Demon King

by Toika (토이카), Toika, Toy Car

After dying, I woke up as a weak goblin.

To survive, I have to destroy, consume, and evolve off of other monsters.

From the ugly guy to the king who rules everything!

1000 pages, ebook

Reviews

[Pablo García · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author is irrational, delusional, nonsensical and possibly great tendencies towards a deep psychopathy. Earth is paired up with another world, and each Earthling as a "soul-mate" (another being that makes up a unique pair). The author is into game-like dungeon-stats-and-grinding and DE-EVOLUTIONIZES/De-Humanizes a College Student from South Korea into a cannibal-goblin-moster that can't remember or differentiate when eating humans or other goblins/monsters. Because the main character levels up from eating his opponents, he eats thousands of his opponents and treats them as finger food. The thing is, if one is "De-Evolutionized"/"De-humanized" and "turned into a monster" (first, one doesn't think "human thoughts anymore"/no more language, or ethics, or moral quandaries. The main character as a "monster" can't even communicate with other humans or other monsters and just grunts and makes noises....This means that the main character should have cared less whether his main weapon had attack points, curses, buffs/debuffs, etc. (things that only a gamer would give importance to) and cared more about survival and creating a safe-place to rest and "survive". This main character never goes to the bathroom, never sleeps, just hunts and kills, and eats his victims, to level-up 24/7/forever. It is childish and not-credible to have a dystopian/apocalyptic version of Earth that turns "Earthlings" into Monsters In-Real-Life (IRL) and not just "pretend-Role-Playing-Game" and then the Monsters eat and "level-themselves-up" like if they were role-playing a video game. Main character can't even communicate like a human, doesn't look human, has lost all humanity, all way to communicate, so, why would a "monster" live his real-life-like-playing-a-stupid-video-game, worry about stats, skills and level-ups??? Animals eat to survive, breed to leave offspring, only an idiot author would believe that they would actually do anything and everything to level up and have bigger buffs???? There is no get out of a monster-transformation-card at the end of this Dungeon-Dystopian-like-story, so why become the monster, if you do not have to??? Why become the Demon King if all of humanity is going to hunt you down (for all the right reasons)??? With no martial arts, no combat training, without any cooking (eating everything raw), this author pretends that a S. Korean College Student is just going to kill and eat his way into becoming a Demon King???
If the main theme is "survival", then the author misses it/messes it up completely. If the main theme is becoming the "Demon King", then what is the point of "destroying Earth", having him "de-evolutionize" from an Earthling into a monster, like Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis", where a man changed into a cockroach (but this cockroach did not feed on the other roaches or then became king of the roach motel by killing everybody/everything)...
There are too many plot holes, and not enough reasons (real ones) to make it an interesting read.
I do not recommend this story/book/web-novel series.

[hridayam · Rating 2 out of 5]

The evolution system was the only good thing about this.
The story was just mid, more than 50% of the scenes were just fight scenes.
Got bored 20% in and skimmed through it.

[Deborah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Stopped reading about 90% through because the protagonist became someone I couldn't support. The protagonist is originally an underdog who is fighting to level up and survive . . . and then it turns out he's actually Baal (as in, from the Old Testament) and is doing all this as a plot to regain the title of "Satan" from Lucifer.
...What.
Around the same time we learn this, the protagonist turns into Generic Overpowered Evil Dude. As in, actually evil with no redeeming qualities. In addition to him becoming sleep-inducingly dull, this means he's someone I want to lose; not someone I want to root for, invest in, or continue reading about.

Aside from that, the writing was pretty decent for the first few hundred pages. It started off around 4 stars and, after about the halfway point, started sinking to about 2 stars. By the 75% mark, I was definitely losing interest and only kept reading out of vague curiosity. But as I said above, I gave up at the 90% mark because not only was the story no longer good, it was actively bad and the protagonist actively unlikeable.