- #1
he beat the crap out of some random thugs, inflicting maximum pain on them, while saving a random girl. No, he didn't need to go that far. No, he didn't feel the slightest twinge of guilt or rejection to causing pain. Unsurprisingly, that wouldn't be the last time. While the system tries to fix his unambitious ways, it rewards his behaviors.
I recognize that he acts caring with friends and family, but the narrator points out every so often that he only gives them opportunities because they can make the most out of the opportunities. If they couldn't, he wouldn't help them. Aside from the people he regards as future wives, everything is strictly done based on how it makes him look or whether or not he can complete a system mission, and even with the future wives, well, he wants them to be his wives in the future because they're beautiful and talented/rich, so I don't think that counts! I wish he could help a friend without having to remind the readers that he's only doing so because he expects to get something out of it later!
[collapse]The second problem is the breadth of the system, which is something to be expected from its self-introduction. And the author does a good job of juggling the different industries Chen Huan gets forced into, keeping any individual arc from dragging on too long. Until the latest arc whereSpoilerhe joins a NBA team and flies off to America for 100+ chapters, almost completely ignoring the main storyline. In and of itself that's fine, but the blow-by-blow of the basketball games coupled with using real celebrities was both redundant (because most of the games weren't that interesting) and disconcerting (because Americans don't speak like that, and those don't celebrities don't act like that, at least not quite that publicly).
In the last few chapters the author has started moving away from basketball alone, but we haven't reached the finals yet after 100+ chapters of basketball starting from just the playoffs...
[collapse]Things might get better after the arc ends, of course, but the weakness has shown itself: a novel that tries to do many things, that's fine, but a novel that tries to make the protagonist the best at many things, if the author goes too in-depth on the wrong subject the reader will get bored for that entire arc.There are definite pros, of course. The author uses racial/national stereotypes casually, but he uses bad ones for Chinese and good ones for other countries at times. Aside from what I wrote in my first spoiler, the vast majority of the novel is about helping people and doing good things to look good, instead of making other people look like idiots so the protagonist looks good in comparison. There are many endings where both he and his opponent are successful, but he was just more successful, and he doesn't always end up on bad terms with his opponents. Due to how his system works, he doesn't hog all the spotlight (just a fair amount of it).I feel like if you read this to ~50 chapters and didn't enjoy it, you can just ignore every system novel you see from this point on.
