- #1
Reviewing this mostly because I think it deserves a bit higher rating - less than 4/5 definitely isn't justified so far, though 5/5 is maybe a bit high, dragging it up above 4 would give a better idea of the quality. Though I'm only a little way in, so it may change later (maybe for the better - some of the things that drag it down feel like an inexperienced writer as well as start-of-story jitters). Everything I say has the big caveat that I'm not that far into a pretty long story - I'll say that here so I don't have to repeat myself...The basic setting isn't particularly original, but it's done pretty well and feels comparatively natural. This is helped by the fact that this isn't one of those cases where the author is trying to shoehorn super-advanced VR tech into the current world - this is explicitly some distance in the future, and the tech that supports the super-advanced VR is also super-advanced, and has made the world visibly different in reasonably plausible ways. The game world is pretty much Just Another MMORPG (tm), with wrinkles that are made plausible by the super-advanced tech - it's not going to make you go "huh?" when the NPCs are decently complex characters while still being actual NPCs in a game. All of this makes it feel like the background mostly hangs together without having jarring bits and sharp edges - the setting is getting out of the way of the story without being irrelevant. It's not perfect, but it's the kind of not perfect that a decent editor could fix pretty easily without a complete rewrite.The core character is likeable, relatable, and pretty believable (caveat reminder - not far in, can't say how he'll develop). He's reacting pretty much the way you'd expect someone to react given the personality he's supposed to have and the background he's been set up with, and honestly, that's about all you can ask for from characters in a story. Other characters are less well developed (again, not far in, don't have too many to talk about) - they're either NPCs (game NPCs or the story equivalent, background characters), or secondary characters, so this is reasonable. But no one's been jarring or painful to read, and the MC has actually been a lot of fun to read.Plot... well, I'm not far enough in to have more than the hints from the prologue and the earliest part of the game world to go on, but it does seem to be going somewhere - the prologue sets up the world a month or two in the future before dropping us into the game, so we know it has to get /that/ far, at least. The in-game plot also sets up hints about the future, and then puts some effort into developing towards those hints, not super fast but not so slow that nothing happens in the first 20-odd chapters. There's a lot of chapters to go, so who knows if the pacing will end up being consistently good, but it's definitely not been bad so far.Finally, the elephant in the room - the translation. So far it's all been MTL that hasn't proceeded all that far; the current translator (Bersleid, as of ch19) is doing lightly edited MTL and while the light editing affects the readability we're actually getting the big benefit of lightly edited MTL: really fast updates. Personally I can handle it - I have to think a bit about parts to figure out what the point might be, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying it. If you can't handle MTL that's probably going to be a deal breaker unless/until someone does a proper translation (which may happen).Summarising, from my early perspective this looks like the bones of a solidly done story - not attempting to be really groundbreaking or original, but doing what it does well. And there are hints that it may actually do what it does /quite/ well - time will tell. For now, modulo the MTL caveat I'd say give it a shot if you like the broader VRMMORPG and/or genderbender genres.