The Primal Hunter

A LitRPG Adventure

By: Zogarth

Narrated by: Travis Baldree

On just another average day, Jake finds himself in a forest filled with monsters, dangers, and opportunity....

It was a day like any other when suddenly the world changed. The universe reached a threshold humanity didn’t even know existed, and it was time to finally be integrated into the vast multiverse. A place where power is the only thing anyone can truly rely on.

Jake, a seemingly average office worker, finds himself thrust into this new world. Into a tutorial filled with dangers and opportunities.

His new reality should breed fear and concern. His fellow coworkers falter at every turn. Jake, however, finds himself thriving.

Perhaps... This is the world Jake was meant to be born in.

Don't miss the start of this hit LitRPG fantasy series with millions of views on Royal Road. Grab your copy of Primal Hunter today on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, or Audible (narrated by Travis Baldree).

About the Series: Experience an apocalypse LitRPG with levels, classes, professions, skills, dungeons, loot, and all of the great traits of progression fantasy and LitRPG that you've come to expect. Follow Jake as he explores this new vast multiverse filled with challenges and opportunities. As he grows in power and slowly transforms from a bored office worker to a true apex hunter.

©2022 Aethon Books (P)2022 Aethon Audio

Entertaining and Yet Flawed

Despite the numerous problems this web series that has been printed and narrated has, I enjoyed it. A straight-forward litrpg is not unlike pizza: even when it is bad, it is still pretty good. If you're a fan of progression and adventure, this book delivers. However, if you go into this read expecting professional levels of editing and/or even basic story elements like having a climax and denouement instead of the story just abruptly ending when the author hits the word count, he estimates will be the best for sales, then you're going to understandably hate this novel. Those things are actually very bad - even for fans of the genre - but sometimes a technically poor novel still entertains despite itself. This novel is the equivalent of finding a green weapon in Borderlands 3 that rolled one or two things so well that it makes up for the other stats on the gun being dog poop. Somehow, despite all the faults, this novel works.

I'm only going to list these faults because I'm hoping to read this author's work for years to come and I hope Zogarth is buying books and studying the art of writing because the only bits (s)he is missing are the ones that can be taught.

As other reviews have stated, the novel suffers from focus shifting to point-of-view characters who aren't the most important part of the story at that moment causing the narrative to screech to a complete stop the moment it picks up momentum. Additionally, with the exception of William, who is a sociopath, the other characters aren't likeable or detestable enough to be interesting. Even William is boring when he isn't doing something terrible, and he's utterly unlikeable all the time, so even when he's being interesting, I dislike him. Point being: changing point-of-view should only be done when it is absolutely necessary to the narrative; in fact, I think I'd have enjoyed this novel far more if we never got any other point-of-view than Jake's. We could learn what the other character's were doing through the lens of his experience that way instead of having the omniscient narrator spoil everything for us.

Further, the frequent restatement of the full stat sheet was a bit obnoxious. While this is a big part of writing a web serial - to refresh people's memories when they haven't read your last chapter for a day or more - it is something that should be edited down a ton once a book becomes a novel and possibly even more before it becomes an audiobook. Progression is great, and we want to hear this every once in a while, but it should be when it is important to the story. For example, I'd be interested in hearing that raising Agility caused the character to be able to loose three arrows in the time it used to take him to loose one or that perception increased accuracy such that he could intuit the arrow's path as well as the enemy's movements to send arrows flying to hit critical areas. Basically, just a list of numbers going up is boring until they mean something and then the number isn't as interesting as what that number means. To be fair, Zogarth gets this right quite a lot of the time, but when he doesn't, the narrative again screeches to a halt as we hear Baldree have to rattle off an entire stat sheet once again.

The gravest sin is in printing this without having a story structure. This is a web serial that hasn't been edited to have a novel's normal rising action, climax, and then denouement. As a result, the novel just ends in the middle of nowhere without ever having a resolution to the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist. In an AMA on Reddit, the author reveals that this is due to inexperience and wanting to keep the page length to a certain amount on Amazon, so I expect future series to not do this. Normally, I'd give a highly negative review for this fault alone, but I'm giving this book a mulligan because it is his first. Also, I came to this series with the second novel already available as an audiobook. If I weren't immediately able to continue the web-series to the conclusion of the first arc, I'd have given this one star and never read anything by the author ever again. I'm not surprised that other reviewers have done that and probably many other readers who haven't bothered to take the time to write a review. Web serial readers don't expect anything to be complete, but audiobook readers expect a book to be a complete book - not the first 1000 pages of the first arc. If that means editing a book down for brevity or having a very long book, then do what you have to do, but you're work becomes not only your product but your brand now and you're selling to a much, much larger audience with much greater competition and different expectations.

Enjoyable LITRPG

Some LITRPGs are going down a dark and depressing path full of gore and nastyness. This one, while violent, didn't do anything that would disturb my sleep at night. It's a solid start to a tale, and my only complaint is that the continuation of the story (book 2) isn't out at this time. It doesn't leave on a cliffhanger, but rather what feels like the end of a chapter.

The narration was excellent.

so many unlikable characters

Honestly if I wasn't listening to this book with my family, I don't think I would have finished it. Every character but one is just plain unlikable, and our main character is a literal murderhobo who spends all but 7 or so chapters out of 70+ actively avoiding and running away from all human contact. I will probably buy the second book at some point to close out the tutorial arc, but I don't see myself continuing beyond that point.

Great Game Focused LitRPG

This book was lighter on story and heavier on leveling, skills, and abilities. The story that was there was good: friendship, betrayal, and self discovery; and hinted at a larger world yet to come.

The leveling system was very MMO feeling with strong undertones of western cultivation. And we experience it in a deep close third POV—my favorite.

I read some negative reviews about the writing, saying it was hard to follow or something. It’s not at all. While I do wish the audio format would come up with some way to indicate new sections or POVs, as long as you are paying attention, the POV character announces themselves in their first few sentences every time.

Great story, very monotone performance.

I loved the story, but wasn't thrilled with the voice acting. it was very monotone through most of the story with the exception of the gods who they seemed to give now character to.