My first experience was the Ready Player duology by Ernest Cline and the This Trilogy is Broken 4 book series by JP Valentine. I’ve also had many recommendations for Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman.

The Ready Player series was basically an ok story with a “hey, remember this thing from the 80’s‽” through-line. And while some of the jokes felt forced, the Valentine Series overall was a ton of fun and I couldn’t stop reading it.

What else have you really enjoyed? (This genre lends itself towards a couple of Bingo squares too. )

  • brenticus@lemmy.world
    3·
    7 months ago

    I haven’t read a lot of western litrpg, but there’s pretty heavy overlap with Japanese light novels. Arguably a good chunk of the tropes and popularity spilled over from Japanese light novels and Chinese progression fantasy/xianxia. In that genre I can recommend these pretty easily:

    • Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra, which has a guy transported to a fantasy world with powers like a Civilization leader.
    • Log Horizon, where a bunch of MMO players kind themselves in a world basically like the game they know but slowly uncover differences.
    • Sword Art Online: Progressive, which is basically the original story filled in with the details and character development needed to make it actually pretty good.
    • Konosuba, which has a lot of similarities to gamelit progression and such but is very much a comedy.

    If you’re into web novels, Shadow Slave and Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint are both incredible while scratching that itch. I’ve only read the manwha but Greatest Estate Developer also lurks around the genre while being quite good.