The Legend of William Oh

The writing style is very refreshing. The characters are original and well written. The touches of humor are fun and add to the characters. The litrpg aspect of the story are not its strongest point but it's good enough to not be a problem.

The only real shame about this story is that I've caught up to the chapters

Reviewed at chapter 20.

Overall 5/5

Story: I almost set it down during the first three chapters, but I had just come from Macronomicon's "Industrial Strength Magic", so I figured I would stick it out and I am glad I did.

Writing: Each chapter is almost like a vignette in the lives of the characters strung together to create a whole story. Some of them are more connected to each other, but each is a complete scene even if there are multiple scenes in an adventure. I love this style of writing, especially for serials.

Characters: With only 20 chapters at the time of this review it is tough to say that the characters have had significant growth arcs or anything like that, but the MC has had moments of introspection and purposeful decision making.

Humor: This story is irreverent at times and serious at times. Sometimes it feels like it is bouncing around, but it works. I especially enjoyed the joke about 

Overall:

This has been a slightly slow to start, but fantastic beginning to a litrpg romp for the ages. I wish Macronomicon the best because I want to continue to read great stories from them.

This knocks it out of the park. 
The epigraphs with Jason are amazing and super fun while also give extra depth, style, and humor. 
the style and humor in general is awesome, I love will, I love how smart he is but also his general personality and wits. Huge fan of the sounding out words thing and asking for definitions, not sure why it adds so much but it absolutely does. 
I could not recommend this book more, I’m also a huge fan of this particular system of leveling up, stats, and abilities. Really cool and something I haven’t seen before! 
Love the competence that we see displayed by the characters and party, Loth is awesome.

Im not exactly sure how to describe it but for how fun and whimsical Will is I feel like he communicates very maturely with the other characters, and in general the characters communicate well, which is extremely satisfying for the reader but also leads to much deeper and more complex situations than if it was a more run of the mill situation that resulted from an author not having two characters talk who probably should. 

on that same point I like the depth of all of the characters, even those who we meet really briefly feel more fleshed out and all have actual personalities, which just adds more to the world and the ambiance. 
Definitely a huge fan of the abilities, my only gripe is there are a few characters who have their builds and synergies explained more in detail that I just don’t understand at all. But I believe that’s more just me missing things here and there and then being dumb. 

The way the mechanics and LitRPG elements don’t take over or subtract from the writing despite being central to the story is masterwork, and the subtle hint to the deeper lore of this world and what happened give a glorious bit of intrigue. To the author, are you sure that you aren’t William Oh?

While it's a good story I'm dropping it here for the following reasons:

• Too many artefacts. Lot and lots of them. I'm the type of readers who does not care about stats or numbers, all I need to know is what the character is capable of. Here, the characters are always changing gears, and the author plays a lot with how artefact interact... Results: I'm lost, and can't follow nor understand the capabilities of the characters.
• The system is not satisfying. Level ups are boring, and upgrades are delayed for too long.
• Each floor is a simple biome world, and because they are constantly moving up (or down), they do not really matter. It doesn't feel like each floor is a challenge, but more like the background of the story is switching.
• I am not interested by the "main goal" of the story. The tower is so big that reaching the top will take a long time, and it's not really interesting enough to keep me hooked for that long. The MC is powerful enough that it's life is not really in danger if they are careful, so not a lot of stress here. The politics of the tower (with the enemy lords and religion) is fine, but nothing more than that.
• The story doesn't feel grounded. It looks like everyone in the tower could die at any moment, and no one else would care. Because there is no civilian in the tower, and there is a mentality of "everyone for themselves", the impact of death is very low emotionally speaking.

To resume, I quickly lost interest. Be it the character, the world, the system or the plot, I just felt like "meh, don't care".

Too finish with some positive notes:

• I did appreciate the humour.
• The grammar is very good.

The synopsis may makes you think this is an uninspiring story : a huge dungeon to climb, a system with level, etc. But you would be dead wrong, because while the world building is certainly not top tier, the writing of the characters and their numerous interactions is however delightful. Will, the mc, is especially balanced in his characterization : very strong but not completely op, witty but not annoyingly, very smart but not immune to mistakes... 

Tldr : good shit, you should read it. 

TLDR; you should read this!

This is set in a LitRPG world where the population lives inside and around a tower filled with monsters. Each floor has its own environment which can change drastically. 

Yes, a world with a tower has been done before, but where the story shines is the characters. I love good dialogue as it makes a story come to life and be believable. And William Oh has that in spades. William is a young teenager who is just starting out to climb the tower. He wants to meet friends he can rely on and climb the tower together. He is not naive or immediately accepting of people without good reasons and he is not a murderhobo. 

There are decently described battles against the monsters of the tower and he uses his head and his abilities to solve problems (or his friend Loth does). All this combines to make an entertaining, believable story. I can’t wait to read more!

The story is worth of its title from a suprisingly early point on :-)

The play on public perception and rumors spreading with the subsequent reactions of characters to our main character and vice versa is very entertaining 

Many lovely and homorous interactions, but still hard into a merciless world. So beware that it can be a bit dark at times. The comedy is not over the top, but very much often present. it appealed a lot to me :-)

The Power mechanics are very enjoyable as they often build up a hype or anticipation for what the characters can do or possible do in the future. 

i liked the analogy of some exploit or highly synergistic diablo 2 equipment builds 

The narrative tension is also very well done in my opinion

The story gets my full endorsement!

A beautifully written story where every part is entertaining or interesting from complex world building to small interactions between characters, every little bit has been given a worlds amount of love and attention. I cannot stress enough how much you should read this. If you want to read a book that’ll have you chuckling and on the edge of your seat, this is the book for you.

To start off, the power system is horribly written, he can create stone pillars because his ability is to walk on increasingly unwalkable surfaces a she gets stronger, and instead of walking, he pulls the ground to his feet?? No. It's written like a fanfic where he can do it because it's cool in the moment and the other has always had a fan theory of what would happen if he could. Also, the story has become just plain bad. Its coming to the point where it just 90% consequenceless violence, in a recent chapter we spend half of it just getting to where the previous chapter left off, and then a mage casts a giant spell into the sky and some stuff happens that no one even in the story even cares about. Its just no great. Plainly. I'd be hard pressed to say what the core idea was unless it just "abilities depend on sacrifices". And even that is getting weird. There was a chapter where William was taught that "but your ability doesn't say it is impossible so you can do it" which just kills it for me. At some point I'm just rabbit reading and going "please don't go this way...."