Forever Fantasy Online cover art

Forever Fantasy Online

Forever Fantasy Online, Book 1

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

Forever Fantasy Online

By: Rachel Aaron, Travis Bach
Narrated by: Josh Hurley
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £18.57

Buy Now for £18.57

Summary

A thrilling new novel for fans of Sword Art Online and World of Warcraft!

In the real world, twenty-one-year-old library sciences student Tina Anderson is invisible and under-appreciated, but in the VR-game Forever Fantasy Online she's Roxxy—the respected leader and main tank of a top-tier raiding guild. Her brother, James Anderson, has a similar problem. IRL he’s a college drop-out struggling under debt, but in FFO he's famous—an explorer known all over the world for doing every quest and collecting the rarest items.

Both Tina and James need the game more than they’re willing to admit, but their escape turns into a trap when FFO becomes real. Suddenly, wounds aren’t virtual, the stupid monsters have turned cunning, and death might be forever. Separated across a much larger and more deadly world, their skill at FFO is the only thing keeping them alive. But as the harshness of their new reality sets in, Tina and James soon realize that being the best in the game is no longer good enough.

©2018 Rachel Aaron and Travis Bach (P)2018 Audible, Inc. Fiction Science Fiction Game Fantasy LitRPG
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c

Continue the series
Last Bastion cover art
Last Bastion By: Rachel Aaron, and others
The Once King cover art
The Once King By: Rachel Aaron, and others
All stars
Most relevant
This is my first LitRPG and it was a fun listen. The story and setting is interesting, especially when they realised how it slowly changes the players.

However, on why some say it's half a good book. James's parts of the story is the usual hero's journey. Full of challenge, twists, emotions and triumph. But Tina's parts, as interesting as it is to go into player-player interaction. It's unfortunately very repetitive. They'd resolve the same problems multiple times. Even when it looked like they'd reconcile, characters would bring it back up at the first opportunity, Tina's hard-headedness not helping. This might not have been so bad had it not been so frequent in almost all her chapters. It's not so much of an issue of characters, but with a seemingly stagnant & repeating plot. It gets frustrating rather quickly, by the later end I'd facepalm commenting "you resolved this already". The only justification is that the players aren't honourable combatants, but video game nerds. But it did grind my gears.

But, aside from the players bickering (which were short, thankfully), the story & characters really sucked me into it. And the slow reveals of how the game-world logic differed to this now real world logic. They give depth & complexity to the world, the npcs & the big baddy too. And that's just the first book. Excited for the next one.

I get why some people say it's a half a good book.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The James chapters are great! The Tina chapters are annoying. She's such a moron its hard to get through the chapters that follow her side of the story. Narration is good though and is done at a good speed so that's a plus.

Half a good book...

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I'm an avid gamer so i took a punt and bought this. All i can say is i was hooked from the start. Great idea, well written, and great narrative. I cant wait for the next one.

It Got Me Hooked.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Forever Fantasy Online is a LitRPG where the characters end up stuck in the game. You know, the ones where the characters play through a virtual reality system and then somehow end up stuck inside the game, being hit hurts, death is permanent, and all that fun stuff. I found this one to be unique compared to those that I’d read previously, almost like portal fantasy rather than LitRPG. NPCs (non-player characters) are people too. They’ve been stuck in a recurring nightmare where they’re forced to act out the game for the last 80 years. Naturally, they aren’t very fond of the ‘players’.

The two major POV characters, Tina and James, both have their own character arcs which are independent of each other. I enjoyed both POVs immensely, however, I preferred James’ POV more, I really enjoyed reading about him and found his chapters to be more relatable for me. While the book switches POV each chapter, I rarely found myself wanting to skip chapters to get back to a character I preferred.

Tina was preparing for a raid of the biggest, baddest dungeon in the game with a trial team to prepare for guild inductions. The change hit before the team entered the dungeon, and Tina is faced with the challenge of managing her team and ensuring their survival. I really enjoyed her survival arc as she struggled with managing an unfamiliar team.

Overall, I wasn’t a huge fan of Tina’s personality. She’s stubborn and controlling, but at the same time, she’s doing all she can to keep the other players alive. I admire her determination to save them all, and the challenges she perseveres through, but she constantly conflicts with members of the team she’s trying to save. In this, the authors have done a fantastic job of creating the conflicts that would likely arise when you throw people who were playing a game to relax into a situation where their lives depend on the game they were playing.

James, on the other hand, logged into the game in a lower level area where the NPCs quickly pick up on him being a player. James quickly finds that the NPCs were originally people in the Forever Fantasy Online world who’d been trapped in the game and forced to live by a script for 80 years. For some, this meant simply giving the same quest out millions of times. For others, this meant they were the character that was kidnapped every day for the players to go rescue. Needless to say, they weren’t very happy about their 80 years of nightmarish living.

James was easily one of my favourite characters. He reminded me a bit of Rachel Aaron’s Julius Heartstriker from the Heartstrikers series. He plays a healer and wants to do all he can to help the local NPCs and right the wrongs caused by the game.

Throughout this book, the authors do a great job of showing how their characters react to different scenarios and the growth they achieve. Over the course of the book, they go through some serious character development with their emotions and motivations quite clear for the reader.

One of the other things I really liked about this book is how it deals with common practices in video games. Characters who chose to play non-human characters have to learn how their new bodies work; how their tails work, what it’s like to have elven agility, what giant stone people like to eat. They also deal with characters who elected to play the opposite gender in the game and their sudden change in gender, and players who’ve bought their accounts online and are in end game content without having any idea how to play. Furthermore, the unrealistically shrunken maps are extended to make them more in line with what an actual landscape would be like, and bags/inventories hold a much more realistic number of items.

Overall, Rachel Aaron and Travis Bach have written an amazing story and a realistic LitRPG which deals really well with a number of different factors involved in gaming. They’ve created a great world with lots of interesting pieces of lore and filled it with realistic, well-developed characters. The stakes feel very real and from early on it’s evident just how much they stand to lose.

The only negative thing I can really say about this book is that it left me wanting more and that I’ll have to wait for the sequel. Josh Hurley’s narration of the audiobook is very well done too, and I enjoyed every moment I listened to it.

I’d recommend this book to people who enjoy:

* LitRPG
* Character Development
* Character Conflict
* Multiple POV
* Female POV
* Good Worldbuilding
* Battles

Amazing book with a stellar narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It was so good every book should take place in an mmo come to life

So good

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews