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The Land was one of my most anticipated unread LitRPG series because it is so popular and because it has come highly recommended to me by a few Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends. It also has a great narrator at the helm for the audio! That made it all the more disappointing that this first book in the series turned out to be a fairly dull and average read. It was run of the mill stuff for a LitRPG and definitely nothing special.

The premise was fine. It was basic stuff for a LitRPG but that is not necessarily a negative. The initial set-up was actually pretty intriguing as the prologue showed us a bunch of bored Dark and Light immortal supernatural creatures plotting to escape their prison realm by flooding it with humans. They do this by luring unwitting humans to the world by having them sign the consent form for their souls in the small print of the sign up to their VR reality game. I thought that set-up was pretty fun! From there we followed the tale of Richter, a human, who signed up for the game and ended up having his soul sucked into The Land. The Land was basically just like an ultra realistic version of the VR game Richter had been playing. Which is to say it was a typical D&D style fantasy world with all the basic levelling up elements of the average LitRPG story. The plot basically just followed Richter as he adjusted to his new reality and as he set about going on some quests to level up his power.

The story was OK but it was hindered by the fact that the action was very dull and the characters made zero impact on me. Richter was the only real character and he was just about likeable enough that I was able to root for him. He did not do much wrong over the course of the story but despite that I never really managed to overly warm to him as a character as his, and Kong's, sense of humour was just a touch juvenile for my liking. I think the fact that I failed to connect with Kong's sense of humour in general was a big issue for me. So while Richter did not do much wrong he still gave off the vibe that he was a bit of a frat boy tool. The quest and action scenes were just dull. The fantasy world seemed OK but there was zero tension to any of the action or adventure scenes as Richter just re-spawned when he died and none of the secondary characters, all creatures from The Land as far as I could tell, made zero impression on me so it did not feel like it mattered much if they actually died. It was a big weakness for sure that all of the secondary characters had a throwaway feel to them. I could not even rustle up much emotional connection to the most significant of them, a wood sprite, that ended up as Richter's new best pal.

The intriguing stuff from the prologue with the Dark and Light immortals was also completely squandered as after the prologue and Richter's initial arrival to The Land nothing else happened with this part of the story. I like a slow burn story arc but as this book had little else going for it I felt it needed a bit more help from the one aspect of the tale that did seem really fun!

Another flaw for the series was the fact that little was mentioned about the "real" world that Richter came from. Not once did he give much thought about his life back on Earth and we learned absolutely nothing about what sort of world or place his future Earth was or much about it at all outside of the fact that fully immersive VR games were a thing there. It was a pity as it wasted a potentially fun element of the story while also making Richter's character seem ultra shallow.

The pacing of the story was hurt by all the chronic stat bleating. We got hit with so much of them that they not only got boringly repetitive but because there was so many different ones they were impossible to remember so ended up being pretty meaningless outside of the few "special" abilities that made Richter a special snowflake in his new world.

All in all I ended up quite disappointed by this run of the mill LitRPG. I think a lot of that had to do with my high expectations going into the story. This was fairly average for the genre. I've read worse but I've read a lot better. By the end of the story it was struggling to hold my attention. I'm not sure if I'll give the second book in the series a go or not. I'm tempted to because the series is so popular and has tons of books published in it and because I can get it fairly cheap but I'm just not very enthusiastic about it so I guess time will tell in that regard!

Rating: 2.5 stars. I'll round up to 3 stars.

Audio Note: Nick Podehl is one of the best narrators there is and he gave a typically good performance of this one.