I'm rounding this up to 3 stars, and that might be me being generous.

There is a few things I dislike about this book. One being the MCs habit of reading the lore of any item he picks up, and often re-reading them. If he picks up two of the same item at the same time, you get the same lore told twice. There is also the fact that the author has tried to write the book in a way to educate non-gamers about gamer terminology. Which I'm not against in itself, it would write: Spam (use repeatedly in an exploitative manner). And that's okay, but then the MC would pick up a shield and said shield would have 10+ different types of defenses that was only listed as F Defense, and a bunch of other letters without telling us what those letters were. Why not simply it by saying it had x elemental defense? (because I'm assuming all those letters are different elemental defenses)

But the biggest thing that makes me dislike this book is the fact that what I enjoyed the most wasn't Sam and his character, wasn't him playing the game and leveling up. No, the most interesting thing about this book is what is happening outside the game, in the room where the game developers are sitting. And that's just plain backward for an litrpg book imo.

Not to mention that the game is basically a dark souls rip-off, and that includes only being able to level up and boosts stats when one is resting at a fire, and that means the joy of leveling up and getting stronger kind of vanished from the book when the book would just skip the point where the MC went and grinded out mobs and then came back and jumped up 4 levels. Of course, dark souls fans might love this book. There is quite a focus on combat and outplaying monsters and players. But I've always been a bigger fan of levels, skills and loot. I wish the blurb had been upfront about what kind of game it was, so I was mentally prepared for this sort of game.

One thing that I did enjoy in this book was the pvp. Just like in Dark Souls, you can visit another players realm and kill them. In most mmorpgs, and thus in most litrpg that is designed like an mmorpg, PKing is frowned upon and usually morally wrong.
That's not always very realistic with todays gaming scene, I know in certain asian mmorpgs it's a big no-no but most western games devolve into killing fests. Atleast in my experience.

But in (most) Litrpg, only bad guys PK. In this book, you got to see the joy of ganking your friends and trying to outplay the other player. Which strung a familiar chord with me, because outplaying someone can be quite thrilling if it is on equal footing.

This is a hard book for me to rate because I genuinely don't like the MC. I feel like the author was attempting to write about a character that has undergone trauma and came out of it damaged. But, nothing is ever specifically mentioned. The only thing that is mentioned is that the character gets low social batteries. But when this happens, she is mean and rude to people. Which, honestly, isn't a very good representation of introverts. But nothing else was really mentioned. No cptsd or bpd which would explain her behavior. Worse, she even states she's gone to therapy and gotten to the point where she is forming new stable friendships but she acts like a teenager whose never been diagnosed or talked about her trauma.

Worse, the author seem to never have played an mmorpg and have some weird ideas about how men behave when they see a female player. (A lot of "hey sexy come level with me")

Worse, this all seem to take place in a single day. I could understand mood swings on different days. I could understand waking up and feeling bad. I can't understand being nice to one stranger, and five minutes later being a mean bitch to another stranger without said stranger even doing anything different than the first.

It would all make sense if it wasn't a time travel story. If this was just after her loss, but it isn't. That being said, I'll still read book 2 in the hopes she decides to grow or realize she isn't being fair.

I liked the game-world a lot. I liked the game system. But the main character drones on and on about the past history of games in several places.

I don't need to know how pvp worked in other games. I need to know how it works in THIS game.

Not to mention you don't get to go ingame until around the 30% mark.

Fairly well written when looking at the litrpg genre, however it was terribly predictable. Gilly was straight out annoying. And the whole thing was bleeding angst teenage mumbojumbo