The Duelist

By: Eric Vall

Narrated by: Alex Perone, Marissa Parness

Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's Summary

Duel your enemy and kill him. Take his assets, including his wives, as your own. Grow your estate and become the most powerful warrior mage this world has ever seen.

©2020 Eric Vall (P)2020 Eric Vall

Please Stop.

A. Injecting MMA fanaticism poorly
B. Allowing MC to remain ignorant while glued to a walking google search engine.
C. Writing out inner dialogue that amounts to cringe swearing and Twitch memes.

meh

far too inconsistent in descriptions. and i ended up skipping alot of scenes just to continue. interesting world, but mc is just annoying. i dont use memes in general conversations when speaking aloud, thats just idiotic, its like someone else talking to you and instead of just laughing at a joke they say "lol" out loud while laughing. its not cute. its not endearing. its just stupid. gonna return this one.

The same

Eric Call seems to write the same type of MC in every book, an idiot. That's a shame too, as the story itself was quite interesting, but the terrible writing for the MC kind of ruins the experience. Alex Perone also adds to the lack of appeal in the MC as he sounds like any idiot frat boy looking to score. Thankfully, Marissa Parness did a lovely job at giving each of her characters a unique sound, which helped immensely with immersing in the story.

Meh

My title to the review pretty much sums up how I felt about this book. The narration was underwhelming by Alex Perone and felt like Marissa Parness had any actual diversity or emotion to her characters. I probably won't continue with this series for personal taste but overall the story passable. The story was good but the MC is kind of bland and typical to vall stories. He is described one way but written to act and think in a different compacity that didn't mesh. If you're looking for something different and new from the author then this book is pretty much more of the same as his other series.

great book!

i am so glad i purchased this book! loads of descriptive detail in this story and seat hovering action! can't wait for the next book in the series!

writer in the story

One thing I noticed through the the story was it seemed the main character had the writer plot already known.

Great Read

Another great book of a start of a series by Eric!! the narrators did another great Job!!

Great book

Loved it all the way cant wait for nest book to come out need more and more books like this

Pretty good!

If you've read and liked any of Vall's other books you'll enjoy this one. I'll be getting the next one for sure.

Eric Vall at his best.

I've been a fan of Eriv Vall since Succubus Lord first came out. Since then I've seen him write gems and stinkers. This book is definitely one of the gems. Good Job Eriv Vall.

Not impressed!

I give the premise a 3 star, but the execution is bad. It's yet another chinese sweatshop just adding sloppy stream random events. A lot doesn't make sense. An MC preapprentice watchmaker with some casual mma training is going too be a duelist... Do the author knows how much training is needed to be efficient in real battle martial art?!?!? It is showed in the action scenes which is poor and full of fluff.

I just hate the fanboy army that inflates every book with a 5 star review without any thought about the book. It will not help the author or the genre in the long run. It will just give us worse books with poor content.

The story is driven by plotarmor and the mindless stupid MC makes one descision in the while book. Otherwise he's just following along other events, meanwhile explaing every action twice. How can you make fillers for ever paragraph.

Ending on a tease with the 2nd wife.. really!?! Just a low blow fooling people to buy the sequel.

Not impressed! But not disappointed!!

I find myself disagreeing with much of what Anon has said, it's nothing overly special, sure. But it's not as completely awful as they make it out to be either. It's rather what I've come to expect from any kind of isekai story, good or bad.

The premise is quickly established, not boring us with any overly long exposition dumps, but not skipping past any noteworthy world building details either.

My suspension of disbelief at the MC defeating far more skilled/experienced opponents is certainly helped by the ability that is given to him, sure. But I wouldn't call it plot armour, it's not as if he makes any stupid choices, or fails to use common sense, and is then saved by some miracle or dumb luck.

This coming from a 7 year long HEMA practitioner, so I well know how much study and practice it should take to become anywhere near proficient with any kind of sword. Lord knows I would have loved to have had the ability the MC was given when I first started sparring...

The story moves fluidly and I never found myself wishing they'd linger more in any given place or time, the (potential) wives have their own distinct strengths and weaknesses in specific areas, giving them more character than some other isekai stories I could name... And I rather like the voice acting from Alex and Marissa.

Stories like this are a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine, and ultimately I have to say I got what I paid for, and am happy with it. Would recommend if this type of book is a guilty pleasure of yours too! There are certainly much worse picks than this one!