Review Detail of valiantxvillainous in The Hollow God

Hello! I was told to give as honest of a review as possible so here goes! Firstly, I’d like to say that the Hollow God was a fun and entertaining read, alive with action and an enigmatic and intriguing world. There’s always more to discover and a fight to be had. The descriptions are vivid and do their job well in feeding the reader’s imagination. The story is rife with action, and well-described battle scenes to keep you on edge. If you like cultivation novels with a fun and interesting spin, this could be the title for you. With that being said there are a few things I’d like to bring up to the author. The quality of the first two chapters strands a strong contrast against the rest. While I applaud the author for improving the quality of his craft, I don’t think it’s a good thing to keep the introduction to the story subpar, as it’s extremely important in hooking the reader. Writing mistakes seem throughout are the most prevalent in these two chapters and I highly advise the author to go back and revise them. Another thing about the first chapter, I’m a little unconvinced with the first person narration used here. The majority of the book is written in the third person and the shifts in perspective can be jarring. But beyond that, the first paragraph introduces a character who is detached both emotionally and physically from his environment and first-person narration excels at diving into the mind of the character. If this character is emotionally closed off due to his circumstances then he becomes difficult to emphasize with and you lose the advantage of using first-person narration. Not to mention, the character’s personality takes a rather drastic shift after this chapter so I don’t see how it’s necessary to write in the first person. With that being said, the characterization drastically improves after the first aforementioned chapters and is definitely something the reader can look forward to when reading this book. The writing style, as mentioned before, is vivid and captivating. It’s fun to read and entices the imagination. However, the author often makes small mistakes(like frequently forgetting to capitalize) or using cheap gimmicks(such as employing asterisks for action) in his writing. I would really appreciate it if the author went back to try and correct more of these errors, as they are rather frequent (of course, I totally understand the occasional typo here and there but these small, obvious mistakes are extremely frequent). The author also has the habit of info-dumping with large, intimidating paragraphs. I highly suggest to break these up in one way or another, as they can be both daunting to the reader and also boring. On top of these long info-dump paragraphs, they also often featured confusing run-on sentences as well. Please break up your sentences! And/or add commas to make them more legible. Luckily the author doesn’t do this extremely often but it does come up occasionally in the story. As for the plot…I’m not really sure what the plot is. The general direction of the story feels extremely vague in the first few chapters. There’s a lack of conflict or overarching goals. It’s just fighting, powering up, exploring, rinse and repeat. I wish there was more of a plot direction from the very beginning of the novel that would have lured me farther into the story. With that being said, the world is still fantastical and for many, this is enough of a good reason to pick up a book and turn to the next page. The characters are also cute and well-written so that’s something to enjoy as well. Kudos to the author and I wish him good luck with his writing!