Review Detail of Sinfish in Night Ranger

Night Ranger is a reasonably competent tranmigration into a game world that is actually real. The best part of the story is easily the vivid combat scenes, which relies on a MMORPG sensibility to drive the action. The fast pacing and excellent translation make at times, this novel can be enjoyable, but unfortunately, the world is inescapably shallow, which even at the best of times prevents the novel from ever being truly great, and at the worst of times, drives the novel into frustrating places. The world is just like the game he played, except when it's not. The main character remembers everything about the game down to the fiddliest bit, except when it's convenient for him not to. The system seems in-depth, but ultimately is obviously contrived around the main character like his subclass which would make no sense as a main class. Skills that would be obviously stupid in a game are purported to have existed in the game, such as a near-instakill skill that makes the user weak for months. There are niggling details when the author tries to bring in plots into a video game world. The MC's father was murdered by a slow poisoning. Here's the problem: In this world, you can fairly trivially cast "Cure Poison" and "Divination". Over the months he was slowly getting sicker, why didn't his father visit a cleric? And after discovering he was being poisoned, it would have been trivial to find the culprit. I'm a hundred chapters in, and every single character introduced so far feels like a sock puppet for the MC to interact with. Nobody feels real, they're all just NPCs waiting around for the MC to show up. The villains, in particular, have all these contrived plans that involve trying to kill the MC, but they often seem pointless. For example, one mastermind spends an enormous amount of money plotting to kill the MC because he has a treasure map onto his land. I can't help but wonder why he simply didn't take a small adventuring party there and simply take it. We keep being told how smart the MC's actions are, but it's clear that without plot armor, he'd die pretty much every other day. He consistently, repeatedly putting himself in mortal danger time and time again, by choice. Yet there's never any sense of danger at all because the MC is a cocky perfect hero because he's played a lot of video games. He's never afraid of death even when he's inches from it, and even though we're told he feels pain, it doesn't seem that way. There is an incredible amount of telling instead of showing. Worse, people know things they shouldn't. The MC concludes that other people don't gain experience for getting kills, but he literally just assumes that without any testing whatsoever. Some mook knows instantly the incredibly rare class of the MC (literally only 18 other people in the world with the class), but then a far more powerful, older, guy with far more access to knowledge has no idea what he is like two chapters later. For some bizzarre reason, despite seers with future sight knowing a world-shaking calamity is coming, they forget to tell anyone. The MC has a cross between xianxia and video game morals. One second he's thoughtlessly murdering mooks, the next he's sparing somebody who's betrayed him. Why? Because they're plot-centric. The MC keeps saying he doesn't kill pointlessly, but he does. All the time. Then the author tries to show him as ruthless, but it mostly just makes him evil and possibly insane. The MC looks at somebody and senses that they have strange eyes, so he kills them. Then he kills some peasant for giving him lip. Well, maybe they weren't a peasant, maybe he was a spy. Who knows? Not like the MC is going to bother to check when he mysteriously just knows. When it comes down to it, the MC sees people as bags of experience and loot. When his class trainer says "Okay, for the next step in your training, I need you to murder these five thieves that are pretty annoying because uh, they'll show off your night murdering skills" he doesn't stop and think "wait, is pick-pocketing really a capital crime?" Nope, he's got a quest to kill 5 people, so he kills 5 people. Amusing, since he later gets ragingly mad at someone else who is killing people to fulfill their advancement. I'm often frustrated by MCs that try to bring in modern world morality into brutish and violent worlds, but in this case, the MC shows less regard for human life than serial killers. His kill counts exceed that of most of the villains in the story, and include innocents, guards, and children. Bizzarrely, every day citizens expect him to be punished because in civilization there's clearly rule of law, but he routinely gets away with murder. You might say, "Might Makes Right", but he's really not that strong in the grand scheme of things compared to the ruling powers trying to keep order. Somehow, every possible authority figure that in all reasonableness would see him hang, coincidentally befriends him or has something they want from him and they don't even admonish him for his killing sprees. This is partially explained by the reliance on law enforcement on divination spells which are failing, but it simply isn't enough. The author wants us to believe he's decisive and bad-ass by going from zero to murder in less than a second, but this just makes him a short-tempered, idiotic murderer who only gets away with it because of plot armor. Let's talk about plot armor. MC shows up at what is essentially Hogwarts, where the story has tried very hard to establish that virtually any wizard with a brain could kill him at whim. Unsurprisingly, there are rules against murdering wizards in Hogwarts. So, some nub wizard, let's call him Draco, slanders him, so the MC murders Draco and his guards, in full view of, well, everybody. Keep in mind, Draco's probably like 10. Now, dead 10-year old wizard is part of an incredibly important family, lets call them the Malfoys, so understandably they're peeved, not to mention it's definitely a capital offense to casually murder the receptionist at Hogwarts. But not to fear, the MC isn't a bad guy, after all, Draco started it. Yeah, that's pretty much his excuse. Let's recall that virtually any Hogwarts student can kill him, much less their parents. So well, fat lotta good "he started it" it is going to do him, you can't get away with murdering 10-year old Draco Malfoy at Hogwarts. Fortunately, the MC's great-grand father was a wizard, and he has a fancy wizard medal, which means the MC can't be summarily avada kevadra'd, but instead he has to be arbitrated. The Malfoys roll their eyes, and give him a sham trial, fully intending to lock him away in wizard prison and arrange for an "accident" to occur. But wait! Dumbledore was there all along! MC had literally no plan to get out of this predicament when he killed the guy for giggles, but after he finished killing him, he was like "oh hey, there's Dumbledore in his little girl form". So Dumbledore saves his ass. Have I mentioned the MC is stupid? Well, whatever, that happened. But it's not like the Malfoys are going to take little Draco being murdered lying down. They're an incredibly powerful wizard clan, and they can squish MC like a bug. But suddenly they decide they have to do so honorably, by uh, openly killing him dring the Tri-Wizard tournament by sneaking in an insane hermaphroditic killer into it instead of, I dunno, Draco's father teleporting to his house and melting his face off before dinner. Well, anyway, it doesn't work, but it's not like they still can't squish him like a bug. Fortunately, a volcano blows up and wakes up a dragon that has been sleeping for millenia and kills their entire family. All according to keikaku. Well, it's still a fairly enjoyable read despite its faults. I'd recommend to give it a try and see if you can get past it's shallowness and simply enjoy it as a decent system game transmigration with awesome fight scenes.