- #1
For those who left a 3-star or less review, I think they dropped the series too soon, and I hope they revisit it again sometime. It really is genuinely a very interesting, logical, and unique series.Each chapter is very short, and 100 chapters in is barely even the tip of the iceberg. It's a 500+ chapter novel, there's a lot that goes on, plenty that needs to be introduced or revealed, and tons of questions that get answered later on.One of the reasons I personally enjoy it, is that it's less of a generic dungeon crawler action series (which you can find literally anywhere else) and and more of a social-political story where the world building is more focused on how these dungeons and game scenarios function and impact both the players and non players. What constraints the game mechanics have for each person, and the overarching mystery of who runs these dungeons. The story is very DARK. It has a lot of dark, horrific elements balanced in-between light-hearted comedy. After all, it is a series about necromancy.The characters each have their own unique charms, and their actions, or lack of action are explained through their own unique POV chapters, or through logic inferences. The protagonist (Choi Yikyung/Lee-kyung) has very realistic reactions. He does start off wet-behind-the-ears, but he gets plenty of gradual development. There's a lot he doesn't know, and he is naive, but he isn't necessarily s*upid. He's slowly learning, but there just isn't much known about his class or the state of the world.My favourite character is the love interest, Seo Dawon (which for me, was unexpected). He is the archetypical handsome, talented, a little bit self-centered kind of guy, that you normally find in any romance series---at least on the surface. Dawon is a lot more fragile, unnerved, skeptical and suspicious than he lets on. He keeps a cool face on the surface, but he's also learning a lot about his own situation in real time as Yikyung is. He's a logical person who is undergoing the effects of being turned into an undead, and that's causing his personality and rationality to slowly change or degrade. I think it's unique and interesting to get character development in the form of character degradation. Character development doesn't necessarily always equate to a positive change, but a change that's influenced by the story. It's rare to see a natural development of negative change. I do hope, there are some positive changes by the end, though.One of the story's weakness for me is, admittedly transition scenes. It feels like there aren't enough transitory scenes sometimes, which interestingly enough, does get fixed in the webtoon version (unfortunately, the webtoon version also omits a lot of the romance scenes). But it's not so much that it's distracting. It's absolutely not a perfect story, but I gained a lot of new and interesting experiences from reading the novel, or I was able to see some elements of a story unfold in a different, and insightful way.I think it's worth a read, if only just for the novelty of being something different.