Didn't need to be gamelit.

This is a bit of a weird one. It starts poorly and only begins to get interesting around chapters 4-7. It's a coming of age style story and does decently at that.

The setting is not great though. There's a class system that seems to have the farmers working to fullfil Communist shuttle quotas for the clan while the upper classes accumulated wealth from somewhere and do nothing.

Moreover the LitRPG aspect is hand waved in after a few lines at the start but was unnecessary. You could take all the game aspects out of the story and it would be greatly improved. The stats were meaningless since a level 2 can do seemingly everything a higher level can and when it says "Stamina: 2/9. Freya was exhausted." You could just say "Freya was exhausted." I have no idea why the game stuff was shoehorned into the narrative as it was much the worse for it.

Then there's the plot. Very Game of Thrones-esque with an evil villain who wants to kill everyone because they're evil. Not much going on there. The main characters have quite interesting arcs though and once you get a bit invested it's not too bad.

The people were another weird aspect. Every clans has slaves who are treated like shit. The main characters mates even joke about hoping some prominent female enemy warriors are caught and turned into slaves so they can rape them. Between that, the rigid unfair class system and the society based around pointless war you wonder why you should want these guy to survive. One main character even wonders if their society deserves to be saved.

I will say that despite the janky plot devices and the dumb game mechanics the story gets a bit better by the end and the last hour or two were compelling and enjoyable.

Overall, I think this is an ok book. Not great and it could definitely be retooled into a 4-5 star book but it's not there now. The narration was good. I probably won't read the sequel.

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