I came into this already having read all of “He Who Fights with Monsters” through 2023 and a slew of several other LitRPGs. In comparison, I found this one lacking for the most part. But, as you progress through Jake’s journey with him, it does show some promise towards the end of Book 1. It is hard not to think this is a bit derivative of Shirtaloon. The audacity to interact on equal terms with a god being paramount. But, some duplication of tropes is bound to happen. So, I can get over that. What actually bothers me about this book, however, is that there is no “plausible” explanation of how and why they are in this game-like situation. It is explained a bit, but it didn’t quite get me to that point of thinking “Yeah, I can see that!” I read another LitRPG that, for example, took the Avatar movie approach where a quadriplegic having nothing left to lose forfeits his body to enter into this game world. The world was almost like Sword Art Online. Shirtaloon has the whole “magic is real, monsters are real, but due to circumstances Earth was bereft of it while Palomastus (spelling?) was positively steeped in it and Jason got pulled into this mess.” Having reached the end of Book 1, I cannot rightly say where Zogarth provides solid insular logic that I can follow as to what happened here. Are there multitudes of tutorials each with only 1,200 participants for all of the billions of people on Earth? I can say I’ll stick around with Zogarth a bit longer and see where this leads. Maybe it is going to be explained in Book 2.