Thrilling read!

I heard very good things about this book and kept on delaying the inevitable, and I really will concur: it is whimsical, endearing and despite being LitRPG, the book is certainly going to find its audience among female readers due to the rather large strong woman ensemble.

This is the first time I have read a book about a character that is essentially a dungeon, and I do believe we need more books with sentinent physical uh... "being" POVs because of the huge amount of unique story potential they can offer. Magical dungeons that are controlled by a sentinent soul core have the extra perk of being rather parasitic in nature, where it digs deeper into the ground and change its physical shape at will.

I will leave the general plot to the reader's imagination, I just have to add I always enjoy seeing game like menus in LitRPGs, just a personal preference and this book uses this technique sparingly. Readers that quip about senseless point systems in this genre will feel glad The Slime Dungeon tries to keep levels to a bare minimum and focuses most of its energies on the friendship between Dungeon "Doc" and his sidekick pixie Claire that scheme together to offer increasingly valuable prizes for adventurers without becoming too dangerous due to the risk of getting Doc killed. I like the concept of trying to keep a safe balance between being too easy and too dangerous because Doc depends on forming a symbiotic relationship with magic wielding adventurers to absorb their mana and stay alive so to say.

It seems like the adventurers are not conscious they live in a game. To them, the appearance of magical dungeons at random intervals is a sort of natural occurence in their world and they already have an organized system to send trained adventurers for surveillance, risk stratification and plan of action for monster core and mineral mining. The fact Doc is so insanely sentinent from the very start makes him a rather valuable dungeon because he has the free will to spare the lives of the fools that venture inside or offer protection to anyone willing to serve him.

I was expecting 100% of the book to be from Doc and Claire's POVs, but you will see quite a handful of chapters from the outside world, mainly pertaining the the Adventure Guild commissar half-elf Mary. The really abrupt change out of the blue made it feel like the book needed a bit more editing to make this change more fluid. A part of me suspects the huge focus on having a plethora of female adventurers was suggested by a beta reader to make the book pass the Bechdel test (it does by a landslide). I liked Mary and Fiora quite a lot, Nathalie is a minor supporting character whereas Diana couldn't choose to be either a Princess damsel-in-distress vs mysterious obscure magic wielder vs Strong woman. She did act like an innocent teenager, just that I kept on wondering if she was 13 instead of something closer to 18 (the book doesn't specify her age, just that she is under 20). The Queen of the city-state of Duran intrigued me. In just 2 small paragraphs, we had a far greater glimpse to her character and backstory than Diana's sort of "out there" personality. I suppose the Queen will gain a prominent role in future books.

The best written female character by leagues is Claire. I think she passes every question of the Strong Woman Test. While she is magically obliged to serve "a dungeon master", the text sort of insinuates she has some degree of free will to choose any available dungeon cores but has to serve one forever once the bond is formalized. She is not motivated by love; she views Doc more as a friend/associate/roommate. Her hobbies seem to be building shelves for her house and gardening. She also makes a lot of decisions on proper dungeon management which is fuelled by her main goal to live a long life and Doc tends to agree with her (not always). Claire also passes the test because she mentions she has a good relationship with her mother.

Now, I really wanted to give this book 4 1/2 stars, I enjoyed the campy banter between Claire & Doc and the overall worldbuilding behind dungeon mining. The problem is that the sudden change of POV to the guild felt very out of the blue (I got used to it after a while), Diana's personality seemed a bit inconsistent leaving her more as a plot ploy than a fleshed out character, and the ending with the full revelation felt very rushed. Like... I got the vibe: "I want to finish this book at 60,000 words and will just speed things up because I spent 2 chapters having Doc awaken and start building his dungeon". Outside of the antagonist Koran, the villains of the book suffer from the problem of "great revelation finale" syndrome and to avoid spoiling their identity ahead of time, you never get the chance to meet them over the course of the story and know their intentions. I will always prefer more morally grey villains because they are far more interesting than "mysterious bad guy in a black cloak wants to destroy everything" which is a quip I always had regarding The Emperor in Star Wars. They are just bad... and that is it. Certainly a mysterious identity bad guy can be pulled off and I can think of several writers that are capable of pulling off this trick and leave you guessing. Given this book has the sort of constraint it tries to keep Doc as the main character/good guy, this trick would have been very hard to pull off but well worth it in the end given this is not a standalone novel and the guild characters will become more important as the story progresses.

I assumed the book had a new revised edition, but the revisions seem to have focused on removing typos (I saw none) and left behind recurrent filler words that could be safely removed such as "in order to". I also think the initial grading of the dungeon as B and then reranked as D when it became more dangerous was a typo. I assume the B was supposed to be an E.

In a nutshell, I still really loved the story, I am glad the writer followed through with whoever offered the suggestion to increase female representation to entice a larger reader audience, and despite the POV quips, I would love to read the sequel sometime. ( )

Thrilling read!

I heard very good things about this book and kept on delaying the inevitable, and I really will concur: it is whimsical, endearing and despite being LitRPG, the book is certainly going to find its audience among female readers due to the rather large strong woman ensemble.

This is the first time I have read a book about a character that is essentially a dungeon, and I do believe we need more books with sentinent physical uh... "being" POVs because of the huge amount of unique story potential they can offer. Magical dungeons that are controlled by a sentinent soul core have the extra perk of being rather parasitic in nature, where it digs deeper into the ground and change its physical shape at will.

I will leave the general plot to the reader's imagination, I just have to add I always enjoy seeing game like menus in LitRPGs, just a personal preference and this book uses this technique sparingly. Readers that quip about senseless point systems in this genre will feel glad The Slime Dungeon tries to keep levels to a bare minimum and focuses most of its energies on the friendship between Dungeon "Doc" and his sidekick pixie Claire that scheme together to offer increasingly valuable prizes for adventurers without becoming too dangerous due to the risk of getting Doc killed. I like the concept of trying to keep a safe balance between being too easy and too dangerous because Doc depends on forming a symbiotic relationship with magic wielding adventurers to absorb their mana and stay alive so to say.

It seems like the adventurers are not conscious they live in a game. To them, the appearance of magical dungeons at random intervals is a sort of natural occurence in their world and they already have an organized system to send trained adventurers for surveillance, risk stratification and plan of action for monster core and mineral mining. The fact Doc is so insanely sentinent from the very start makes him a rather valuable dungeon because he has the free will to spare the lives of the fools that venture inside or offer protection to anyone willing to serve him.

I was expecting 100% of the book to be from Doc and Claire's POVs, but you will see quite a handful of chapters from the outside world, mainly pertaining the the Adventure Guild commissar half-elf Mary. The really abrupt change out of the blue made it feel like the book needed a bit more editing to make this change more fluid. A part of me suspects the huge focus on having a plethora of female adventurers was suggested by a beta reader to make the book pass the Bechdel test (it does by a landslide). I liked Mary and Fiora quite a lot, Nathalie is a minor supporting character whereas Diana couldn't choose to be either a Princess damsel-in-distress vs mysterious obscure magic wielder vs Strong woman. She did act like an innocent teenager, just that I kept on wondering if she was 13 instead of something closer to 18 (the book doesn't specify her age, just that she is under 20). The Queen of the city-state of Duran intrigued me. In just 2 small paragraphs, we had a far greater glimpse to her character and backstory than Diana's sort of "out there" personality. I suppose the Queen will gain a prominent role in future books.

The best written female character by leagues is Claire. I think she passes every question of the Strong Woman Test. While she is magically obliged to serve "a dungeon master", the text sort of insinuates she has some degree of free will to choose any available dungeon cores but has to serve one forever once the bond is formalized. She is not motivated by love; she views Doc more as a friend/associate/roommate. Her hobbies seem to be building shelves for her house and gardening. She also makes a lot of decisions on proper dungeon management which is fuelled by her main goal to live a long life and Doc tends to agree with her (not always). Claire also passes the test because she mentions she has a good relationship with her mother.

Now, I really wanted to give this book 4 1/2 stars, I enjoyed the campy banter between Claire & Doc and the overall worldbuilding behind dungeon mining. The problem is that the sudden change of POV to the guild felt very out of the blue (I got used to it after a while), Diana's personality seemed a bit inconsistent leaving her more as a plot ploy than a fleshed out character, and the ending with the full revelation felt very rushed. Like... I got the vibe: "I want to finish this book at 60,000 words and will just speed things up because I spent 2 chapters having Doc awaken and start building his dungeon". Outside of the antagonist Koran, the villains of the book suffer from the problem of "great revelation finale" syndrome and to avoid spoiling their identity ahead of time, you never get the chance to meet them over the course of the story and know their intentions. I will always prefer more morally grey villains because they are far more interesting than "mysterious bad guy in a black cloak wants to destroy everything" which is a quip I always had regarding The Emperor in Star Wars. They are just bad... and that is it. Certainly a mysterious identity bad guy can be pulled off and I can think of several writers that are capable of pulling off this trick and leave you guessing. Given this book has the sort of constraint it tries to keep Doc as the main character/good guy, this trick would have been very hard to pull off but well worth it in the end given this is not a standalone novel and the guild characters will become more important as the story progresses.

I assumed the book had a new revised edition, but the revisions seem to have focused on removing typos (I saw none) and left behind recurrent filler words that could be safely removed such as "in order to". I also think the initial grading of the dungeon as B and then reranked as D when it became more dangerous was a typo. I assume the B was supposed to be an E.

In a nutshell, I still really loved the story, I am glad the writer followed through with whoever offered the suggestion to increase female representation to entice a larger reader audience, and despite the POV quips, I would love to read the sequel sometime. ( )

Slow to start but that's because I already knew the tropes. Claire and Doc could've used more character development. Could've used better setup-payoff with the succubi. Still an overall entertaining read. ( )