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The World Online - Review
Link to the author's (S.X.J. Ke) personal website
Genre: Fantasy
Publication Type: Webnovel
Tags:
- Average Age of Main Characters (23)
- Length (10 / 10)
Link to Goodreads
Blurb: Earth Online – a virtual MMORPG that takes place in the future year of 2190 – a game that everyone will bet their futures on. Set in a map that is ten times the size of real-world Earth, players battle for supremacy in the first game to feature personal adventure, territory construction, and grand warfare. For every death you experience in the game, your level would drop back to zero. Ouyang Shuo, an above average player, suffered the ultimate betrayal. For merely a piece of equipment, his sworn brother betrayed and backstabbed him. This time, after he reincarnated in the game, Ouyang Shuo swore to exact vengeance.
However, in an unexpected turn of events, Ouyang Shuo found himself back five years before the betrayal – right before the launch of Earth Online. This time, armed with the knowledge from his past life, Ouyang Shuo would venture upon a new path.
How to perfectly complete quests? What historical battle maps would appear? How should one build up their territory? Utilizing the experience from the predecessors of his last life, Ouyang Shuo makes his bid for the top against all odds. Follow his journey as he seeks to lord over the world!
A different kind of tale that blends historical characters and virtual reality gaming, with heavy emphasis on kingdom building and warfare.
Review: I really struggled to find information for this webnovel. There seems to be no fanart, and even finding an actual release date was beyond me. This is pretty confusing, because from my understanding there's a non-insignificantly sized following. Anyways, please be aware that the release date is an incorrect approximation.
Onto the review! This novel gets deep into civilisation building. There's an incredibly heavy focus on building an empire, and all the politics and city management that is necessary to do so. The author also leverages a pretty expansive knowledge of ancient Chinese heroes to make what are supposed to be representative 1-1 NPCs. So, this civilisation building combined with ancient Chinese history was pretty fun to read, and I was really into it at the beginning. It helps that the translations for this webnovel aren't too bad at all.
I haven't listed it as a recommend however as I found that the quality dropped off massively the closer you got to the end. Essentially, when the author took the focus to a largely global POV instead of a mainly Chinese focus, there became a gross simplification of the plot progress. Characters became dumber, events unfolded way more rapidly, and previous plot points were completely ignored. I'm not sure why this is the case, but I found the ending bad enough to influence what came previous.