DIE TRYING [A Roguelite Extraction LitRPG]

We are still at the beginning of the novel, so this review will be a bit short.

What I like the most for now is the MC personality and history!
We can feel his pain and struggle he had to endure in his life, and his attitude and choices he made are coherent with that. He is a very fun and likable character.

The grammar and style are top notch, nothing to say here.

The world seems promising, we can feel that it has an history and 'personality'; it has some traits that I don't think I've ever seen before, so that's refreshing ! I will be happy to see more of it !

The system is "standard" for a reading POV, but the nice thing is that a lot of aspects of it are new event to the gods, so it does not feel like everything was done/discovered already, and there is surprises to have, and rooms to grow !

For the story: of course it just began, but the pacing of it very good; we always have something to looks forward to to keep us entertains!
The synopsis promise us with back and forth between the fantasy world and earth. It's yet to happen for now (because we are too soon in the story), but I really want to know how it will go on!

The banters between the MC and Play are very fun to read (though the 'emojis' from Play are not very compatible with audio reading).

So yep, you probably did not learn anything with this review, but anyway, I like it =)

The beginning started off a little rough for my tastes, but I stuck through it and holy damn I am loving how its turning out. I am completely hooked.

The magic system is unique, the characters are good, the setting is really well thought out. Love it. Would definitely recommend.

As always, Mark knows how to balance humor and drama extremely well. Wade is a fun character believably motivated by tragic circumstances, and the story has already gone edits that took it from great but with niggling bits of weirdness to near-perfection. Fun fights, fun conversations, fun situations. Good time for all. 

This story was frustrating for me. I liked the ideas and the basic writing, but after catching up through 120 chapters the story never delivered.

The good: The basic setup is interesting; 100 earthlings iskied away each night to a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, competing to be the last one standing. Our MC is the only one that can take material back and forth, and has a real talent for analysis and system exploits. The characters are written consistently and with distinct personalities. The language and syntax is clean and the author has clearly put thought into world building. 

The bad: The story and writing drags, with severe pacing issues. 120 chapters in and were not through 3 days yet in story. The interesting premise of the story hasn't been given a chance to shine since we are bogged down. Nothing is skipped or glossed over, every interaction, internal monologue, and decision making process is laid out. The chapters are bite-sized, so sometimes an entire chapter will be used on basically transition two between two events. Conversations among characters are almost "too" real with lots of digressions and filler. The world building has been done, but we get told more than shown. It feels to me like the author is sharing all of the details they've worked out instead of just the ones that are relevant to the plot.

I ended up skimming a lot.

Pacing is great and the characters have characters while also not being tropes.

While there's a good head nod to tropes, it's well done and not hamfisted.

The world building is good and at the same time it's not overwhelming or underwhelming. Honestly at this point I'm just padding this out for the 50 word mark.

This litrpg has numbers going up and humor galore and tells a compelling narrative with unexpected world building. Point is, book one is a fun romp worth your time! 

The protagonist shares a retail horror story scarier than any dungeon crawl - such a dead end struggle. He also has plenty of other compounding life events to really push him to the bottom of the heap. There are only a few glimpses of his true skills, but I'm confident over time he'll be the OP hero we truly need! 

There are a few sprinkled POV chapters giving a rich environment for dungeon crawling hijinks. 

The writing style is effective, well edited, and this is one of my new favorite stories. Check it out!

I've finally caught up since I first saw the review that described it as a loot extraction game. It combines my enjoyment of theory crafting how powers can interact in unexpected ways with the idea that you can bring artifacts from other worlds to ours and use them here. It took me a bit to really get into the story but by the middle of book one I was resenting everything that interrupted my reading time. Looking forward to more of the same in book 2!

I don't usually use RR, I come from spacebattles, but I had to make an account just for this fic. 

It's good. We're talking new sub-genre of litRPG good. All the individual pieces are stuff I've seen before, but the way it's all put together is a breath of fresh air. 

I've seen the advanced chapters, so I'm rating it from that point of view. 

Grammar: Mark's writing style has errors here and there, but nothing that took me out of the story.

Style: There's no weird prose or attempt to be artistic, it's simple and to the point. 

Story score: 

10/10 Author clearly understands what's fun about litRPG and makes it a focal point in every part of the story.  

World is really interesting too, though that's to be expected from this author. It's basically the number 1 thing everyone knows him for. Mark writes with a rationalist foundation, so everything in the world has a reason to exist, and history behind it. This isn't going to be your basic elf/dwarf/goblin in generic forest number twenty thousand and two. 

Magic system isn't talked about much yet as of chapter 17 besides a warning that it's toxic as heck and shouldn't be messed with. But I've seen what comes next, and I can say it's a really clever but simple system. Mana being toxic is the only foundational rule, and everything else revolves around that. Makes the system really easy to understand since you can predict a lot just from "If X, then Y." but has so many layers you could unravel. 

For example, there's a metal that absorves mana. So if mana is toxic to train and requires a high degree of safty, of course people learned how to work that metal into daily casting as the emergency off-switch. If things go wrong, immidiatly dump all mana into the metal. It makes sense. Then from there, of course there's different kinds of jewlery done with that metal, from necklaces, to rings to even just innert pill form you'd drink down. All of which have different pro's and con's that just make sense. It's not done in way that's special to the setting, it's done in a way that any reader could guess at and come up with the right answers.

Like rings are far off from your core, so you have to move mana over to the ring to dump it. But it also means it's not auto-sucking your mana away. Great for spellcasting. 

A pill gets swallowed right into your stomach, which means it's directly by your core, so it'll automatically suck all the mana out of you. Great for emergency 'oh-shit' or when you're about to lose concious and can't mentally do the work. 

It all just makes sense. And all of it stems from a few basic rules. 

And then if there's mana, there's also such a thing as anti-mana. So suddenly, all the rules about 'mana is toxic' get doubled because you can now apply the inverse to that. If the metal I talked about earlier sucks up mana, then that same metal would repell anti-mana. 

And if mana is toxic, then anti-mana is the opposite of toxic, so it would heal and improve people. 

And if mana isn't sentient or concious, then anti-mana is.

And if people can control mana, then anti-mana can control people. 

See what I mean? 

That kind of logic and reasoning is everywhere in the entire system, and it makes it really easy to pick up but has so much depth to it. 

The litRPG stats become real important for this, because it offers the MC a completely different perspective on magic than the locals. Nobody here knows where the lethal dose is, so everyone's real careful to not overcast anything since it's toxic. But what if you have a literal mana bar telling you where your real limits are? 

That's the kind of addition that I find the most fun. It's not just 'auto become great at magic' it's just giving the MC critical information to work with that locals don't get. And that extra bit of knowledge means it's all about how the MC abuses it. 

Character: You either love the characters or don't. Probably the biggest thing about this fic is that it's completely character focused. 

Everyone else has a lot of backstory to them, personal goals, driving motivation, they're all fully fleshed out people. 

You'll meet the rest of the cast at chapter 10 I think, and it'll take about ten more chapters to slowly realize that they've got so many layers to them. 

But the main thing is that they're fun to see chat and interact with each other. Mark writes with a sense of humor to everything, and DT follows exactly that. 

I usually forget character names pretty quickly, but the Die Trying cast is rather tiny at like 7 total characters so far, and they're all memorable. They seem to start from basic tropes, but wow do they have depth to them. 

This is the second story of the author I have followed - and I am equally enjoying this story.  The author challenges the LitRPG genre while still giving any book in that category a run for its money.  Admittedly, I like the manic MC who likes to break things that the author seems fond of. I’m hooked, and will see this through to the end!

I'm a little disappointed that in the Extraction LitRPG there's NO EXTRACTION WHATSOEVER of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING while it's on chapter Sixty-Five of the Book Two already!

Well there were aplenty of moneymaking plans for sure, most of them pretty dumb, but for how long does the author plan to keep readers salivating in wait for EXTRACTION to begin at last?

P.S. Chapter 87 now. Still the MC hadn't extracted anything. Thinking of dropping...