- #1
This is a niche novel. If you've ever been into a buggy game and tried taking advantage of it in quirky ways, this novel will feel like home. The world of Nekomimi Neko Offline is a buggy mess like if you took Skyrim 1.0 (original release with no patches) and on a scale of 1-10 you dialed it up to 50. The devs are downright sadistic, but everything honestly comes together really well in a semi-believable way (I've seen bugs similar to those exploited here in actual games). The story itself comes together really well, with fleshed out characters and an honest-to-god good plot. This novel is absolutelt better written than the vast majority of ones on this website. I'm sad that the novel is getting close to completion now.For me at least, this novel absolutely deserves a 5/5. The first 40 or so chapters are pretty big on infodumps, but after that it hits its stride. The MC is fairly dense, but it's in a consistent way and when things are literally shoved in his face he is aware of them so it's not to the level of frustrating. Honestly, the novel is hilarious if you can appreciate how buggy of a mess the game-world is.It's honestly a heck of a lot more believable than most VR-novels. I'm never able to get into them because the novel will just gloss over how unrealistic it is from a game perspective. Even entertaining novels like Overgeared have frankly awful levels of realism when considering the atrocious game balancing and how the MC takes advantage.This novel doesn't hold anything back, fully embracing how shitty the balancing in these novels is. It almost feels like a parody of the genre as a whole, while being entertaining in and of itself.