Reborn as a Transcendent Chapter 1829 Discussion

This story is a mindless read. No value judgement on whether it being a mindless read or not is good or not, it's just a mindless read. I find the overall story itself and premise relatively interesting and I do enjoy reading this whenever I'm bored and want to find something better than nothing to do. My actual rating for this story isn't really 3/5, it's more like 2.6-2.8/5. Better than doing nothing, not bad enough that I'd actively rather do nothing than pick it up to read. This story has very solid worldbuilding, at least in a localised sense. The immediate surroundings of the protagonist has a very well fleshed out political and governing structure, and the game itself has a very very strong worldbuilding element. Relationships between characters, while relatively one-dimensional, are still decently elucidated. The protagonist isn't unnecessarily s*upid, and is actually pretty smart, but overly so in a plot armor kind of way.

The true drawbacks of this novel are threefold.

1. Abysmal plot progress commensuration. 1829 chapters in, only a few months have passed. In total. Sure, a lot of things have happened, but true plot progression has not really taken place. A lot of what happened has been in-game progress rather than irl progress, and while that's important too, I think it could have been much faster chapter-wise. Conversely, in the few months of the story, somehow irl things are happening too fast time-wise. The plot progress itself hasn't gone too far irl, but events are taking place too rapidly. Basically, it makes it feel like the game is taking too long while real life is too fast. Spoiler

   in these few months, she's encountered at least five assassination attempts, the progress of the earth awakening has accelerated so much than demi-humans are appearing, and a returner has appeared. For 1829 chapters, that's fine. For a few months, that's too fast.

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2. A lot of nationalism and racism. I generally try to ignore it, but the author insists on forcing nationalism and racism into the novel. And it's not like a fantasy novel where the context is different and nationalism and racism are conditionally different and are engaged with differently. It's earth, slightly alternate reality, in the 21st or so century. And the nationalism and racism are there in a very matter-of-fact way like "this is how it's supposed to be". Maybe others won't have an issue with it, but I do.
3. Protagonist is way too unbeatable. There's no tension because there are no strong enemies, or enemies who can outthink her. Other novels with "unbeatable" protagonists usually get around this by having their environments be populated with enemies that are unbeatable with the protagonist's current level and the protagonist has to carefully navigate the situation in order to continue growing to the point where they can face those enemies. This novel doesn't have that. Past the very first bit of the novel, she's always at the very peak of whatever possible enemies there could be at that moment for her. There's no challenge, she just has to stay ahead of the curve.

Overall, it's readable and I enjoy it in place of mindless scrolling. It's just not very good, and if you can't read mandarin or put up with MTL, I suggest not starting. The TL is at 500+ chapters with 2 updates a week, and while they're doing their best, the pace that the novel is going means you should probably wait to read about 20-30 chapters in one go. Personally, I try to read about a hundred chapters in one go while reading the raws because that's how long it takes for something like a minor event to conclude. Where I'm reading, the minor arc goes on for about 300 chapters. Sooooooo yeah, it's gonna be a while before we get to the proper Main Event. Everything up till now (and probably for another couple thousand chapters) is still in pre-main event phase.