Back with another book review, looking at the second book in the series by Luke Chmilenko, Ascend Online. Now, you can see that this is kind of the second book because it isn’t #2, but is instead #1.5. The reason for this is that this book follows a different character and takes place between the first and second books, from what I can tell.

Let’s do a bit of a refresher, what is Ascend Online. Ascend Online is a full dive, full immersion video game with a fantasy setting. While other companies in this world have tried to create games like this before, they haven’t worked, but this one is amazing and it feels right. We are following one group of players who show up in the city of Eberia in the first book and then head out into the wilds. This time we are following Lazarus Cain (great name), a half-giant half-elf who instead of going out adventuring like most players did, joined the thieves guilds in Eberia to try something different in the game. However, when he wakes up in a another thieve’s guilds hideout without his memories and a sigil emblazoned on his chest, he has the adventure come to him.

It was a bit interesting starting this book, because I saw that this was book #1.5, so I knew I wanted to go in what is technically the right order, but I wasn’t sure what I should be expecting. I wasn’t expecting for it to be in Eberia and with a different group of players. That took a few minutes to get used to, but I think that I like Lazarus as well as I like Marcus (Lyr) in the other books. Mainly, because I think that Lazarus is a bit more of an interesting character. I like Marcus, but he is more of the prototypical hero. Lazarus, while part of the thieve’s guild is still a caring person and is worried about the world. Again, Chmilenko does a good job of staying away from creating an edgelord which would have been easy to do yet again. The characters that Lazarus interacts with, the other players in the games and the NPC’s, also seem to be a bit more fleshed out with, which is nice.

Another thing that makes me like this book a little bit better is that the story is a bit more focused. The first one jumps around a bunch more and leaves a lot of open ends to the story. Now, I think that’s good, since we’re in a series, to not tie everything up, but you feel like there are two stories in the first book. This, on the other hand, is all about finding the memories and figuring out what is going to be happening and how to stop it. I think it also helps that this story is in Eberia and not in a larger area. This is actually some good advice for young writers or new Dungeon Masters, keep your story focused to a smaller location and it’ll probably end up being a tighter story because you don’t need to fully build and explain as much of the world.

Now, this book isn’t perfect. You can still tell that Luke Chmilenko is a young author. There are some things, like the NPC’s swearing that is a bit jarring. I feel like in a fantasy world, the NPC’s should have their own way to swear or phrases that they use as compared to just saying what we say now. For the players, I’m fine with it, but for the NPC’s it’s a bit world. The other thing, and I complained about this in the first book as well as the Sufficiently Advanced Magic series, is use and listen to your editor. While I think it was a little bit better in this book in terms of writing, Chmilenko still had a serious issue with repeating or over writing sections of his book. This comes down to describing something and then repeating the same description of the same thing in just a little bit later, sometimes in the same sentence. Any editor worth their salt would have fixed this issue. It’s stuff like “The slow moving river of sewage slowly drifted by, it’s went wafting up to us” or something similar to that, where you have it already described as slow and then repeated. Definitely could save on words that way and make it clearer. I’m not going to knock him for the stat blocks, as I think they are an issue just because I’m listening to the series, not reading it.

Overall, I liked this book better than the first. It definitely still has the issue that I’ve found in so many LitRPG’s where it’s overwritten and just needs a good going through by an editor. I think that this is a better book than the first, and I really enjoyed the story and the main character. This is a very traditional LitRPG, but it’s a good series for someone who wants to start in the genre. I’ve already started book #2, so expect in a few weeks a review on that one as well.

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