The Dragon’s Revenge

By: Conor Kostick

Narrated by: Samuel E. Hoke

When a multinational games company recruit Tom, a smart, streetwise Dublin teenager, to get a team together and come to San Francisco to immerse themselves in a massive fantasy world, he thinks it is the job of his dreams. His challenge is to level up fast so as to eliminate an AI dragon that has gone rogue and is preventing the release of the game.

As Tom comes closer to that goal, he starts to realize that the game is not what it seems, not least because a powerful crypto-currency company seem to have funded the creation of the game for their own purposes.

©2019 Conor Kostick (P)2020 Tantor

Excellent!

If you enjoyed Epic by the same author, then you will love this story. It is modern, fantastical, and wholesome in all the right ways - capturing the essence of why people enjoy playing games. In this audio format, I particularly enjoyed the narrators measured voice.

Note there are a few oddities with this being an audiobook. The plot mostly takes place in the digital world and the story sometimes lists the main character's in-game stats to emphasize his progression. While I imagine these making sense on a page, it can be a little off putting to hear these narrated. Note that this happens very infrequently, but it may affect your immersion a half-dozen times.

Everquest v33.4

Conor's MC is a great whole person. The two settings are interesting and believable. The game setting make me think Conor did his research on the free Everquest. Or is that the common background that all Lit RPG writers assume? Button smashing with macros in a D&D numbers game raid was not the future of immersive entertainment even in 2010. However, Conor did write the experience well, with the breathless narrator fitting his voice soothingly, so I could picture and enjoy.

"So why only three stars?" inserting Conor wryly from the telepathic void.

"This media is about a writer writing a character in two settings who creates a character in one and who thinks he has a character in the other. The writerly decisions about the setting and the scripted setting are the inversions of character. A good writer should be able to really make something of this. That's who get's 5 stars!" I screamed as I fell into the void.

It felt like I knew the characters

Tom is a teenager from Dublin who gets the job of his dreams. He has to build a team to take down a dragon in a massive online RPG that has gone wrong. This book goes into all the details of how he and his friends level up, so it’s definitely what they call LitRPG. What I liked especially were the relationships between his friends, which felt totally real, like I knew them.

Brilliant LitRPG

Brilliant, gritty LitRPG. I’m surprised fans of Epic haven’t rushed to this, because it’s like Epic but with more game strategy. I liked the narration, slow and sombre. Best of all, I liked the MC a clued-in kid from Ireland who uses his ranger build to be the puller for his party and raids to great effect.

narrator sounds like he was out of breath

pacing was pretty bland. I felt like I was grinding to get to the good parts just as the characters were grinding their levels. the story didn't really feel like it was advancing til the end and it went by quick.