Save State Hero 2

Save State Hero, Book 2

By: William D. Arand

Narrated by: Stephanie Savannah

Have you ever woken up, rolled over, and thought to yourself, "I'm pretty sure I'm working for a Super Villain?"

If you haven't, then maybe you're not the type of person to work for a global corporation.

Edmund, however, is just such an individual. He had worked for Legion and his mentor and savior, Felix Campbell.

Now, though, Edmund is swapping employers. Moving from the only home he had known and the few people he truly cared for to working for Dorothy after she swaps sides. Which essentially means Edmund will soon be working for a Super Villain, who in turn works for an Evil God. A lot like a global corporation, once again.

All of that is mostly irrelevant to Edmund, though. He'll work and do all he can to make sure they succeed. Because all of this is to get a better result than the previous one, which, while it was a good ending, wasn't the best ending. It wasn't a perfect route clear.

Now, Edmund is reloading his Save-States to get back into it and test out something he could never actually handle when he played video games—the Bad Route.

Working for the Evil version of Dorothy and Zeus while attempting to crush everyone else, all while trying to figure out how he can help his little sister.

Because Edmund is rather comfortable with his superpower now, as well as the fact that he's now quite aware that he's the only one who can do it.

At least, that's what he thought when he started the Bad Route.

©2024 William D. Arand (P)2025 Podium Audio

Interesting Continuation

I really like this series because it explores some of the weirder backroom stuff that has always existed in this shared universe. I can't wait for more.

Far, far from Arand’s best work

I’m admittedly not certain what had the greater negative impact - writing or narration. For writing, Arand has some fatal flaws in his character development arcs that compound from minor nuisance to full on cringe with each sequel. Please do recognize that even as I write that criticism, I keep coming back to his writing. As has become familiar, the further I progress in a given Arand series the more I feel like I’m grinding my molars and pulling at my hair to make it through. What’s cute but lacks verisimilitude becomes progressively more egregious in each successive book of each series. A recurring pattern. In this case, the gratuitous, pandering, juvenile take on character interactions and insultingly hackneyed attempts at masculine charisma (which are common in his writing but this book turns the dial to 11) teeter from his typical harem-logic caricatures to what I think might actually qualify as toxic misogyny. Then again, this narrator performs male roles uniformly as some variation on a theme of Mom’s-basement-maladjusted-shut-in, suffering some form of traumatic brain injury, and high af on mescaline. So her reading might be exacerbating what would otherwise be the tolerable idiosyncrasies of typical Arand fare.
This was bad. Just really, shockingly bad. But I’ll probably get the next one too so obviously there’s some hook he’s sunk into me that demands better than a 1-star rating.

going to be a very hard listen

chipper anime voices and accents that drop out mid word and sentence. like that one girl who wants to act British but only knows init and guvuna.