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Listen to it in one sitting!
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Unsouled
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Sacred artists follow a thousand Paths to power, using their souls to control the forces of the natural world. Lindon is Unsouled, forbidden to learn the sacred arts of his clan. When faced with a looming fate he cannot ignore, he must rise beyond anything he's ever known...and forge his own Path.
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An unbelievably underrated series
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Publisher's Summary
In 2056, the world's most powerful AI System, ARKUS, comes online. Created to extend human lifespans, it quickly makes world-changing discoveries in health science. It also develops an advanced VR headset that uses consumable nanomachines to let users experience time faster in virtual worlds.
Two years later, ARKUS releases World-Tree Online, a game where players scale a giant tree with thousands of unique game worlds hanging from the branches. The game's time-dilation makes it so that one hour of playtime feels like one month to those in-game, allowing humans to virtually extend their lifespans. However, after an old gamer named Vincent joins World-Tree Online, an update begins that stretches the time-dilation to one year for every five seconds. Players are unable to exit the game during the update - with an estimated wait time of three hundred sixty years.
After experimenting with an exploit, Vincent begins to develop new spells that will take him higher in the game than he ever thought possible. Unfortunately, he crosses paths with the last moderator, a young man named Lucas that uses his mod abilities to torture and subjugate other players.
Lucas is willing to abuse his power to conquer the World-Tree, but Vincent's exploit might just be the key to stopping him.
The Soundbooth Theater Team for this Production:
- Justin Thomas James - Music and Narration
- Jeff Hays - Jim and Killer Sam
- Laurie Catherine Winkel - Quinn, Alexandria, and the rest of the female cast
- Dalton Lynne - Proofing and Editing
- Ahmed Mahmoud - Editing, Mastering, and Sound Design
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Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- 匿名
- 21-06-2019
An excellent book that just makes you feel good.
Absolutely brilliant, cant wait for more of these. Perfect voice acting and excellent writing. Good job.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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- 匿名
- 06-11-2019
im going mad waiting for the next book!!!
i can't wait for the next book. Best book I've read to date and that's very hard to say considering I have read many
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- 匿名
- 02-11-2019
wow
What a great book, probably the best set of main characters iv had the pleasure to read about. highly recommend!!
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- 匿名
- 03-09-2019
Perfection
Oh my god this audiobook was absolutely incredible! The narration and emotion was completely out of this world, and the sound affects and music were fun. The villain was performed so well I got chills.The writing was great, as was the plot, characters, and every other narrative aspect of this book. The ending was very satisfying, I cried tears of joy when it was done.
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- 匿名
- 28-08-2019
Good Spin on Gaming Fun.
Strong well-thought-out characters with entertaining interactions. Couple that with a well paced story arc and a good finale made this book quite entertaining. Well read and narrated voices and story by The Voice cast. Thanks for the entertainment guys
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- Ragnaroc
- 13-07-2019
Satisfying yet flawed
First I have to say the performance is absolutely amazing and I hope all the narrators keep up the good work. The story is satisfying however doesn't leave much up for the imagination by the end. The major flaw to the story which I feel warrants lowering the overall rating of the story is character development. The multiple time-skips within the novel doesn't leave room for characters to grow and rather just feels like a power spike for the plot to move forward. By the end it leaves an indifferent feeling about the series.
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- mitchell
- 08-07-2019
interesting idea, could have been better realised.
plagued with 30 year time jumps where literally nothing happens in the interim other than people slightly increasing in stats and gaining new spells. cast spell, drink mana potion, cast spell, drink mana potion, cast spell........ it gets tedious. worst of all, this is another litrpg which suffers from awful "game design" and administration: no system to actually uphold game rules etc, instead player moderators can be overcome and/or run from instead of just being able to execute a ban. if this game was real I don't think anyone would play it for anything but the time dilation, 15 actual years solely working on one spell and 37 years grinding on a single world for mediocre stats is the definition of tedium. nty
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- RRedmond
- 21-06-2019
Tweens only may apply !
Not sure what is sadder, the lack of any real depth to this story or that I listened to the end !
Essentially a really good idea that felt entirely dumbed down and stripped of authenticity !
Make the sequels more edgy and a bit more Raw and I’ll give you another spin !
In the meantime, I’ll Try flower arranging for a bit more Ooomph !
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- Embrakh
- 18-06-2019
Amazing Story and Awesome Villian
Loved this book. The protagonist is great, the main cast of characters deep and the trio of narrators are some of the best in the business. They consistently give some of the greatest character performances on the platform.
The antagonist is great too. Never thought I'd love watching what's essentially a Reddit moderator be one of the best GameLite villians in the genre from an author I have no previous knowledge of. I'll definitely be buying any of his other Audible releases.
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- Trey
- 05-06-2019
Good book. One minor-ish gripe.
I enjoyed this book however. the characters were likeable and the bad guys really got on your nerves. My only gripe is this, the whole system with Mana potions felt way overused, it felt like in combat scenes every other sentence included "the protagonist drank aether" "the protagonist sipped aether" etc etc. not only did it continued to make me sit there and think where is he getting all of these potions but the system felt kind of lame and distracting to the point where I'm mentioning it now in my review.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-05-2019
Villain stole the show.
The whole book was great. Several time skips, so be prepared for that. The characters were well written. The world/s were very interesting.
The main antagonist though was perfect. Rarely have I so thoroughly hated a bad guy in a book. And my God was this one of em.
21 of 22 people found this review helpful
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- B Brown
- 07-05-2019
10/10 Would Recommend
All of the voice actors did a amazing job. The noises and fanfare that accompanied the narration enhanced the experience.
The story I find is thrilling and captivating. The characters are very memorable and the ending is very satisfying.. the perfect blend of emotions.
14 of 15 people found this review helpful
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- Alie Brown
- 04-05-2019
Science fiction at its best ...
E. A. Hooper gets the fundamentals right:
- Characters and some character development
- World building, including world monsters and world events
- Balanced fights
- Well connected plot
which is all used to explore the what if of infinite time to enjoy life and to explore the condition of being human. I wish there were more authors writing elevating books like this one and that books like this one made it to the best-seller list more often, instead of all the incongruent post-apocalyptic gloomy c**p ala Stephen King and George R. R. Martin.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 14-05-2019
GameLit that doesn’t fall victim to typical pitfalls
This book really surprised me. I was going out on a work trip and wanted to find a fun read for my travels. For background, I have listened to some GameLit RPGs prior (Chaos Seed, Ascend Online, and a few others) and will be measuring most of my review based on comparisons from those books. I’ll do my best not to put spoilers in here.
First thing I recognize is the combat-pacing. When listening to some of these books, you have to manage the pace in your head. Authors will typically over-explain a battle or fight to where by the time the narrator finishes reading that part, five minutes have passed in real time while you’ve been listening. While I’m sure some (if not most) readers appreciate the flowery adjectives describing the fight, for me it seems to take me out of the story. If I’m watching a fight, I notice what is happening and not thinking about the superfluous description of it. This book did a great job in that regard. If someone got hit by a weapon, the author wrote that and moved on to the other action taking place around (and there is a LOT of action). That’s not to say the author did not use adjectives at all, but that he seemed to write with combat-pacing in mind and the narrator delivered, making you feel like you couldn’t disengage from the book without missing something (something I commend them both for).
Second, is the overall lack of tedious number recitation. As a reader, I love the world-building mechanics and learning about “how stuff works” in the books I listen to. I rarely feel the need to skip the skill levels recitation and I do not typically want to miss the in depth description of newly obtained skills/items/abilities/etc. But for those that may be reading this that do, you’ll be happy to know there is a markedly different method utilized in this book. The author still has some numbers in here, but most of it is not “Player loses XX hp from sword slash, or enemy regenerated XX from magic potion”. It all seems to be relative and assumed as if the author is saying “yeah he got his mana back from that potion, now let’s get back to what really matters”. Very refreshing and kept the plot moving. This also contributed to drastically cutting down any lengthy battle sequences.
There are a few other things that makes this book stand out but I just got home from my work trip and am going to hug my kids now.
18 of 21 people found this review helpful
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- Chris Buzon
- 09-05-2019
This was phenomenal
This was one of the best books I've read this year. fantastic narrators, great story, suitable for many audiences without being childish. I cant wait for more in this universe.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful
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- Ray Johnson
- 21-11-2019
Climb that tree and build a house
Ok, so I’m going to commit some blasphemy here and I think a lot of it comes from all the hype that hit the book before I’d gotten to give it a listen. It’s a lot like being told how amazing a movie is by everyone you know and when you finally get to see it, it does not meet your expectations.
So, here’s the gist of the story. An old man who is mourning the loss of his wife finally breaks down and joins one of his long time buddies in the VR world. The man, Vincent, is a long time gamer and is looking for something that will help him take his mind off of the upcoming anniversary of her death, or birthday, I don’t remember and it really isn’t relevant. He enters the game and decides that he’s not going to party like he’s 20, as his buddy, Jim, is doing but he’s actually going to play the game. Low and behold, the game has a time dilation that allows you to play for super long periods of time in your head, while in actuality only an hour passes in the real world.
So of course, a glitch occurs that ends up making it so that everyone in the game will exist without being able to leave for over 300 years. Closer to 400, but hey. A moderator loses his mind, and decides that he likes the way Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini ran their countries and decides that he wants to do the same thing in the game world. He does some really creepy stuff and I’m honestly stunned that the book didn’t become waaaay darker than it did. That’s the compacted version. Vinnie and pals band together to fight the evil moderator. Do they win, fail, or continue on to the next book? Not ganna say, cause spoilers.
Now, I’m not saying that the book isn’t good, only that it was not what I had expected. Although there were a few things that sort of set me back a bit. So. I’m going to get all the negative stuff out of the way first. First off one thing that I did not appreciate were the time jumps. Granted, when you have characters who are stuck in a game for hundreds of years I can understand that you want to show some passage of time, but having them level up in the off time was annoying and it sort of robbed the readers of seeing what they did to get to that point. For example, one of the book’s blurbs talks about how Vin exploits a cheat. We get to see him figure it out, and then start to work on it, but then time passes and he is at 99% of the way finished with figuring it out. Granted, you do get to see him finalize his project, but a huge number of years have passed. Secondly, the simple acquisition of a new spell or skill seems to take forever. I realize that time dialation occurs, but there is no way I’m going to spend thirty years of my life trying to figure out a spell or other skill, when other games pretty much let you add stuff as you level. Leveling becomes impossibly difficult, too. There is one part where the party spends decades on some dead monster inhabited world just so they can become stronger. I don’t think that is even remotely realistic, even if you are under a threat of perma death. And that brings me to the real issue I had, in so far as the time they were trapped in the game really only had relevance to the first book. Crazy mod takes over, so no one can escape thus there is a need for the trapped in the game trope. But the trapped part is so long. Even if Hooper had just made it a hundred years it would have been so much more palatable. It would still have been horrifying, by just cutting away decades and making them single years. The horrors committed by the crazy mod would still be horrible. Oh, and a side note or two. Why would you play a game to forget about the emotional day that you are trying to avoid, when once you leave your memories are compressed and feel like a dream? Also, how much trouble can you get in for doing things in a game? Again, at the beginning of the book the mods are hunting bad guys, some of whom are known to have raped other players. Did they get jail time in real life for what they did? I know they got permabanned, but it is a very pertinent question because things transpire that will make some of the book wonky if that isn’t addressed later.
Ok, now onto the good stuff. The characters were developed and well fleshed out, and their teamwork flowed. The bad guy was admirably whiny and annoying to a point that he was utterly irritating and you hated him easily. There was an unusual game system that worked well, and it was pretty cool to see it in us. The fact that you could craft new spells was a great concept, even if I don’t understand why known spells weren’t easy to use. The fights were fun and well written. My favorite part is that the book isn’t stretched out into a needles trilogy in regards to the main villain Lucas. His arc is completed, and so there is now an opening for more changes to come in the series. The book has a lot of positive things going for it such as. . .
. . .The amazing work by the SBT team. I have said for a long time that LCW and JTJ are the Bonnie and Clyde of SBT. The go together like peas and carrots. Ugh, I hate peas and carrots, how about Ice Cream and Sprinkles? Much better. Justin and Laurie carry this book and probably made it more than it would have been just reading it. Jeff plays Vin’s pal Jim and has a ball with the womanizing alcoholic. Probably more fun than he should have. As always, SBTprovides a kick ass quality to the story they tell.
Final Score? 7.4 stars. Yeah, I had a lot of issues with the way the time dilation played out, the difficulty of creating spells, and the leveling between time jumps in general. The fights were great and well written, but jumping over a lot of levels and learning made me feel like I lost something that should have been there.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
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- Mary
- 09-05-2019
Finally a Change BRAVO
This book is the best interpretation of a fantasy LItRPG book. Instead of everyone playing the game is a prepubescent teenager or an overly sexiest young male and female, there are players of multiple ages and experiences. The story kept my attention and the cast excited my imagination. As a older gamer, thank you for a great story. It also provides a lesson, that all came learn from.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful
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- Joshua
- 24-04-2019
Couldnt finish, Not terrible but not for me
Its not bad, but I couldn't finish it. Im sure others will love it and maybe ill give it a second try some day. However I hated all of the characters, except the best friend Jim. The main character is a touch slow... and sucks at fighting. Hell, he spent all of four seconds picking a lame class. Then proceeds to almost get killed by a goblin cuz hes being a panzy but then charges a world boss...ugh. Anyway the main bad guy is cringe level psycho too with a childish flair. I'm just gonna have to take a break from this one for now..
For those on the fence though it is well written, and the narrators are really good. So dont worry about that at all.
24 of 30 people found this review helpful
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- Richard
- 26-11-2019
Surprisingly Great
This book is so good. it feels corny if it's your first litrpg but this is one of the best litRPGs I've listened to. the book is complete not a half story like the land and it feels satisfying to finish. i love the characters and have smiled and chuckled many times. the audio is excellent too. never really heard of the narrator before this but he was excellent. The characters vocals were well defined and the his voice was dynamic so you don't get put in a trance and miss the whole last minute of dialog. The idea behind the book/game is intriguing as well and how magic and skills are invented is really captivating.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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- Alexander
- 15-05-2019
Excellent and fairly unique!
Absolutely loved it - the descent into tyranny, the magic system, the worlds! I don't usually write reviews but this book deserves a special mention.
enjoy :)
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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- Adam
- 03-12-2019
A Surprising Gem!
Can't believe how good this is, only thing I disliked was Lucas, too childish.
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- Mauritz Krylander
- 19-11-2019
Brilliant!
loved it, the concept is good, writing flawless, the characters likeable (except for you lucas).
I particularly enjoyed this because it doesn't just add time dilation for no reason like a lot of litrpgs but uses it as a fundamental part of the game.
The villian is far more believable than most 2 dimensional characters in literature these days and Vincent a nice departure from 'military black ops super elite assassin' which are usually in these sort of books.
Can't wait for the next installment to be released on audible.
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- David
- 07-09-2019
WOOW A MUST READ MAYBE JEFF HAYS BEST WORK YET
What can I say other than WOW. I love LitRPG purely lovely them, I own almost all the fictional audio read by Jeff Hays And this is one of the best work he has done yet.
Now onto the meat and potatoes, this book is amazing, it has everything, stats grinding, epic battles both PvM and PvP, and then to take that get mixture and add a heap of diatomite, some grenades and a nuke and that will give you an idea of the explosives of this amazing work (to put it in the terms of the book, add a negative Ravan, a gravity punch and 1000 mana canons). One of the issues I have found with LitRPG is if you are an online gamer and have built up relationships over a very long time with a great group of friends, you know that it isn't always gold and glitter and takes some intense battles, team gamers or history to bring you to a level where you know that person for who or what they are, even behind the keyboard, however, this is the first book that gets this right. The way that the main team of friends build up the relationship is maybe my second favourite thing about it. However by far, my favourite thing about it is, that the author was not afraid to kill his characters off, and lose items, as well as give them some debuff for death, most if not all of the game based LitRPG that I have read never kills of its players/characters, or if they die, the respawn fully dressed as they were on death, which isn't how it happens in most RPG's. The third fav on this list of amazingness is that the battles feel like a battle that you would have on a great game, with bosses that have epic strength and abilities or phases to its battle, which challenge and push the players to the limits and a lot of the time, over the limit to which they die, however not before having to go through the dread of losing all the amazing gear and loot you have gained from decades of battling, which in a few places has had the team give all the good gear to one player while two more distracts the danger so she can get through (which again is such a gamer thing to do), which intern teaches them how to work as a team or find the explore to that battle that they can then overcome. It is such amazing writing. The final amazing part of this book is the meniscal bad mod that is on a power trip, that makes you want to hunt him down your self and stab. That for me is the meat of the book, and its such an amazing piece of writing, then throw in both love & hate, love, friendship, family and an amazing idea for a gaming system it is one of the best well-rounded books I have enjoyed for such a long time. And I cant wait to see what is coming next for the Void knights and the World Tree!
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- Edward
- 06-09-2019
loved it.
well worth a listen. roll on book 2.
excellent performance as always and great story.
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- Alv
- 27-08-2019
Great story
Well worth listening to this. A great story that poses a very interesting human rights and philosophical question with regards to the gaming future. Really enjoyed it. 👍
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- Phoenix Dark
- 18-08-2019
Good lit RPG
believable villain and characters (as far as lit RPG s go), good world building, enjoyed it a lot.
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- john
- 18-08-2019
excellent,but
thoroughly enjoyed this book it was well narrated and the story was excellent. however the Echo effect used on the voices was annoying. I like the fact that it gave me the option to skip 11 minute stat update I didn't skip it but I like the option can't wait to read the next book
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- Amazon Customer
- 20-07-2019
Great book can't wait for more.
Real Great book had lots of fun can't wait to see what the next book has lined up.
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- Eben
- 12-07-2019
Unique and enjoyable experience
Really enjoyed this book, had to listen every spare moment I had. Cant wait for the next book