The Land: Monsters by Aleron Kong
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This deserves a full five stars and my unending enjoyment WHILE I'm reading it. I mean, I may have said this before but it bears repeating: I can read this stuff FOREVER without ever getting fatigued.

After all, it's basically an ongoing video game with all the enjoyment of skills progression, leveling up, dungeon crawling, and with a new wrinkle: hardcore debuffs that started with water and food weakness, but progressed all the way through massive (and extremely funny) bowel poisoning.

All the normal reasons for reading this, compared to the ones before, still apply. Only now he's a tier two ascended and he has to start out without any gear, alone, deep in a high-power dungeon. It's a huge departure from the previous novels that had made him grow as a leader, but I was fine with it. It has all the benefits of leveling without character progression or silly romance or pathos. Just give me those skills, baby.

So why did I knock off a star?

Because the damn thing STOPS where no normal book would. It ends on a squarely middle part! I mean, if I were reading all these in a row it wouldn't matter a single bean but I'm not. I expected a MUCH longer novel that actually succeeds in A quest if not the STATED quest earlier on. It's like playing FF7 remake only to get out of the city and see that the whole game just ended. Oh. Wait.

Well, it was still fun WHILE I was reading it! :)

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