★★★★★ 4
Entertaining, stats go burr, some annoying writing quirks
Format: Audiobook
This series is like following along your favorite video game MC. It has a decent amount of plot, although there occasionally is too much tangential action before resolving a plot. Don't expect amazing depth and you'll be pleasantly surprised by how mindlessly entertaining this story is. Yes, the male MC is so lucky that he survives everything even without a clever plan (ever) but at least the author kinda explains this with a high luck stat. It's basically an in-world explanation for plot armor, which I kinda respect in its audacity.
That said, two complaints:
1) As a biologist, it's annoying to hear the myth that the "law of the jungle" is "only the strong survive" as the "way of nature" repeated over and over. This is an old fashioned and inaccurate understanding of evolution, which is primarily about survival of populations and certainly has selection at multiple levels (genes, individuals, familial groups, & populations). The idea that the system's goal of "strongest survive" in this novel producing anything like evolution is an annoying and persistent reminder of how poorly most people understand evolution. Fitness is defined by how well an organism matches its niche and how many offspring it has, not how many it kills or how strong it is. So if a cultivator in this novel becomes amazingly powerful and has zero kids, they would be a total unfit creature as defined by evolution.
To add on, "law of the Jungle" understood as "every man for himself" is also an old misunderstanding of Kipling, who was actually making a point that even animals in nature follow some rules, after all "the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack". It has always baffled me how such a small scale collectivist phrase has been so thoroughly misunderstood my our individualistic culture.
2) The author has several annoying writing quirks, like needlessly using the word "itself" all the time. Similarly, adjectives are heavily repeated. Author favorites are "powerhouse" & "monster". It makes no sense that every culture would have the same slang and it's annoying to hear the same words so often. Might I suggest a thesaurus? It's fine if Ogras always says "monster" but everyone can't do that or it just seems like the author has limited vocab.
On that note, too many things are described as near endless, limitless, etc. That is a nonsensical concept, which covers for not explaining something in measurements or metaphors. This is a common issue with authors who don't do math, but something "near" infinite, is actually infinitely far from infinite. Something is infinite or it's not. Again, lets find other terms like "vast" or "enormous." Or get even better and say something "stretched across a province/country/continent/planet/solar system/galaxy/etc". Those all provide size without saying something nonsensical.
2) Stats go burr to the point of confusion. We're supposed to track attribute points, Dao, race, core, skills, nodes, bloodline & bloodline skills. We need more charts at the beginning of each book. How about one showing how skills merged? And what's the difference between 50 and 100 strength. How about 1000 or 10,000? It'd be nice had even rough comparison to picking up some mass like 100 strength means picking up a car and 1,000 is picking up a mountain.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2024
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