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Dream Drive
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 13, 2018
This book was, quite possibly, the best developed LitRPG world I've read to date. Note that a limited portion of the content is NSFW and explicit scenes are, well, explicit.
The story's pacing doesn't suffer from over-conflict, leaving the reader time to digest the twist and turns, as well as the characters. Not all supporting characters are developed but the ones that get the treatment are given as much unveiling as the main character - allowing us to see their personal takes on society, morality, and even religion. This aspect of the story isn't just lore as these defining traits are core to the main plot beyond motivations.
Overall, a highly recommended read, and a very hopeful encouragement to the author for a second installment.
The story's pacing doesn't suffer from over-conflict, leaving the reader time to digest the twist and turns, as well as the characters. Not all supporting characters are developed but the ones that get the treatment are given as much unveiling as the main character - allowing us to see their personal takes on society, morality, and even religion. This aspect of the story isn't just lore as these defining traits are core to the main plot beyond motivations.
Overall, a highly recommended read, and a very hopeful encouragement to the author for a second installment.
March 9, 2018
Great book! The story is quite unique, and very enjoyable. It kept me tied to my seat!
Read
July 2, 2019Too much dystopian, not enough LitRPG for me.
Dropped ch 6/10
Dropped ch 6/10
August 28, 2019
Hooked to the story from the start.
September 10, 2019
this was an excellent story
January 4, 2026
It's fine.
The pacing is the biggest issue. Things that I can overlook easily for a 100k word story start to grate more and more when the story is almost 500k words. The interesting concepts, ideas, and character moments get spread further and further apart because some action or slice-of-life scene has to be described in rigorous detail. If all the good stuff in this was condensed to 30% of the length, I could see myself coming away from this book very happy. Unfortunately, this book has the slowness of epic fantasy pacing combined with not actually being epic in scale - it only has ~7 characters, 2 distinct nation-states (3 if you count the real world dystopia), and a plot that is distinctly "first book out of five in a series". Also it's been ten years and the sequel will realistically never come out.
The worldbuilding is fine. The detail is concentrated on the tribal people where the bulk of the time is spent, and it's fairly well-realized. I read this right after Things Fall Apart, which put me on high sensitivity for being introduced to novel tribal societies, and there was basically never a moment where anything struck me as implausible or contrived. Everything besides that is fairly vague - the evil empire, the dystopian modern setting - none of it is bad, but besides a few infodumps it's all pretty vague and not really focused on.
The characters are, again, fine. They avoid being totally flat caricatures, and they're decently entertaining to be around. The biggest issue is that the majority of their depth and complexity is a directly informed characteristic. Everyone's constantly describing other characters as X, Y, and Z instead of the characters actually demonstrating those traits. The prominence of characters doing Bojack Horseman-esque psychological rants against themselves was sort of annoying but not abysmal.
The LitRPG elements are - say it with me - fine. There were some very good choices:
- Setting up a dichotomy where permanent stat ups trade off against short-term ability usage led to a good push and pull resource management dynamic
- Focusing on the advantages directly granted by treating HP as an abstraction instead of a description of your actual complicated physical state was neat and interesting, and I liked the little ways this was integrated into other parts of the story - Jackson being able to train longer because he doesn't suffer bruises or certain kinds of muscle aches, stuff like that.
- Distinguishing skills which can be grinded from pure stats which required killing things prevented stupid gamebreak bullshit
- The game-element related action scenes in the final chapter were really great, aside from my issues with The Gun.
There were also some major issues in this area that annoyed me.
- Despite how often the stats come up, there's never any attempt to put them in perspective. Is 100 Strength "a lot"? Is that the difference between an average person and someone who works out two days a week? For a story that focuses so much on this stuff, this is important! Instead it just remains a vague and abstract number with no connection to anything.
- Jackson asserts multiple times that diminishing returns on stat investments means that specialization is necessary and being a jack of all trades is a bad idea. This just doesn't make sense? Diminishing returns on points put into one stat mean that an even stat spread gives you MORE in absolute terms relative to dumping them all in one stat. This is a bizarre leap in logic that I don't understand.
- This is getting into nitpick territory, but the design of The Gun seems to suck, and it had to get written out of the story to avoid being a gamebreak. It becomes apparent in Ch10 that this insanely powerful multi-target long-range insta-kill weapon that can perfectly avoid your allies can be used without any major negative consequences every 10 minutes as long as he has healers around. This would be a really dumb gamebreak if it was left in, so of course he had to be forced to use it early, thus breaking it, which seems to directly contradict the fact that its durability was listed as 'extreme' much earlier on.
The plot had a few interesting ideas that were, again, spread far too thin. By the time things were being revealed, my reaction was "finally!"
I skimmed past the erotic sex scenes, so I can't rate those other than to comment that the inclusion of a total of four (4) erotic sex scenes across a 500k word fantasy story is certainly an interesting decision.
I can only assume this was so highly recommended because "basically fine but overly verbose" is a bar that 99% of LitRPG stories fail to clear.
The pacing is the biggest issue. Things that I can overlook easily for a 100k word story start to grate more and more when the story is almost 500k words. The interesting concepts, ideas, and character moments get spread further and further apart because some action or slice-of-life scene has to be described in rigorous detail. If all the good stuff in this was condensed to 30% of the length, I could see myself coming away from this book very happy. Unfortunately, this book has the slowness of epic fantasy pacing combined with not actually being epic in scale - it only has ~7 characters, 2 distinct nation-states (3 if you count the real world dystopia), and a plot that is distinctly "first book out of five in a series". Also it's been ten years and the sequel will realistically never come out.
The worldbuilding is fine. The detail is concentrated on the tribal people where the bulk of the time is spent, and it's fairly well-realized. I read this right after Things Fall Apart, which put me on high sensitivity for being introduced to novel tribal societies, and there was basically never a moment where anything struck me as implausible or contrived. Everything besides that is fairly vague - the evil empire, the dystopian modern setting - none of it is bad, but besides a few infodumps it's all pretty vague and not really focused on.
The characters are, again, fine. They avoid being totally flat caricatures, and they're decently entertaining to be around. The biggest issue is that the majority of their depth and complexity is a directly informed characteristic. Everyone's constantly describing other characters as X, Y, and Z instead of the characters actually demonstrating those traits. The prominence of characters doing Bojack Horseman-esque psychological rants against themselves was sort of annoying but not abysmal.
The LitRPG elements are - say it with me - fine. There were some very good choices:
- Setting up a dichotomy where permanent stat ups trade off against short-term ability usage led to a good push and pull resource management dynamic
- Focusing on the advantages directly granted by treating HP as an abstraction instead of a description of your actual complicated physical state was neat and interesting, and I liked the little ways this was integrated into other parts of the story - Jackson being able to train longer because he doesn't suffer bruises or certain kinds of muscle aches, stuff like that.
- Distinguishing skills which can be grinded from pure stats which required killing things prevented stupid gamebreak bullshit
- The game-element related action scenes in the final chapter were really great, aside from my issues with The Gun.
There were also some major issues in this area that annoyed me.
- Despite how often the stats come up, there's never any attempt to put them in perspective. Is 100 Strength "a lot"? Is that the difference between an average person and someone who works out two days a week? For a story that focuses so much on this stuff, this is important! Instead it just remains a vague and abstract number with no connection to anything.
- Jackson asserts multiple times that diminishing returns on stat investments means that specialization is necessary and being a jack of all trades is a bad idea. This just doesn't make sense? Diminishing returns on points put into one stat mean that an even stat spread gives you MORE in absolute terms relative to dumping them all in one stat. This is a bizarre leap in logic that I don't understand.
- This is getting into nitpick territory, but the design of The Gun seems to suck, and it had to get written out of the story to avoid being a gamebreak. It becomes apparent in Ch10 that this insanely powerful multi-target long-range insta-kill weapon that can perfectly avoid your allies can be used without any major negative consequences every 10 minutes as long as he has healers around. This would be a really dumb gamebreak if it was left in, so of course he had to be forced to use it early, thus breaking it, which seems to directly contradict the fact that its durability was listed as 'extreme' much earlier on.
The plot had a few interesting ideas that were, again, spread far too thin. By the time things were being revealed, my reaction was "finally!"
I skimmed past the erotic sex scenes, so I can't rate those other than to comment that the inclusion of a total of four (4) erotic sex scenes across a 500k word fantasy story is certainly an interesting decision.
I can only assume this was so highly recommended because "basically fine but overly verbose" is a bar that 99% of LitRPG stories fail to clear.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews