Question The King's Avatar

So the situation is, I watched the anime adaptation of The King's Avatar recently(which I liked), and was exited to read the novel, but on like the 4th chapter I started to question myself "Is it worth it?".

I see that this novel has huge ammount of chapters, and from my personal experience, novels of this kind tend to get pretty repetitive and boring, no matter how good or bad the start was. So I'd like to ask people, who caught up to the translation or even read mtls/raws some questions.

Unfortunatelly, reviews may be a bit too biased because of certain reasons, and also only give me general information, which I already know from story synopsis or anime.

So my questions is:

1. Does it get repetitive?
2. How deep characters' personalities are so far? (Both antagonistic ones and not)
3. Is the novel slow/fast pased?
4. In the anime there wasn't any attention to 'digits' aka weapon/character stats and etc. If you can say so, how carefully author considers game's balance thing? Or maybe he just thinks some random numbers in stats after every power up? (Hello from Shura's Wrath)
5. Does it become boring?
6. How much romance is there?
7. On which chapter the anime ended?
8. Could you name some novels similar to this one, so if I've by chance already read them, I could to compare by some analogy?

 

1. Yes (duh)
2. Depends on how you see it. Its deep enough for my enjoyment.
3. Slow
4. Forgot
5. Yes
6. Minor
7. Idk around 200?
8. Nope.

I stopped reading it / dropped it. But what I read was decently enjoyable.
Just read it till you drop it

 

Really slow paced.

Till chapter 1200+ still working on team like usual.

Nothing change except new member, new team, new enemy.

I drop it at chapter 1100++ ~

 

Just read it. Its not like Shura's Wrath or generic power fantasies. No romance as of yet, but that's because the characters are professional players with no time. There are some boring moments, but there's a reason why its popular.

And I wouldn't trust the opinions of those who mtl. Mtl kills brain cells, so their opinions of a novel would be worse than those who read proper translated novels.

 

1. Repetitive as in you duck, you piece of shit wuxia kind of thing, then no. In fact it never gets repetitive in the sense of the word
2. Very deep, you can relate to them
3. Slow paced
4. They do mention stats but they say skill matters way more.
5. Depends on the person, if you can read those repetitive wuxia then I would find it weird if you found this boring later on
6. Just like sniper Island, it exists within your heart
7. Idk, I am waiting for the Japanese dubbed of it
8. This is a award winning novel, it is nigh high impossible to find another novel like it, I do not mean as in the gaming genre but overall character development and story progression

 

My problem is that I can't stand unfinished stories, so first of all I never start reading something that is discontinued/might get discontinued with high probability, and if I start, I'll see the end of it, no matter how bad it becomes (Again, hello from Shura's Wrath). The only thing I've dropped is LMS, for me it became really bad at volume ~22. At the volume 39, I just couldn't bear with MC's personality, author, and the constant and meaningless repetitiveness.

It is the only novel that gets me really triggered everytime someone recommends it, or says that it is good.

@juniorjawz @Shio @valdesaga @Overclock @Jackfrost2139 thank all of you for the answers

 

Man. You must have had a field day with novel with open ended ending and those shitty ending stuff

 

1. There is a fair amount of repetition in the sense that they have to grind in the game, but it is still not nearly as bad as the average VRMMO or xuanhuan story and it would be strange if there was no repetition at all since they are playing a MMORPG.
2. Deep enough to give dozens of characters distinct personalities at least.
3. Fairly slow paced, I think the whole story is set over a period of maybe around 2 years or something like that.
4. Numbers are only rarely mentioned, most of the time the author tries more to just give a general idea of the stat differences, especially since it is almost always pointed out that player skill matter more.
5. Depends on how much you like the characters I guess, personally I love them enough to find even the more tedious bits of the story enjoyable.
6. Implied at most since the story is entirely focused on the game and the pro league.

 

Personally, I feel like the author tries to add twists to make it less repetitive. Plus, they are making a real life drama for the kings avatar. Thats another reason why I am continuing to read it.

 

It is good. Honestly i dare say this is the best MMORPG novel hands down. Though i am not sure it is fair to call it a MMORPG novel since strictly speaking this is more like a slice of life novel about professional gamers.

This is the only novel i am reading where i wait anxiously for chapters to release. Everyday i thank the translators for releasing 2 chapters/day.

The worst point about it IMO is the slow progress. It can totally use more than 1-2 chapters in a single fight so it can get hard sometimes. Dont take me wrong, it is not like the chapters are wasted with fillers or anything but it becomes a love-hate relationship when you have caught up with the releases.

Another good point is that it has a lot of chapters (500+) released and it has being good since the start. You cant say that about most fictions.

Go read it!

 

1. honestly? only kinda, not really though
2. very
3. slow (paced)
4. not too sure. I just scroll through numbers myself lol
5. nope
6. some
7. not a clue
8. too much effort

 

King's Avatar is my one of my favorite stories from novelupdates, but I'll try to accurately list some pros and cons.

From watching the anime adaptation, the main thing you would benefit from in reading the story is having the world and characters expanded, and being able to experience the full extent of all their back-and-forth, high quality shittalking. The author goes into extreme detail with things usually skipped in other MMO stories such as the mechanics of playing, social politics, banter, teamwork, and how people of varying levels of understanding and skill try to accomplish the same goals. It's very realistic.

The anime went the direction of hoisting Ye Xiu up as the typical OP cool protagonist, but in the novel you find that he's honestly just a smartass bum that makes people facepalm from his casual shamelessness. You can't help but like how self-assured and calm he is. Also, in the cases where he gets into a competition of how shameless a person can be, you can't help but laugh.

So, the main draws of the novel are its heavy worldbuilding and generous treatment of all characters (even side characters get to shine and become lovable here). This is a very slow-paced novel because there's so much detail to go through, so if you're hoping for a wham-bam-check out how awesome this is, now onto the next wham-bam, you're probably not going to like it. This is the novel to read if you really wanted to feel how an ideal MMO community and setting would feel like.

Now for your questions...

1. The story is continually moving forward. Every scene has a purpose in leading the characters toward their end goal. However, this is a realistic MMO story, so you're naturally going to find a lot of scenes that are similar to each other. Grinding, leveling up, fighting the other factions, and watching the pro player tournaments are some of the biggest areas that people will point to for repetitiveness. I personally really enjoy it, in the same way that I enjoyed reading all the repetitiveness in cultivation novels where you grind, grind, grind pills, but some people hate it.

2. Characters are what makes this novel shine. You remember every single side character because all of them have fleshed out personalities and motivations, and they way they interact with Ye Xiu is always hilarious. It's easy to love all of the characters, and you can even sometimes feel for the antagonists, too. Much of the novel actually reads from other characters' perspectives, giving you specific information from their vantage that you couldn't get from Ye Xiu. It's very refined.

3. Slow. The author immerses you by setting you right next to the characters on their long trek up, so if the noobs are learning a new skill, you have to read about how they're learning and progressing the entire time. Again, you love it or hate it.

4. The author doesn't include any litRPG kind of elements. You barely see numbers at all. It's naturally assumed that all classes are well balanced (otherwise there wouldn't be a professional scene), so things are measured by the levels of the characters (higher level characters beat lower leveled), and by the skill level of the players (if the player is a pro like Ye Xiu, even a lower leveled character can win with some cleverness). Because of how detailed the author gets in describing fights, tactics, skills, preparation, and even the physical equipment (are your keyboard and mouse working?), you get the sense that every fight turned out the way it did for specific and believable reasons.

5. Yes, sometimes it really does, but I power through the boring parts because I know that the next time some of my favorite characters come back, or the next time Ye Xiu does something outrageous, I'm going to be rolling around laughing or on the edge of my seat with excitement.

6. No romance. Everything is implied. The story focuses on plot with no romantic subplots to distract from it.

8. If there were other novels similar to this one I'd be all over them... This is just a really realistic, well-made, well-constructed and well-edited novel. With other big ones that I've read like Coiling Dragon and Legendary Moonlight Sculptor there are obvious character/plot/pacing/consistency issues. In those kinds of stories, some random amazing event can happen out of nowhere and you just have to go with the flow, even if it doesn't make sense with what happened before. Whereas King's Avatar's issues are that it's too consistent, nothing random happens without a reason. Sometimes this means that reading through some segments is a chore, but the author needs you to know that those chores happened in order for the next part to make sense.

 

Some questions that build up in your mind will not be answered... it is purely how Ye Xiu spend his time from being kicked out the team to going back to the pro scene for one more time