Mastermind: A Superhero LitRPG Story

Titan Online #1

By: Steven Kelliher

Narrated by: Adam Sims

Length: 13 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's Summary

Karna was just like any other comic book fan. He dreamed of fighting alongside colourful heroes and taking down dastardly villains.

In Titan Online, the most popular VR MMORPG going, he finally got the chance to live out his cape-donning fantasies.  

That is, right up until he was killed by the game’s number one ‘hero’. A man who serves only himself in a constant grind for money, fame and adoration. Forced to start from scratch due the harsh game mechanics, Karna finds a new mission: bringing balance back to Titan Online.   

With a strange new power and some unlikely allies, Karna hatches a plan to save the game and get a bit of revenge in the process.  

When the heroes can’t be trusted, it’s up to the villains to save the (virtual) world.

©2019 Steven Kelliher (P)2019 Audible, Ltd

I was tricked

You ever start a book, like the concept, well written. Then you get half way through it and realize absolutely nothings happened. That you’ve spent 6 hours listening to the MC complain that someone is too popular/powerful. But you’ve invested too much time to not see what happens. So you start to skip, and skip. And each time it’s still him complaining. Then you just say f it and stop listening w/ 3 hours left. That’s this book.

A bit too whiny.

Alot of complaining, eye rolling, and heavy sighs. that sums up the main character. nothing is good enough for him, and he always focuses on the negative about everything.

Quest givers?? complaining paranoia. Awesome rare new class?? sighs, complaints, and eye rolling. the keystone point of a hardcore mode super hero game is permadeath?? whinging. It goes on and on.

The point of the main guy here is to point out everything that's wrong with the game world, and complain about it at all times.

He is also somehow surprised at how effective teamwork is in a mmorpg...

Nobody likes whiners. Nobody. likes. whiners.

The narrator captures the entitled and whiny voice perfectly, so props there.

really isn’t that good

it’s not that the writer is poor it’s just that it isnot interesting ... its dry long winded and no character growth... author tried to turn villains intoantiheros and heros in to villains and wanted to use game logic to do it which means you don’t have an ai you have a decision tree ... but this is supposed to be top class ai and i don’t even know just poorly done ... it had possibly of being good but just comes up short chapter after chapter

Misleading publishers summary

Couple of hours in and im really disappointed. The summary made it sound like the MC had actual powers good enough to write a book about. His crap power ensures that the action will be extra boring. ugh. "Super Powers" my butt. Author made it vague about WHAT his powers were on purpose. Im sure one of his friends put it nicely. Ill retract this when I finish it if it somehow doesn't go bad.

Edit: I've now finished the book. My original critique is still valid but I changed my overall score. It did get better. But the power he has really is crap. When he sort of gets something going it gets taken. This critique is full on Subjective. (as are all such things). You may love his power. Its basically the ability to influence people to a very high degree. Only NPCs though. So if that sounds like a cool power to you then you'll love it. It is written well enough and the narrator is really good. This is a good book that should have a high score but I just hate his ability so it's no fun for me. MEMEMEME right? lol. enjoy. or not. I dont care.

Wow!...needs movie

I would LOVE to see a movie made with a following tv sequel series...maybe "The Titan Chronicles"...better then anything DC has pumped out and could out do many Marvels films out there

Great

I think that you have a lot of potential in this book to work with. So keep up the good work and I hope you do more with this story.

Flawed Antihero story

There are a few serious issues holding this book back, one of them is how forgettable some of the plot is, so bear with me here.
This review is SPOILER HEAVY.

The main characters power is entirely sidelined: The power of the mc is hyped up as being something awesome, only for it to be sidelined and useless in most every scenario. The real power is actually something else, but I'll get back to that later. The power to influence NPC's and bring them into his gang sets up awesome possibilities to interact with AI driven characters and the deep themes of how alive they are really, except, the power is instead treated more like just a normal mind control power, with my mind score means you gotta do what I say now because I held a good speech that gives me +10 to score. So the author trying to create tension when these npc characters die (and they die a lot) it falls completely flat, as they are tools, not characters. Which bring us to the next point.

Poor supporting characters. This book suffers from the trope of: setup is done, character is now irrelevant in every scenario except 1. Or haha so mystic and then nothing happens. Scale was interesting, then he died, Atlas and blackstreak(? I cant even properly remember their names) has a buddy dynamic that hints at more, even mc thinks that, except Atlas died and lol it's just a random dude I met in the game. Mrs Pols... Pots... Tols? The npc dock lady is hinted at being something deeper, but never explored. B4... B5? B is apparently a much smarter AI, but his physical form gets wrecked, and the main character is waaaay to attach to the box wrapping instead of the core, which he still has, so he's also deadish for some reason. I mean he could just plug the core into another computer, and voila snarky robot is kinda back. Or at least TRY, but that is unfortunately neglected as B is just written of a s dead.
And don't even get me started on the NPC's. It's like the character pretends he cares about them, just up until the moment they die. It does sell the MC as a villain, except he's an unlikable one.
Oh and before I forget, we don't get the villains (the bad guy hero's) explained at ALL, except they are bad, and I the MC think this superficial thing.

Which get us to the second biggest flaw of the book. The main character is a confused mess. Some times I feel like the author has actually had a stroke of genius, showing how deep the MC's trauma has made him fall, like wow, this guy is actually turning into a sociopath. Only for it to be explained away as, oh I always had to do this for everyone and the game world I loved, instead of embracing the damage. Always an excuse, always a justification.
Back to his REAL power, It's watching vods and thinking a bit hard. Before any plot culmination I actually like it, it portrays the trauma of the character, and shows how he is kinda losing his marbles. Unfortunately it falls apart when you realize that this is how the author tries to sell you that the character is worthy of the books title. Yeah. in the age of internet, we are expected to believe that THIS guy, can watch vods that should be available to everyone (I see no reason why Levi wasn't streamed at all times in a crisis battle). And somehow pick out the painfully obvious moments where "Hang on, Levi is acting really weird when this happens" and somehow come to a realization that fanboys watching hasn't already cooked up. (Don't get me started on how viewer bots would absolutely wreck a lot of the plot points, they are ego strokers). I mean come on, this entire sphere of the plot is neglected. Have you seen ANY fan discussion on super powers?
Look the best way to explain it is like this: The book is told from the point of view of the MC, he's deeply flawed, arrogant, rash, selfish and a liar. And through the entire book it feels like the character/author is trying to convince you that this had to happen, except you know the character/author is a lying. It comes off as reading a self written biography where you don't trust the authors honesty or intentions ONE bit. Which would be kinda cool as a concept? Except you know, you don't like the character.

And finally the big number one issue: The plot, oh gods the plot, It has sooooo many flaws and loopholes. Only reason why it can work in any scenario is that we are expected to believe that everyone else is just too dumb. Like, why is the game stagnating? Well nothings really changing because the devs are too dumb to add cool events or tweak the rules. Why does the AI let loopholes exist? Well it wants the world to organically fix itself, except it screwed up so bad with O'l Levi the super smart AI struggles to create a possible threat.
And speaking of Levi, why is he so strong? Just a lucky douch.
Don't get me wrong, I can definitely see some of this happening in the real world; which is one of the core themes of the book, how the real world corrupts the idealized game world (similar to ready player one), but the delivery belittles the reader.
And the pace of the plot, it is just plain awful, and like the MC a confused mess. It is utterly reactionary story telling, yet we are expected to believe the MC is a mastermind planer? He's more like a lucky sitcom character. Take for instance how he killed Prism, just outta nowhere, somehow the newbie lowbie kills a much higher tier character in basically one shot. And how that becomes the catalyst for "We need to act now, or they will kill us" , "Don't worry, I have a plan" proceeds to explain how he's winging most of it until he suddenly doesn't.
And the worst part is I can't even remember half the book because it was mostly pointless.

Now onto some of the good bits for fairness, but in short due to the glaring problems above.
The MC starts of really intriguing and has so much potential (see above for problem).
Plot setup for later events are mostly good, but in a reactionary way.
The observant of you might have noticed I haven't mentioned a major character yet.
The character StarShot is a good rival to the MC, the parallels of how she is basically him before he went into the coocoo nest works. And how they both see the damage in themselves and the world trough the interactions with each other is really good.
And how they end up working together because of their core values I can appreciate.
Except (I bet you saw this coming), the MC figuratively and literally taints and breaks her character. She is dragged down to his level, which honestly could work if it wasn't such a confused mess. Instead of illuminating it feels like gaslighting.

And finally the big plus that made me so confused: The MC really sells being an unlikable diabolical douch-canoe with severe mental problems and how he has in my opinion utterly fallen to the dark side.
Just don't lie to me and tell me he's the good guy.

Finally, the narrator is decent, but the audio quality is poor. You get used to it a bit into the book, but it was jarring at the start.

Don't waste your money

If you're looking for a good litrpg series, this is NOT it. The MC has a vendetta that the author portrays like it has been there for sometime when in actuality, it's super fresh. The MC gets a power that's supposed to be ultra rare and unheard of, then the author proceeds to 100% neglect the "rare" aspect of the power. The power itself is also incredibly stupid. SPOILER ALERT******* The MC gets the power to "influence" NPC's and automatically know the powerset with strengths/weaknesses of any player his own teir or below. Firstly, influencing NPC's isn't mind control. It's literally just being really good at convincing them to do what he wants. Command them to do something too far against the core programming and the influence is broken. Trust me, it's just as lame as it sounds. Secondly, he knows the powers and weaknesses of any player at his teir or below. Naturally, the author spends just about the whole story with the MC fighting ppl above his teir so what is the freaking point in this as0ect of the MC power?! NPC's that get influenced keep dying and the gadgets we thought were at least cool never come back because the NPC that made it is dead now. I LOVE litrpg stories but anyone reading this,, don't waste your money on this one because if you love litrpg like i do, this book will piss you off.

Slow start

slow start. Nice world building and mc isn't open which is nice. Narration was done well.

it's alright nothing special,.

it alright but it sets up this epic world but nothing else. The way the MC talks I would have rather read a story on his old hero character then the new villain one. And there some characters that are introduced and gone so what is the point these characters. So overall not bad but mediocre at best.

A pleasant surprise.

-I was provided a copy of this audiobook free of charge in exchange for an honest review.

I like the superhero genre and equally the Gamelit one and so this marrying of the two sounded really interesting.

We have a player who feels he's been wronged by the number 1 hero in an MMORPG and makes it his ambition to bring him down. To this end he becomes a villain with an unusual skillset and begin's to build a powerbase with a hitherto unseen special power.

I was surprised by the way the author went with the MCs powerset as typically these books have a far more rambunctious style but this was a much more cerebral choice and made the book all the better for it.

Sure it's a little slow, and the action is more or a low-simmer than a heavy boil, but I quickly grew to like the cast and e joyed seeing how the MCs opinions of NPCs became quite blurred as the story progressed.

And the ending was very thrilling with a number of twists and turns I'd not expected and the ending that both drew a line under the story, but also left the world open to other perspectives was very good and I would be happy to revisit this game again so long as we retained the wonderful Adam Sims who did a sterling job with all the characters here.

Very recommended but understand that the MC is not a powerhouse and thus this is a slower, more intelligent game he's playing.

This Book Is Absolutely Amazing

This Book Can keep your attention.
it also brings our your Imagination
overal great book!

Good

I enjoyed this story. Technically LitRPG but it feels more like a superhero story most of the time outside of a game. I'll listen to the sequel if one is released. This is an interesting take on what is ultimately a pet class.

The writing is smooth and easy to listen to.

Unlike far too many LitRPGs this book delivers a complete story. No stupid cliffhanger endings. A goal is set. There's a climax and resolution along with a bit of seeding to suggest that the story can continue in future novels.

The narrator has a good voice, but I have to subtract a star due to the sound editing. A few times he repeats the same words or sentences 1-3 times like he's doing multiple takes, and forgot to delete the segments he'd already recorded.