Review Detail of LemonGrenade in The Daily Life of the Immortal King

I am going to be as honest and neutral as I can in my review of my novel. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Summary: In short, it is about a sixteen-year-old **** named Wang Ling who tries to live a normal life for his age but is also the strongest person on planet Earth. There is cultivation (spiritual energy), countless cultivators, and demons and devils. However, he was born with a unique condition that allows him to achieve the next rank of cultivation every two years without doing anything. He tries to hide his abilities and live a normal life but there is always some evil force or organization that gets in his way and forces him to use his abilities to wipe them off the map. Meanwhile, his brother Wang Ming, is a super-genius scientist that is protected by the government and invents new stuff all the time. Also, he invents powerful talisman to suppress his brother’s cultivation, so he does not destroy the Earth when his aura is released. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Translation Quality: Good. The English is mostly good as well, so no complaints. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stability of Updates: No Idea. Assuming it is good. I do not know of the update stability as I have not fully caught up, but I am 90% there. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Story Development: Average. Some chapters show decent progress, while others are lagging behind or barely moving at all. I can sometimes feel the world in this novel evolving, while sometimes not. Others are inconsistent with the story development. Character development has its positives and negatives. Some characters have their own personalities and feel 3D, but others do not, and the author occasionally fails to develop a few of them. Some of the characters feel like they do not change throughout the story and are just static and stiff. This is where we get into the first major issue: Filler Content. I have to frustratingly whiz through a bunch of chapters occasionally or whiz through a bunch of stuff in a chapter just to get on with the story. It seems like the author was desperate to make chapters look long enough, so he/she wrote in a bunch of a random stuff and abused the comedy aspect in order to try and make it look funny and interesting. Moreover, the author implements this a lot when the point of view is on another character. Sometimes, it is alright, while other times, it makes the character feel bland or just plain annoying. Sometimes, it goes along with the story, while other times it does not. In my opinion, this only makes the POV with the MC the only interesting thing to read in most cases. Combined with the abuse of the comedy genre, I would not be surprised if many other readers feel impatient and whiz through a bunch of the fillers just to see what the MC is doing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Character Design: Average. The author sometimes does a good job in giving the reader a mental picture of what they look like and their personality, while sometimes it feels like the author just quickly threw a bunch of pieces together to make a character. There are a few instances where I have trouble not knowing what the character looks like and his/her personality. The MC does show some personality and character design, but I have trouble understanding what the character looks like since there is rarely a chance to have an accurate description of him. No, “average” does not describe someone since everyone is born with unique facial features. Personality-wise, it feels a little bland in some parts. There is some improvements and development throughout the story while there is some parts that feel static. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- World Background: Poor. The author did a good job talking about the nation the MC lives in, its politics, culture, governing system, and online community. However, the author did a poor job in giving the audience an idea about the geopolitical situation of other countries, their relations, cultures, governing systems, and their geographical locations. This allows the reader to have a good understanding about the country the MC lives in (likely China) but makes it very difficult to understand what and how the other countries are doing. The naming system was also quite mediocre. I feel as if the author used a random name generator to change the name of a few countries but decided to leave the names of other countries intact for the heck of it. Continuing, the author fails to explain the geographic location of every country and just assumes the audience knows the location of the countries who have had their names changed. The author only says that they are part of the “Western World” but that only gives a broad range that could mean half of the entire world. The author may show a character in another country, but there is no explanation of where they are at except they are in this country. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timeline: Poor, jumbled, and sometimes contradictory here and there. The author fails to give the audience an in-depth feeling of how history in this novel has progressed up to this point to form the current technology of today, politics, and lifestyles. Pieces of history are only briefly explained, and most of it was explained at the beginning of the novel. Some of the history is shallow. For example, in the early parts of the novel, it is suggested that modern day technology has only come into existence perhaps only a few hundred years ago during the current Spirit Energy Era. The author never explained why and how science and technology came into existence, and that is just came out of nowhere. Plus, some of it is contradictory. For example, a character a few hundred chapters into the story talks about how a clan/family had excavators but abandoned them due to cultivators being able to move everything themselves. This does not make sense, considering this would not have been needed due to cultivators and the fact that science and technology did not exist back then. As stated in the first few chapters, there was battle Qi before the Spiritual Energy Era, which would probably be no different than a variant of spiritual energy. The author also fails to give precise numbers for timelines of events that happened in the past relating to the history of the world in his/her novel. The author usually says, ‘thousands of years’ and uses the word ‘era’, which is a broad term that could mean a few thousand years to millions or billions of years. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Technological setting: Poor, lazily done, copying, and lack of creativity in many areas. A lot of the technology in the current setting is out of place in this world and makes no logical sense whatsoever. In fact, a reader can feel that the technology is completely out of place in this novel that involves spirit energy and magic-stuff. In some cases, the author does put in effort to mix technology and spirit energy and does a good job. For example: spirit batteries, spirit highways, spirit satellite. Other times, the author seems like he/she pulled some modern technology and future technology a century from now and just threw it in without much care of how it fits into the novel. For example: electric cars, electronic phones, internet. Many of the games in the novel are based off reality and the author does not even bother to change their name or make them interesting. This makes it very shallow with the novel in that some of the games do not even fit with the setting in the novel. For example, PUBG and a few other modern games. Furthermore, some of them seem to be purely for filler content. If that was not all, the author wastes a lot of potential not exploring other potential applications of spirit energy and placing them in the novel. For example, it would make a lot of sense for humanity to have colonies on other worlds like the Moon and Mars. Considering how people can fly, surely cultivators could survive in space and establish colonies, no? Forty Millenniums of Cultivation shows a decent technological setting in a world of spiritual energy and creative writing towards what such a world could look like in comparison. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Race | Nationality: Mediocre. The author immediately places stereotypes on people outside the MC’s nation and immediately assumes they are going to behave and act like a Chinese would. The author fails to try and understand the culture of other countries and assumes that most foreign guys are arrogant and care about face. The author occasionally boasts about his/her country in various situations through the conversations and information paragraphs throughout the novel. The author makes suggestions that the other countries are just as powerful yet says that the MC’s own language is the main language of the world after his own country becomes the most powerful. The author contradicts himself/herself through these statements. The author occasionally fails to consider that there are more countries than his own. It is through this that it gives me a feeling that there is only one country that is important in this world despite other countries being mentioned. Because of this, international responses to certain evens like the gate to the demon world opening or some special event are left out and only the people in the MC’s country show a response. It is like talking about a single gear in a machine in great detail yet forgetting to consider there are other gears in a machine that are just as important. The author forgets about the machine itself and only wants to talk about his/her own gear. Whenever the author progresses the story, he/she fails to include the implications of improperly stopping a gear or rotating it backwards instead whenever a large-enough event happens. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- What I Liked: The author did a good job in making the cultivation system, techniques, formations, and other cultivation-related stuff. I also enjoyed some of the combinations between science and spirit energy, and I like some of the scientific analysis that went into some of the things. I liked a few of the characters and I did enjoy a lot of the fights between the MC and the enemies. I did enjoy some of the comedy in the chapters, and some I laughed at. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- What I Did Not Like: The rip-offs, but there is so many that I will not bother to explain. The romance: I feel that the author made a poor decision at the beginning to even make Lotus Sun interested in the main character if her memory is going to be wiped in the first place. If you did not plan on having romance in the first place, then I do not see the reason for this to exist in the first place. That is a quick way to make readers irritated and possibly drop the novel. In my opinion, I feel that some romance could make a novel good if it not abused for the sake of harems and the main character attracting all the females. If there was some slow romance and you gave the main character some hormones befitting that of a teenager his age, I think it would make the novel a lot more interesting and enjoyable. Fillers, contradicting vague history, poor technological creativity and implementation towards setting of novel, poor international details and explanations, not seeing the big picture, Wang Ling not showing interesting in females despite being a teenager (even if spirit energy represses that), stereotypes, lack of foreign culture, nationality, boasting of one’s nation, and sometimes slow story progression. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- My conclusion: It is an alright novel for passing time, but there are a lot of imperfections that have led to a large loss of potential that could have made this a novel enter the rankings on the site. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- My recommendation: The author really should have taken his/her time to organize everything, research his/her materials to establish a solid setting, establish how he/she wanted the story to progress before releasing the novel. A great way to do this is to make an outline of your novel, and if you are not good at it, you could ask a college student or an expert. Take for example Lord of the Mysteries. The reason that novel is so high in the power ranking and so popular right now is because the author took his/her time to properly research, understand, and plan the settings, world background, character designs, culture, etc. The author knew what he/she was writing and had sorted everything out before deciding to release. I tried to be as neutral as possible, even thought I was a little harsh. I decided to retype this several times to ensure everything was right.