Posted by I picked this up because it was on sale and narrated by Travis Baldree. There are time where I buy an audiobook solely based off who narrates it — just the audiophile in me 😀
The MC, Arnold, was just going about his normal life when he gets accidentally murdered by a multidimensional being. Yep. Something about a resurrection gone wrong, multidimensional universe… quite honestly I really don’t remember the mechanics of it as it doesn’t really bear any further importance to the story. He gets sucked into a different version of earth that comes with a built-in leveling system.
Much like other LitRPGs there are various classes, and you level up by doing class related tasks and quests. Unlike most LitRPGs I’ve read, you don’t get to choose your class in this one, it comes auto-assigned. It doesn’t try to do it’s best by reading your mind and assigning you a class you’d be adept at, either. No, Arnold gets no choice in his Farmer Class. He’s assigned to be a farmer despite hating the outdoors, gardening, and farm life in general. He doesn’t handle strong smells well and that’s just not going to get you far with farming.
He’s told you can choose a second class, whatever you want, if you level to 100 with your original class. So, naturally that becomes his singular goal in life. The biggest hitch for Arnold is that you can’t just go kill things in the woods and level up. Why would a farmer need to wield a sword? In this world, there’s a drinking game where a farmer tries to wield a sword and the game is that he tries to hold onto it as long as he can. The sword will buck and whip itself right out of a farmer’s hands since they’re not classed to use it.
Arnold is given an amazing gift, he’s given a cat familiar who is a fount of magic, knowledge, and training ability…. but Arnold is so stubborn for a good chunk of the beginning he refuses to listen to him. I understand maybe trying things out for yourself once or twice, but he was so annoying to read about because he spent so much time wasting his time doing useless tasks to try to level up when the cat was clearly like, yo, it doesn’t work like that. He doesn’t just waste his time but he makes the world dangerous for others through his thoughtlessness. His character ultimately got off on a really bad note with me and never fully recovered. I understand about being pissed off you accidentally were killed during a ritual gone wrong… but he beats the girl with a cane at the very start of the book and I almost stopped. I kept going because it was audio and I was hoping it wouldn’t turn into a whole book of that. It did not… and the character became more likeable as the story went on, but I never really got over the sour note he started on.
This is a really, really long book for what it is. By the end there’s a lot of monsters and stuff but it still managed to slow down a bit as all the traps were set for certain monsters etc. It could also have been slow because I wasn’t digging the MC — but at 660 pages that’s a long, long LitRPG. With that length I would have hoped for more character development than what we got.
Overall I found this to be a fairly standard LitRPG with a few twists to keep it a bit fresh. If you like LitRPG and think the twist about farming sounds funny, might want to try this one.
Ratings:
- Plot: 10/15
- Characters: 9/15
- World Building: 13/15
- Writing: 11/15
- Pacing: 9/15
- Originality: 11/15
- Enjoyment: 5/10
Final Score: 68/100