The author did an astonishing amount of work with this story, which is why I’m especially disappointed with the direction it’s taking lately.
The nature of the lately revealed background story and of the latest skills Jaune unlocked make his victories look like they’re based on AssPulls instead of actual skills and quick thinking. It’s even worse because nothing like that was even needed given the nature and potential of his powers.
The rushing from one time limit to another and the way he confronted first Cinder and then Malkuth made it feel like author wanted to be done with the story and is quickly wrapping things up.
The rest’s in bullet-points (word limit):
PROS
battles, skills and overall descriptions are superbly done — some authors make it hard to visualise what they are trying to convey either because they’re bad with using allegories or because their descriptions are a mess and being all over the place. Not so with this story, where I could see in my mind’s eye how beautiful the scenes or sceneries were;
spells are well designed and various in nature (not counting the latest chapters);
the author did his math — while some elements are still left behind the scenes (e.g. I’d like him to specify HP and MP limits more frequently), there are still many game mechanics formulas that seem to be planned in-before and not clash too badly with Jaune’s power output levels;
the references to religions, mythologies, cultural elements, and poems were well done;
it’s a Gamer fanfic and it’s long.
CONS
Its nature as RWBY crossover makes the plot’s advancement too railroaded and artificial — I don’t even know why he bothered with RWBY, his worldbuilding seems to dwarf the original;
Jaune makes too many stupid mistakes even after raising his WIS and INT — mistakes that are not caused by his personality (e.g. not like “he’s not devouring more souls because he wouldn’t do that”);
Jaune wasn’t being as original with his powers as I’d like him to, not researching enough, concentrating too much on direct attacks instead of coming up with novice and powerful vectors of attack;
there’s too much useless re-telling of the previous chapters, too much annoying banter with Adam (though there’re some good jokes there too, and, in general, dialogues are rather fluid);
Fanfic Though I’d recommend reading it, it could’ve been much better.
The author did an astonishing amount of work with this story, which is why I’m especially disappointed with the direction it’s taking lately.
The nature of the lately revealed background story and of the latest skills Jaune unlocked make his victories look like they’re based on AssPulls instead of actual skills and quick thinking. It’s even worse because nothing like that was even needed given the nature and potential of his powers.
The rushing from one time limit to another and the way he confronted first Cinder and then Malkuth made it feel like author wanted to be done with the story and is quickly wrapping things up.
The rest’s in bullet-points (word limit):
PROS
CONS