Book #63 of 2023: Forever Fantasy Online

Forever Fantasy Online (FFO Book 1) by Rachel Aaron and Travis Bach.

LitRPG books (where people get trapped in a video game) are usually the worst. 99% of the time, it's just a male fantasy book. While LitRPG is a genre I should love, because of that issue, I just don't bother with those books anymore.

Until I saw Rachel Aaron wrote one.

I've read a bunch of books by her and loved them dearly, so warily I gave Forever Fantasy Online a chance.

And I couldn't put it down. I read until I had eyestrain.

It was basically two books in one. Aaron wrote one story about one character, Bach wrote about other, and they alternated chapters. [Edit: I just read in an interview that both authors worked on both halves of the story.] It was only in the "last 10% of the story" that the two characters were in the same place.

Like all LitRPG books, the real live human players got stuck in a video game. The how and why doesn't matter (until the end of this book, where we got hints that for the first time in the history of LitRPG books we might actually get answers about that). One character, Tina, leads one of the top ranking guilds in the world. The other character, James, is a multiple time college dropout RL, but in the MMO he's a talented healer. Both get stuck in the game and their first days in there are challenging in very different ways.

While I couldn't stop reading this book, there were a few issues with it. A couple big, a couple minor:

Biggest issue: The last 10% of this book, a full hour of reading, was advertisements for other book series. That's BS. (I should have remembered that all of Arron's books do that.)

Second biggest issue: Tina was a really unlikable, and at times unbelievable, character. Though somehow that didn't hurt my enjoyment of the book.

Minor issues: The editing wasn't perfect, but was extremely good for a self-published book. Also, some of the more minor characters weren't quite believable.

None the usual LitRPG issues happened in this book:

Super sexy male main character gets godlike power by the end of the story? Nope. One of the two main characters was male, but none of the characters really gained more power through the story.

Female characters exist only to have massive boobs and to throw themselves at the male main character? Generally nope. There was one character with "unnaturally large breasts", but that was handled in a realistic, interesting way (the character was played by a male player, so now that he was a woman, he had to deal with all the misogynist things he said and felt).

Did the female characters sleep with the male main character for no reason? Nope. There was no sex in the book at all, just handholding in one scene. There was an instance of sexual assault, but it was handled really well and had believable consequences.

Aaron described this book as a love letter to MMOs, and I could see the authors' knowledge of gaming through the whole story. It made my gaming heart so happy!

On to book 2! Just a little slower this time, because my eyes need a break.