We meet up again with the main characters of the first book, Lyr (Marcus in the real world) and his friends in their guild Virtus. Things are going pretty well for them, they have a large guild, Aldford is growing, and possibly the most fun news for them, their stream is doing really well and they are making a lot of money for the guild members in the real world. However, things can’t keep going smoothly for Virtus as they run into an old enemy and characters from Eberia make their way to Aldford bringing new challenges with them. Lyr has to decide who he can trust and figure out if he can save Aldford from problems growing below it.

If you look at my goodreads scores, I knock this book down to a three star as compared to the others that I had a four star books. I don’t think that this book is a massive drop off, just a little one. The biggest issues I have with the book are one of editing that I’ve mentioned before. It’s just using the same adjective or not reading something out loud so it has past and passed within a couple of words of each other. The editing is still rough, and it’s a shame because it doesn’t seem to be getting better. And now that might just because he doesn’t actually go to much of an editor or because the books are being rushed out, but they would be better, and possibly a full star better if they were well edited for content.

The other thing I had an issue with, and this was only for part of it, he tried to wrap too many storylines together. While the first book bounced around, the stories generally stayed separate, with just a few odd bits of tying things together, but it was done pretty simply. In the second book, and by that I do mean #1.5, the story is contained to a smaller area, and for that reason, Chmilenko does a solid job of tying various story elements together. In this one we’re back to the bigger world that surrounds Aldford, and we get too many storylines trying to tie together. I actually think that he does a good job tying them together at the end, but the rest of it, is chunky. That’s the best way to describe it, and it’s pretty obvious. You’re dealing with one thing, then that thing is completely dropped for another thing, and then you drop that other thing for another thing, and repeat. The characters have pretty one track minds. It could have been blended together better. Another way to put it would be in Dungeons and Dragons terms where the players get distracted by a seed you were laying for the future and leave the current main plot for a long time, so you feel like you have to tie it back in sooner than you would have. That’s how it feels like this story was written.

That said, I do think that in the end, it was tied together. There was some actual weight to what happened at the end. You got some of what you wanted as a fan and that had been hinted at earlier in the book, but the book isn’t without loss. In something like a game where you can respawn, Chmilenko makes sure that some things do have some real consequences. Though, I think the epilogue scene is kind of out of place, just because of how they are handling a future villain, again, probably too early.

I also think that the characters continue to develop. Not just the main five characters who were in the original book, but some of the added members of Virtus. While a few characters get less page time than in the first book, it doesn’t seem like they are being overlooked, and with a large cast of characters to draw from, that’s pretty impressive. I can see why he wrote the #1.5 book now as well so that you’d get to know some characters and some ideas of what is going on in Eberia and the larger world as Aldford is off by itself. But there are characters who show up in this book from #1.5 and they continue to be developed. Though, I feel like some of that is being handled poorly because of how forthcoming they are or aren’t with information sometimes. It seems a bit out of place for the character and it seems a bit like this book and characters were started before #1.5 was with those characters.

Overall, I still think that this is a good LitRPG series. I want to read/listen to the next book, but that probably won’t be until 2020 for the audio book, even if the book is published this year. I hope, eventually, that more content editing work will be done on the books, but even if there isn’t, I’m fairly used to it at this point. This book definitely doesn’t make me want to stop the series, even with a bit of a lower rating. And I care about the characters and what happens to them, which is always a good thing.

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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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