Uncle Rob Left Me His Fantasy World

Volume Set One

De: Warden Locke

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Play until it kills you
Uncle Robert died, and that sucks, but it’s just the beginning of Channing’s strange, unbelievable tale. After figuring out the password to the odd gaming console his uncle willed him, Channing finds himself in a hub containing thousands of knock-off games filled with action, loot, variety, and some extremely hot women at every turn. It’s a gamer’s wet dream, right until Channing discovers the dark secret hidden within the console. Uncle Robert didn’t die of a stroke. He was killed in the game by another player, one whose guild is now targeting Channing.
This book contains the first five episodes of Ando/Channing’s story, filled with a variety of games, amazing women, mystery, loot, money, some stats, and a guild filled with jerks who want to kill Channing. The premise is huge, so stretch your jaw before consuming.
Uncle Robert Left Me His Fantasy World is a series of isekai-like games in one package. One minute, Channing is playing the last two minutes of his favorite team’s scoring drive, the next, he’s fighting through the streets of a cyberpunk world to save a stripper. It’s sheer madness, and who knows what other game genres Channing will dive into. Warning: this book contains adult material that isn’t intended for a young audience.

Surprisingly Decent

Since there are no other written reviews at the time I'm writing this, I'll be a bit more detailed than I would normally get in a review in order to help manage future reader expectations.

The Good:
-- The actual story premise was excellent. I loved the core story line, the set-up, the initial execution of the adventure plot,
-- I actually finished the book. That's a first for me for a Virtual Voice title, and I've started literal dozens in the hopes of some limited entertainment, only to be disappointed and remove it from my library after just a few monotone chapters. The story was enough to gloss over the imperfections just to see what happened next.
-- The LitRPG elements were always present, and the progression of such was actually paced fairly well -- especially for the genre. And unlike most other books in the genre, this was NOT filled with any ever-growing stat sheet recitations. The stats, bonuses, and general progression of power was incorporated organically without the need for stat tables and long character sheet stat-blocks, which I greatly appreciated.
-- The story elements outweighed the harem elements, thankfully. While there were plenty of harem elements, they were not artificially drawn out to the point that it got annoying for someone like me who only cares about the actual story.
-- The bad guys are appropriately hateable, and very justifiably so. While the MC does takes steps to deal with them in this book, I can only hope that he does a much better job of it in future books.
-- It was free with my membership. You just can't really beat free.

The Bad:
-- Virtual Voice makes a LOT of mistakes with pronunciation. Examples would be pronouncing 'HP' (short for Health Points) as 'Horse Power' and reading out numbers larger than 999 such as '50,000' as 'fifty comma oh oh oh' - and that gets old very quickly.
-- This is, at its core, a Harem fantasy novel. Which is a shame because if it had spent more time on the main plot, this could have been an actually really solid LitRPG series all on its own. However, the horny fan service often takes priority over logic, reason, and story substance. It can get a bit jarring as you begin to sink into the plot and then BAM, gratuitous, graphic, and often times utterly inappropriate sex to take you right out of said story line.
-- Every character is an idiot in their own way, though it is mostly via author fiat. Everyone has the opportunity to do the logical, beneficial, sane thing in any given situation, but those options are thrown anyway in favor of idiocy that furthers the plot in the direction the author decided.
-- None of the female characters are likeable. They're all pretty awful in their own unique ways, actually. Blue haired liberal arts major levels of hoe-ness of course, because 'Harem' novel, obviously. But aside from that, their personalities all boil down to 'I'm some flavor of crazy, so only good for a fling' or 'I'm basically an object to be used, not a real person' and that is about it.
-- Inconsistent motivations. This ties into the idiocy & plot I just mentioned. Basically, everyone spends a few chapters worrying about, planning for, and executing said plan to obtain X. The build up for X was palpable, foreshadowed, and anticipated and then.....Yay! they got X and then immediately began utilizing it as planned, right? Nope! Literally never hear about X again because author threw in Y and that occupied the story for the rest of the novel.

The Weird:
-- The Virtual Voice chosen uses an Australian accent. That isn't a bad thing, considering it is one of the least annoying voice options. It's just weird because the MC lives in the United States of America and is not Australian as far as the story states - and neither were any of the side characters.
-- Side characters (this is a harem novel, after all) are excitedly collected, only to be immediately forgotten, discarded, or ignored after the initial 'getting'. I'm unsure what the point of collecting a bunch of different characters with different abilities, personalities, and options just to ignore literally all of that. One of the big plot points is his ability to collect these characters, but he doesn't actually ever even try to capitalize on that fact, and his 'handler' (assistant/helper) is just as seemingly brain dead when it comes to planning for and leveraging his strengths to benefit him in any meaningful way whatsoever. Very much seems like a really cool mechanical concept shoved in simply to justify the Harem aspect, and not at all incorporated mechanically into the story, which is a huge waste.
-- There seem to be quite a lot of hanging plot threads that got dropped and left undeveloped, peppered throughout the story. From collected side characters that seemed promising that get shelved and never heard about again to viable options that could have been leveraged to solve several of the problems that the MC comes across but are ignored so the MC can do something stupid instead to further the idiot plot. Essentially, the MC had the attention span and impulse control of a hamster on speed, which can be very frustrating when you enjoy intelligent and/opr clever characters. This just isn't that kind of book.
-- I had to slow the playback speed down to 0.85 in order to catch everything said because the monotone of the virtual voice kept making everything blur together too quickly to process if I was doing anything other than focusing on listening.


All said and done, I'm going to give book two a shot. Thus, I stand by my statement that this is 'Surprisingly Decent', especially for a free book read by Virtual Voice.