Source
r/litrpg•
fingerboxes

Review for Forever Fantasy Online & Forever Fantasy Online: Last Bastion. Light spoilers.

Spoiler

Bottom Line up front: 8/10.

I had read a book from one of the author's other series (Minimum Wage Magic), and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of that novel. I noticed that she had a litrpg series in progress, so decided to investigate it. I went in with reasonably high expectations and was not disappointed.

The books are a (unique?) hybrid of the 'trapped in a VRMMO' and 'litrpg world is real' approaches to the genre. In this case, a fantasy world was somehow transmogrified into a video game, with the inhabitants forced to act as scripted NPCs for a subjective 80 years. The books depict a reasonably realistic version of how this kind of situation might play out, which is nice.

There are two protagonists, one of which has a more-or-less solo story focusing on his interactions with the newly freed NPCs and their antipathy toward players, and the other leading a raid as they try to escape from the endgame zone that has been transformed by the game's transition.

The novels' prose is above-average for the genre, and while most of the plot twists can be seen coming, it is a welcome relief from the 'and then this happened' style of storytelling so common in this genre where authors often mistake 'completely random events' for good plotting. The worldbuilding is somewhat sparse, but of generally high quality. Most of the characters have a distinct voice, and generally make decisions without blatantly holding the idiot ball. I feel like the raid-leader protagonist, Roxxy, is likely an author self-insert in some ways - but this feels like a capacity where it is appropriate, and leads me into my absolute favorite thing about these novels...

They capture what it was like to raid 'back in the day'. In the same way that Ascend Online takes me back to playing EQ as a kid and the feeling of facing a big, unexplored, and unknown world together with my friends, FFO takes me back to my days of 'hardcore' raiding and the camaraderie that I had with my guildmates. Bonus points for handling the problem of 'how would you fight implausibly huge mobs IRL' gracefully.

My biggest complaints have to do with the relatively mundane nature of the 'in-game' threats, the horribly slow start to the first novel, SilentBlayde's IRL character arc being a bit tiresome and drip-fed (unless it ends up having something to do with the cause of the transmigration in general, that would make the payoff worthwhile, but I don't see that happening), and several overly 'woke' moments in regard to <current year> irl politics.

So, yea. 8/10.

Posted Jul 5, 2019, 8:25 PM UTC

816
CeldaEditor: Stonehaven League, Dungeon World, and more•

Curious, can you give some examples of the "woke" moments? I don't recall any offhand, and I'm not someone that likes that kind of thing (the opposite, in fact).

Might also want to edit in a link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/Forever-Fantasy-Online-FFO-Book-ebook/dp/B07D8QTWJM

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fingerboxesOP•

Flameboyant, for one. His entire initial characterization was basically 'Hi! I'm gay!', complete with the requisite 'noble savage' good-guy NPC looking down his nose at homophobia. (No problem with LGB characters, just tiresome when they feel inserted specifically for the purpose of representation)

Some of the interactions between Roxxy and Nekobaby concerning how dangerous it is to be a woman if you are paranoid.

There were a few other moments that don't immediately come to mind, as well.

I'll admit that I'm a bit hyper-sensitive, noticing things to a degree that probably wouldn't bother most readers, but I've seen too much entryism to let it pass without any comment at all

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TheColourOfHeartache•

Entryism is when you try to subvert an organisation's politics by joining it. Simply writing a book with a specific political slant won't qualify; you'd have to be trying to influence writers, publishers, or someone else to promote that political slant and oppose others.

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fingerboxesOP•

I'm not going to have a conversation this out of scope in this context, sorry. :)

This was a small part of my experience with the book, I don't want to turn it into the main one.

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TheColourOfHeartache•

That's reasonable.

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sams0n007•

A terrific and well-established author. One of my favorites!

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TheRaith•

I can't say I agree with Roxy being a self-insert. If you read her other series you can sort of see that she just excels at making characters. I read her stuff and almost always am infuriated by one character or another, but there actions are consistent with who they are, I just don't like them.

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autumn-windfallreader's hat on•

I agree. Roxxy is much too flawed to be a self-insert. And she doesn't get that darling treatment that self-inserts always get. If anything, I'd even say the writers are a tad too harsh with her.

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fingerboxesOP•

That's fair. I don't think that I communicated my point well in the opening post, and used a loaded term that I didn't exactly mean.

I think what I meant was more like there is a lot of the author in the character, because what seems like first-hand IRL experience of what leading raids is actually like came through I a way that I can't imagine 'faking'.

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Nudvik•

Julius was extremely annoying in the later heartstriker books. His naive, self-centred and childish idealism only works because the author bends reality to allow it to. Even more annoying is how in the early books Marci is an intelligent pragmatist who recognises that if someone is trying to kill you, the only thing you can do is make sure you kill them first. But in the later books she turns into a complete pacifist who gets the same stupid plot protection as golden balls Julius.

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TheRaith•

Hence me being infuriated. I would've loved if the mc was Conrad instead, total badass tank dragon. Then again, not my books, and in the end hers were still a fun read.

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Nudvik•

Personally my biggest disappointment with this book was that the impact of becoming another species and especially sex was almost completely ignored.

In the first book, we see Anders the Fish guy quickly lose his attraction to mammalian features and start to be attracted to those of female Fish people. This strongly implies that the "players" don't just have the appearance of their avatars, they've been completely transformed biologically, including their brains. However in this book the only player who we see experiencing this is Roxxy, who is now an asexual rock person.

I feel like there was a huge missed opportunity to explore Nekobaby's situation. Since they became the opposite sex as well as a different species.

What happens when you take a (presumably) heterosexual human male and transform their body and brain into a female Jubatus? By my estimation you're going to get a heterosexual woman who's primarily attracted to Jubatus men. Exploring that combined with Neko's conflicted feelings about the reality of being a Jubatus woman while retaining the memories of being human is really interesting to me.

Unfortunately all we saw was Neko freaking out about having to deal with being ogled and no further development on the whole transformation situation. Which was a shame, since I really don't know what the author intends to do with the whole thing now.

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fingerboxesOP•

Honestly, while this might be a cool subject to explore, even touching this issue would get the author labeled a TERF and bring the wrath of some Twitter outage mob down on her if it ever got noticed.

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Nudvik•

I don't know what that is and I don't want to.

Wokeness can jump off a fucking cliff.

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fingerboxesOP•

Feminists that don't think trans are real

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Nudvik•

That's hilarious. They should have an SJW royal rumble to see who can be crowned the Queen of Woke.

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