Awakening

A LitRPG Story (Outworld, Book 1)

By: Mrdojo

Narrated by: Joshua Story

What do you desire in exchange for your soul? Everlasting youth? A million dollars? Women? Power?

Bored high-schooler Adam Staples wants for nothing. Such an offer could only be a prank, right? Who would have thought that the prankster is a demon in disguise?

After selling his soul and turning into a half-demon, Adam finds himself orphaned and dragged into a realm outside of the world he knew. Training under his benefactor and enrolling in a school made for those who were gifted with powers, Adam ventures around the Outworld to hunt down the demon that turned his life inside out...and perhaps to squash a bit of the guilt he carries for what he had done to his family.

©2020 Mrdojo (P)2020 Podium Audio

Writing outside your depth

It’s seems like the author doesn’t know or forgets what kind of MC he wrote. One second he is a mega genius hacker that acts like life is too easy, the next he can’t remember something he was told 5 minutes ago or make obvious and simple connections like the reflection in the water is him. Pick a lane mojo.

like but not love

I really like this book overall, but his lack of interest in women and inability to build a lasting relationships due to being asshole makes me not like the mc much.

Action

Lots of action kind of like a op anime with little character development and side plot mostly fight scenes solo leveling

Surprisingly very good nerater

I am confessing that I hunt neraters more than the story line, I am a die hard fan of Mccloued Andrews, Travis Baldree, Andrea Parsneau Suzi Jackson and Ramon de Ocampo . So discovering Joshua "Story" was a refreshing surprise. So, I suppose I have a top 6 now for LitRPG.

The story line and the MC developer is great and I am about half way through. This is also the first time that I am listening to a book by Mr Dojo. I think the producer was genius to match the combination between the author and the nerater.

Joshua Story needs a voice coach.

I really wanted to like the story, but this voice actor needs more practice, or at least a voice coach. He could also benefit from having a director in the studio. His mispronunciations or a little bit too distracting, and It felt like sometimes he forgot which character he was voicing. Maybe it's that he only has a few (go-to) voices that he's thinks are good enough.
I know the English language has many words that have different pronunciations depending on region or dialect, but I've never heard anybody pronounce the word contemplative " con- tim- PLATE-iv.
This author uses that word quite a bit in this story, which I probably wouldn't have noticed, had the word been pronounced correctly. I'm by no means an English major but I thought it was pronounced "con-temp' la-tiv". There were A few other words that were so badly pronounced I'm not even sure what they were supposed to be.
He has range and hopefully will be better in time, just not this time .
His female character's sound either angry or airheaded. And, the MC nearly always sounds happy-go-lucky, as in he could start laughing at his own jokes any minute, and briefly angry.
For a character to show depth, it would help if they had more than two emotions.

I'm going to listen to this one more time to see if the story makes it worth keeping, but unless the release a better version, I kind of doubt I'll be able to take any of it seriously.
Sorry Mrdojo, it's not your fault.