Review: IN ANOTHER WORLD I MUST DEFEAT THE DEMON KING by Miles English
It’s not hard to find a LitRPG novel that really just…sucks. So it’s cool to find one that’s actually plenty of fun to read.
It’s not hard to find a LitRPG novel that really just…sucks. So it’s cool to find one that’s actually plenty of fun to read.
The Story
A royal prince from a fantasy RPG world gets teleported into our world. Being a fish out of water, he has to make quick allies, and they show him how to get along in 21st Century society.
However, the normies that end up helping him also get pulled into his quest, and soon they have stat sheets and character bios like he does. They start putting points into different attributes, leveling up to be better members of his troupe.
As it turns out, the prince is on a quest to kill a demon king…who’s hiding in our world. And there are minions here to stop him. Things can get ugly from there.
The Characters
Henry is our warrior-prince who needs to catch up on real-world life in a hurry. Handsome, handy, humble, possessed of many chivalric and knightly qualities. You want to be like Henry.
His first ally is Shana, a waitress at a diner who isn’t afraid to jump into the fight, wielding her boss’s shotgun from behind the counter. She’s grounded and inclined to be helpful, while also not taking crap from people.
(I really liked the casual normalcy about firearm use in this book—people carried, and it wasn’t a big deal. They weren’t all crackshots, they just had guns and knew how to use them.)
Rounding out the main cast are Daniel and Bri, siblings who also get pulled into Henry’s war band. They bring different assets to the table (Daniel is smart and has money, Bri is hot and feisty) making for a well-varied group of characters.
Sometimes the “fish-out-of-water” trope can take too long to write, but that’s not the case here. English didn’t drag it out or overplay the oddities that Henry encountered; he gave them their due, then carried on with the story. That’s what I want from this sort of thing.
The World
Our world, with a lot of the name brands scrubbed off of it, haha. There are just invisible magical elements to it, an underside full of things that escaped Henry’s RPG. Our characters walk between both sides, but end up doing a lot of their exploring and fighting in the RPG pockets of the world.
The Politics
Literally zero. Unless you count certain types of court intrigue that Henry dealt with “back home.”
Content Warning
Very clean book. A little hell here, a little damn there, and one use of “big-titty Asian” to describe Bri, coming from a scumbag character.
Who’s It For?
Well, presumably there’s a market for LitRPG/Isekai books, right? And while I don’t usually find myself sitting in that audience, I do enjoy a fun concept done well. This book came to me on a recommendation and I had fun reading it. It’s accessible even if you’re not big into the genre.
Why Read It?
Because it was refreshing to have fun with a book like this, that would normally focus too hard on how Henry struggled to fit into our world. A book that might otherwise be full of cookie-cutter GenZ characters worried about social justice causes and microaggressions. Here are normal, hardworking young people who have jobs and ambitions and don’t dabble in pointless BS. They handle guns. They think about their futures. And when a cartoon knight lands in the middle of their lives, they take up with him to make things more interesting. I liked that.
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