Title: The Gilded Hero
Author: Wercwercwerc
Rating: M
Fandom: non - it’s its own fandom I suppose.
Genre: LitRPG
Status: WIP
Library Category: General
Pairings: None as yet.
Summary:
To be summoned to another world, arriving in plane of existence filled with magic and potential! Already, you've been given the great privilege of becoming a [Hero] and the honored task of defeating the demon king! Some people might call that the opportunity of a lifetime!

With the chance to learn to become a master of the sword, to grow more powerful than anyone on Earth could ever dream, what's not to love about being a hero? It's just like the King said: this is destiny calling! This is what you were born to become!

Or... not.

It turns out, people summoned from another world are easily charmed with the title of "Hero."

And they really shouldn't be.

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This is the most typical of my offerings today. This is the Mage-to-be, yoinked in from our world, LitRPG story. And it's the best example of that I've seen done. It's the only good one, definitely.

4/5 from me of course.

This story follows John, who was an office-drone/?account, maybe, back in our world. No tedious norm world chapter, but rather it's straight into the summoning. He appears in a throne room with two dozen other people, and they're called Heroes, here to stop an ancient threat, and off you pop to be trained, please and thank you...

Except, as he looks deeper, it looks like they're not the first group to have been summoned. They're not even the first this week...

Plot:
This is the story that is the most unambiguously grim, at least at the start. I really enjoyed it, for sure. It was the first of these four that I read, and I'd not seen anything like it before (a story like this in a LitRPG, where good and evil are a little more typical, typically.).

John very quickly realises that things are rotten in Knockoff!Numenor. It looks a little like a military-industrial complex. Summoned Heroes TM pick up skills and classes more quickly, and the kingdom has figured out a way to spam them out every week. They train them quickly, keep those who show the most ability, and ship the rest off to the highest paying army.

John figures this out, but cannot escape, and is sent to the war. And the war is grim, I have to say. He's an accountant in a shield wall, it doesn't shy from making that unpleasant enough for John. His relatively distant misery might not do it for you, but it's not forever. Because when the battle goes wrong he escapes and I think the story is the better for it.

We follow John as he travels across a league of nations opposed to the kingdom, as he remains stubbornly without a class. The opening section does a lot to secure his lasting enmity with the kingdom, and we're learning more about why the do the 'heroes' dirty like this, try to make sure they're martial rather than anything else, and I think we're eventually going to get to a good scrap, once he's levelled up a bit.

The powerup is slow, and he's definitely (still) not at a level where he could take hardly anyone in a fight, but the promise is there and it's very apparent that he's going to become what the Kingdom feared from the heroes. And, personally, just because it's telegraphed doesn't mean it won't be fun to follow that journey. IT's well written, it's deliberate, and it's paced well.

Characters:
This is another one that, by its nature, has strong but transient characters. We've just reached, I believe, the first setting where he can finally settle and get something done (that said, I feel something's going to boot him out now he's made a significant development).

John is a bit cold, but he cares, he's got morals and he's got his heart in the right place. He's just a modern man, and he doesn't want to be in a fight, or swinging a sword. Unfortunately, he finds himself in a world where these are definitely tools that he'll need to secure his own liberty. He's the least overtly charismatic of the four reccs today, but as a first-person narrative, I feel his character comes through most clearly to us.

The winnowing of the heroes, and then their replacements, resonates and I feel that he does a good job to make each character have reasonable motivations, and then contrasts them to the natives of this world.

Setting:
As an isekai sort of thing, this is the world where we're still the most unclear about what's going on. We've got Empire-seems-good but is actually bad locked down. We're learning that there's a lot of typical RPG environmental dangers, and that King of the Empire is no pushover. Other than that, everything else is much more small scale.

The LitRPG system is explored a fair bit, but we're still relatively in the dark, and we don't know where it's heading. He, being from our world, wants to be magic but it looks like it'll be a long path.

It's a feudal European world so far. However, to the south there might be something a bit more Ottoman (sorry Hak, I know you're European too).

He's not quite at 'Travelling safely' sorta skill, with what we've seen of enemy soldiers and forests and monsters. I look forward to him getting some abilities under him and a bit more of a rapid progression through the setting. Still, the plot, and character as it stands now is enough to pull things along.

 

I got less-anime Legend of the Shield Hero vibes quite strongly from this. The story is only okay, but that's okay.

The MC is as bland as the name John suggests. Typical forgettable SI type deal, a sheltered everyman easy for the readers to identify with. The basic premise of him struggling to level up in an environment not suited towards the class type he innately tends towards is good, and I enjoyed the novelty of seeing summoned heroes relegated to trash fodder roles.

Interpersonal relationships are a definite weak point. No characters stay around for particularly long, and Gregory is the only one I was even vaguely invested in. The only motivation for John is to stay alive, and that's held fairly weakly.

The suggestion of addictive magic which could consume him was an interesting touch, but that's been told more than shown, and John has largely pre-empted negative consequences from it when he should be experiencing the conflict and learning from it.

I'd say that this story aspires to rise above the tropes of isekai, and while by and large it succeeds at leaving the bad tropes behind, it fails at being an engaging narrative. Standard isekai tales don't have that either, so this is stands at the better end of a shit spectrum. I did power through it in a single sitting, however, and the technical use of language is acceptable, without the deluge of grammatical errors which usually make this kind of story illegible. The author does a good job of not making the [Square Bracket] [Special Noun] formatting irritating, as well, which is unusual for me to say.

By the note on the most recent chapter it seems that a lot of weebs have been bitching about the author not falling into the tired insta-l33t tropes which accompany litrpgs. Fuck 'em. This isn't great, but it's a decent timewaster. It's somewhat forgettable but I found it easy and enjoyable to read. @Majube I know you read this, so leave a review dumdum.

3/5

 

I've been following the story for quite a while now and I really like it. Writing is pretty good too.

It has a couple of interesting things in the world-building like the hero-for-hire delegated to being expendable fodder for their armies with only a few of thousands ever becoming something interesting.

The MC has a lot of potential with his stats and hero title but is still struggling to become someone capable of dealing with even normal guars. Right now he probably can't even do that, let alone with someone as terrifying as the King that summoned him.

I'm always excited when the story updates so that's probably a pretty good sign. I gave it 5/5.

 

I liked this well enough when I first read it to finish it in one go a few weeks back, but nothing about it was really memorable enough for me to want to pick it back up or keep following it.

The main character was so bland I don't remember what his name was, and none of the other characters really stay around long enough to be relevant or make me care about them. The MC has his goals and he tries to work towards them, but there's not much else. Where I left off, it looked like the MC would be stuck

Spoiler

working for the Baron for a while,

so maybe there will be a few other characters on screen for the MC to play off of and he'll grow a personality.

What I've seen so far of the setting and LitRPG elements seems like pretty generic stuff. If there's anything really unique or noteworthy about the system, it hasn't come up yet.

There are a few interesting plot hooks set up so far, but at the rate the story is moving it feels like it will take forever before they really pay off.

3/5. I don't regret the time I spent reading it, but it's not something I would invest much further time into.

 

Update bump. The author posted the first chapter of Book 2 about a month ago. Updates will be sporadic.