It pains me to leave this review. It pains me even more to say that I am done with the Carl series. I absolutely LOVED the first 5 books and have both read and listened to them multiple times. This book though brought the fun train to a burning, crashing halt.
I don’t know why they decided to change things mid-series and turn this into a Soundbooth Theatre production rather than just just Jeff Hays doing his thing solo. I don’t mind that being an additional option, but you don’t change the recording style/narration mid-series unless something happened to the narrator. The sound effects are not great – especially the echoey chat effect – and they just continuously snap me out of the book. The extra narrators may have been fine had I been used to them from the beginning, but now it just feels like I’m listening to a bad dub job.
Besides the recording, the whole Yu-Gi-Oh thing is just… sad. Did Matt run out of ideas? Not only did I not stay up all night to finish this in one or two readings like I have for the previous books, but I didn’t even get past 2 hours before I just stopped. I’ve tried going back to it a few more times, and just can’t make myself care.