TLDR: The overall story was enjoyable, the humor was decent though not the greatest, the voice acting did a lot of heavy lifting. I am cautiously optimistic for the future of the series.
My gripes are, for lack of better terms, the “Reddit-style” and/or “Modern lingo” writing. I am fine with gaming terms being thrown in there like “buffs, nerfs, grinders” and such, this is a litRPG after all. I am mainly referring to parts where characters say things like “Raw dog”, “Challenge fucking accepted” and other instances that I cannot remember.
Then there’s Loth (I am unsure of the spelling). A character written to be smart, which is normally fine but this comes off as a “snobby reddit intellectual”. At one point in the story, Loth said “Room temperature IQ” and I rolled my eyes. Fortunately it is only a couple of instances.
(Minor character spoilers, not story relevant). My last gripe is near the end of the book, Loth is revealed to actually be female rather than male. That’s all well and good, the part that gets me is she says “There are benefits to being assigned male”. “Assigned” is a very unusual and particular word to use in that situation. Typically used by those that conform to the identity-obsessed ideology (often called identity politics).
While this does not necessarily make the book bad, or even dock a point from my rating, it does make me concerned it will lead to more of that ideology seeping into the story as it continues. I’ve already dropped two series due to such nonsense, I would prefer to not have a third.
Also, for a litRPG, I found the “level up notifications” to not be annoying. I skip over all of that in every other litRPG that I’ve listened to, except one, as I am not interested in numbers. So that is a huge plus.