded spear. Then he promptly gives it to a tank who doesn't use spears, and indeed, never uses the spear. (In fact the tanks abilities mostly revolve around using a shield, but he doesn't use shields either.) Later the ally gets an upgraded spear through an entirely different path; the original spear just vanishes into the aether.
Which wouldn't be so bad, but the entire series is nothing but this repeated over and over. And again, that'd be annoying in a normal fantasy book, but in a strong LitRPG setup where details matter, losing track of the loot or getting confused over the core rules that have been set down or having the protagonist's level roll back cripples a key part of the book.
In short, this book (and series) is just frustrating, because there's a really good story buried under the poor editing and writing. There are absolutely writers out there who could have executed on this story and made something fantastic, but unfortunately this author doesn't seem to be one of them. Which is...unfortunate.
The setting is fine, if a bit generic. Fantasy world, magic exists, dwarves and elves exist, some magical beasts. Plus there's a pretty crunchy LitRPG system; lots of numbers, and they matter, get reported a lot, and everyone is expected to get thrilled about an extra 2 dexterity or a small increase to critical hit chance. Maybe not my first choice, but it's fine.
The characters are bland to the point of forgetfulness, but at least not annoying. The male protagonist is an orphan (but despite 2-3 throwaway references to it, it doesn't seem to have any impact on his psyche, goals, fears, etc.) and his personality seems to be "generic good guy". Fine. And the female love interests are even more boring, without even a defining personality quirk. By the end of book three, there's the healer who...I think has blonde hair, and was briefly a bit jealous but then stopped for no obvious reason, the mage with black hair who might be marginally more bi and kinky than the others, the barmaid whose appearance isn't really mentioned and is apparently extra catty to the other girls (although marginally, since they're all pretty exhaustingly catty), the assassin who briefly had multiple personalities until the author got bored or forgot about it, and then a half-fae trap expert who apparently has wings (but it's never relevant to anything) and whose main identifying characteristic is that she was slightly slower than the others to fall into bed with the protagonist. It's very, very thin gruel, but hey, not every book needs interesting characters.
The overall plot is...actually quite good, and what gives the book (and series) promise. It's a nice high stakes plot, the fate of the world is in balance, the antagonists are, well, over the top mustache twirling evil, but a shrug at explaining it is made. And the rough details actually work pretty well. The protagonist is doing okay, then gets ambushed as the book starts, comes within a hair of dieing, and then has to scrabble to survive, rebuild, and gain revenge. So far so good.
But there's a smaller problem and then a much more severe problem.
The minor problem is that a lot of the details don't quite work. For example - the protagonist almost dies, but then gets absurdly lucky and doesn't die, gets a rare and powerful class, and also an incredibly rare, absurdly powerful ability that unlocks his potential to become extremely OP if he builds a harem. Which is....fine, but that means the rest of the book is basically "...the stuff that happens after the protagonist won three lotteries on the same day without even buying a ticket"; it's hard to get too caught up in it when he did nothing to deserve it. I'm always much more interested in protagonists who gain power due to determination, hard work, intelligence, or being a good person than utterly absurd, impossible to predict luck.
For another example, the ability that lets him become OP is that he can, basically, form a harem with women, drastically boosting the stats of both himself and his harem members. Such an ability needs to be balanced somehow, and here it's balanced by the harem members automatically and unavoidably dying when he dies which is...a choice, but that ruleset has some pretty harsh consequences, which aren't really grappled with. (For example: Nothing requires the protagonist to sleep with the people he bonds with, so a strict min maxer would bond with absolutely every female he meets, then hide in a bunker and let his now absurdly powerful foot-soldiers fight for him. Which would lead to a boring book, which is probably why the protagonist doesn't do this, but instead he opts to lead the fighting and only bond to a comparative handful which makes no sense.) And it doesn't help that I just got done reading the Dashing Devil: Hidden Hero series which had almost the exact same mechanic and handled it far better.
I could go on; there's a lot of small little hiccups in the plot that hold everything back. The protagonist starts fighting in the arena, then only fights twice. The protagonist arives in the guild hall he built with his now-dead friends and has an emotional moment about how much it means to him before moving somewhere else a few days later without a concern. An author has to make hundreds of decisions when writing a book and ideally they all support the tone and narrative, but that doesn't happen here.
All of which brings me to the much larger issue which is HOLY MOTHER OF CONTINUITY GLITCHES BATMAN. It's a problem in book 1, but becomes a torrent in book 2 and 3. Expect to see - constantly: Characters being talked about before they're introduced, characters being talked about who are never introduced, subplots being abandoned without being resolved, Checkov's Guns being introduced without being resolved, decisions being made and then ignored. A big point is made of everyone evolving at levels 25, 40, and 60, then someone evolves at 45, but nothing is said about it. Even levels sometimes go up and then back down, either because the author forgot that a character had already levelled up, or because chapters were shuffled around chronologically late in the writing process without numbers being changed.
One major repeating thing that happens in this series (as you'd expect given the strong LitRPG themes) is that the protagonist obtains new equipment or upgrades old equipment, and I think the author has about a 50% success rate in remembering to actually give the stats of the new items. Sometimes they'll finally be recapped many chapters later when it's no longer relevant; in other cases they vanish without a trace. In one case, the protagonist gets a powerful spear, had a discussion with his inner circle, and agrees to offer it cheaply to an ally who needs an upgraded spear. Then he promptly gives it to a tank who doesn't use spears, and indeed, never uses the spear. (In fact the tanks abilities mostly revolve around using a shield, but he doesn't use shields either.) Later the ally gets an upgraded spear through an entirely different path; the original spear just vanishes into the aether.
Which wouldn't be so bad, but the entire series is nothing but this repeated over and over. And again, that'd be annoying in a normal fantasy book, but in a strong LitRPG setup where details matter, losing track of the loot or getting confused over the core rules that have been set down or having the protagonist's level roll back cripples a key part of the book.
In short, this book (and series) is just frustrating, because there's a really good story buried under the poor editing and writing. There are absolutely writers out there who could have executed on this story and made something fantastic, but unfortunately this author doesn't seem to be one of them. Which is...unfortunate.
January 11, 2024
DNF at 1%.
I hate magic card stories..
I hate magic card stories..
July 11, 2024
It's fine...there were some interesting characters and the chemistry was good. The FMC’s are your more generic sycophants you get in this genre, but the way the mc interacted with them was good, felt it struck a good balance between the wish fulfilment and actual humans, the poly was interesting. The MC’s character seems to be inconsistent, spoilers, but the point that popped out to me was when the MC finds out the woman who raised him/ran the orphanage? Not sure as his past is glossed over, but he finds out she was murdered and doesn’t react at all, like zero, was bizarre.
I’ll give book 2 a try.
I’ll give book 2 a try.
January 21, 2024
Nice beginning with good group chemistry. Also liked the first restoration of a party. but the Mafia-like stuff was a bit much. Also, Assassin is not a good group class and the MC therefore does not act like an assassin. nevertheless will read the next one.
July 24, 2023
Loved the story can't wait for the next book will be nice to see where Cassius takes the story
June 18, 2024
Benny from earth was pretty cool. Probably the best character.
October 28, 2024
Good LitRPG. I liked the world, I liked the game mechanics. The MC was a prototypical "alpha-male" but it was only annoying at times. Not sure I'll continue with it.
February 18, 2025
Not a terrible story but everything seems and feels rushed. It could be a pretty cool world but too much is focused on everyone wanting to bone and then rushing any of the character development.
July 25, 2023
Middle of the pack for the genre. This translates to a decent story and ok characters, but an overdone sidekick trope. I'll probably read book 2.
February 10, 2025
I hate using this term but it's just mid. I stopped reading about halfway through when it felt like the plot was meandering and the characters seemed more interested in praising the MC then getting revenge.
There really isn't anything original or special here it's just another fantasy harem that uses RPG mechanics as a short cut for world building. The MC is just another edgelord with a "heart of gold" and a harem of women that have no other thoughts than to please the edgelord. Which sucked because it had a good start and an interesting premise but got bogged down with shallow characters and a generic video game world. Plus I'm sick and tired of all the crappy AI generated covers I keep seeing, it feels lazy and disrespectful to their fellow artists.
There really isn't anything original or special here it's just another fantasy harem that uses RPG mechanics as a short cut for world building. The MC is just another edgelord with a "heart of gold" and a harem of women that have no other thoughts than to please the edgelord. Which sucked because it had a good start and an interesting premise but got bogged down with shallow characters and a generic video game world. Plus I'm sick and tired of all the crappy AI generated covers I keep seeing, it feels lazy and disrespectful to their fellow artists.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews