What is Reddit's opinion of Overlord, Vol. 1 (light novel): The Undead King?

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Thank you! That's the exact sort of answer I was looking for.

And that explains some of my issues with Solo Leveling. I had a heck of a time trying to find what I should be reading, and then there were different versions and it didn't click with me so I dropped it.

I'll give Overlord a shot. Is this Amazon link what you read? With the best translation?

http://www.b2c.hachettebookgroup.com/search/?yen&q=overlord&imprint=Yen&imprint=JY

Here is a list of all the official overlord stuff translated into English. Yen press is the official English publisher for Overlord.

If you click on any of the electronic options it will give you a list of media types to support whatever device you have.

Example

• Amazon (kindle)
• Barnes & Noble
• Book Walker
• Comixology
• Google Play
• iBooks
• Kobo

For me I use Calibre which is an e-book software for desktop, that can read all these formats, Android has something similar build into and I know it works with Amazon (kindle), Barnes & Noble, and google play as well. Google plays format uses less space, I don't think this is an issue unless you have hundreds of books, but just food for thought.

> The one counter point I will raise is if you look at most LitRPG's (which in my experience tends to be things like manga and such)

That is, one again, a very broad generalization. LitRPGs exist in several formats.

• Japanese Light Novels, such as <strong>Overlord</strong>.
• Japanese Web Novels, such as <strong>I'm a Spider, So What</strong>.
• Self-published novels in the western market, such as <strong>Ascend Online</strong> by Luke Chmilenko.
• Traditionally fiction in the western market, such as <strong>Sword of the Bright Lady</strong>.
• [Western-style Web Serials], such as <strong>The Wandering Inn</strong>.
• Russian Novels, such as the <strong>Play to Live</strong> series by D.Rus.
• Chinese Novels, such as <strong>The King's Avatar</strong>.

And that's just scratching the surface.

> the magic systems are terrible. That is fine, because the magic system is mainly there as an excuse to give the heroes powers, abilities, and enable them to level up (or for comedic effect in other such works featuring copious explosions).

They also have a variety of different styles of magic systems.

Sword of the Bright Lady, for example, involves collecting a substance called tael that is harvested from the brains of humans and monsters and absorbing to gain power. This has had a tremendous impact on the society and economics of the setting, since tael is a physical resource that can be hoarded, and there's a significantly efficiency loss if it's absorbed and then the person who has it is killed, etc. There are some RPGish mechanics in that there are tangible level increases from absorbing enough tael, but there are no hard stats (e.g. hit points, damage values, etc.)

Conversely, I'm a Spider, So What is built almost entirely around stats driving the story - and it's beautiful for it. It's internally consistent, has constant danger, and the main character's constant analysis of her situation makes it a joy to read.

The Wandering Inn has yet another approach, where one of the main characters attempts to opt out of participating in the level system entirely, and it's a pretty major plot point.

It's true that progression is often a focus, but even that isn't always the case - and there's nothing inherently wrong with a system that's designed to showcase character progression, anyway. It's one of the primary draws of the genre, both because it can feel extremely satisfying to the reader and because it's more coherent and consistent than settings where the magic progression is more arbitrary.

> For your first point, I am not saying that it applies to all hard magic systems, but that by their nature they are most at risk. Hard magic tends to be very inclusive. It tends to have very specific rules of what a person can do. When you go that way rather then making something more exclusive which tends to be more what soft magic trends towards then it is very easy to limit magic to only useful stuff, while in a soft magic system it is extremely difficult to limit a sufficient number of things that it feels unnaturally efficient.

Sure, there are probably settings with hard magic out there that just have powers lists without any good explanation for why all powers are useful - but that doesn't seem particularly common to me. I read a lot of hard magic fiction, and the vast majority of it is pretty open-ended in the totality of what the system includes.

I can certainly see what you mean if you're looking at Mistborn as your example of hard magic, but it's an extreme case, and as I mentioned previously, it's also probably a system that was deliberately designed for utility by someone who exists within the setting. It makes sense to function as a set of tools if it was designed that way in-world.

> Either way, I do not advocate for hard or soft magic systems, as I think they are both rather poor execution in themselves. I would argue that they are both the extremes of a spectrum which has a nice middle ground where magic can truly be special and mysterious while still being understood well enough to not be a dues ex machina solution.

I think part of the disconnect here is that you seem to be assuming that the terms "hard" and "soft" only apply to the most extreme ends of the spectrum, which isn't how I (or, I suspect, most of the people here) would use the terms.

Rather than using the terms to represent the extremes of the scale as you would, if something leans hard, I'd probably call it hard fantasy. If something leans toward soft, I'd probably call it soft.

For example, I frequently cite Mother of Learning as one of my favorite examples of hard magic, but there seem to be spells for virtually everything (e.g. making a small force-field above you that serves as an umbrella). The factors that make it hard are that there are clear levels of mastery, hard values for how much mana people have available, and clear mechanics for the categories of magic and how they interact. It's basically about as open-ended as D&D magic, if not more so, and D&D encompasses virtually everything a player could think of (especially with spells with variable effects, like Wish, etc.)