Final Core: Volume 1

De: D.M. Rhodes, Razzmatazz

Narrado por: Adam Verner

I died and was accidentally reborn as an [angelic monstrosity].

So now I'm building a holy dungeon-tower that is tall enough to reach the gods...so that I can complain about it!

But the humans think that I am trying to destroy the world.

This is the first volume of the Final Core, a dungeon core base-building LitRPG series.

©2022 D.M. Rhodes (P)2023 Podium Audio

calm story

an intresting and fun story, with fun characters and lots of info on lore

Masterfully Done!

The characters are great and the way the voice actor brings out all the different personalities is engaging. It is not super crunchy, which I like and us more character driven. 10/10 would recommend it.

I love everything but how they treat Perchta

Or Fresh, if my hypothesis is correct. Fresh (Perchta) was a sweetie, wholesome even, in Dungeon Item Shoppe. Now she's peddling poison and doesn't try peace first? Not cool, Razzmatazz. Seriously not cool.

I liked it.

I have to say that it started a little slow. I eventually picked up and it was a delightful listen. I highly recommend it to anyone. Five stars all around.

Good

If you like dungeon stories, you would like this
It has a unique twist g

Decent Writing

The Author jumped around quite a bit often leaving me confused near the end of his chapters. I enjoyed the cult knowledge segments.
Someone should have cast a female Narrator for the book. There are many female parts and though the MC has a male name the character was that of a female jacked up with magic to turn it into a dungeon. (not a spoiler since quite literally happens in first chapter) The narrator completely ignores the Female connotations for a good portion of the characters and continues to use deeper voiced Boston accents.
The premise is solid. Unique Dungeon turned tower. I hope the books get better but I'd much rather read them myself then have a male narrator ignore the roles.

Intriguing

i despise gods on a personal level. However, I find stories like this comforting. The dungeon core genre has been fast growing and I am here for it. I only wish to create worlds for myself.

Awesome to hear!

I listen to books when I carpool go back and forth to work, and this was awesome to hear with the people in the car! I was told not to skip ahead as they wanted to hear the story and the comedy of the characters that the writer has written in for us to hear.

Dungeon Core (Lite)

I just don't know how I feel about this book. Minor spoilers below, but no real plot points. At this time I have not checked out the 2nd book and this review in no way addresses anything there.

On one hand, this story is an entirely unique take on a dungeon core series. Our MC is a reincarnated dungeon core, nothing new there, but the author establishes pretty early on that that there are different types of dungeon cores: you have the standard core type that is immobile (like in Divine Dungeon), but you also have mobile types where the core is an actual living breathing creature (like in Dungeon World), and then there are also affinities that each dungeon can have. This is the first story I can recall where the core actually had a holy affinity and where the author leaned into it rather than making the MC have any sort of revulsion to it (like in Bone Dungeon (I think?)).

Additionally, rather than having dungeon fairy guides the author instead removed that inherent aspect as well as the core's ability to remotely build and harvest resources, and instead it gave the core the ability to summon workers (which are basically fairies).

On another note, I did appreciate the time the author took for the world building at the beginning of each chapter and the sections where the actual real life mythology was explained and all the different cultures that influenced it.

Now, this has a number of downsides, and the shortest way I can describe this book is that it is a Dungeon Core Lite, meaning that many of the features we've come to expect have been truncated or removed entirely. First, the MC doesn't care about his dungeon at all. After the first two rooms (floors) he has virtually no input for the rest of the book. The same thing applies to the mobs, bosses, loot, design/theme, etc; everything is just left to the workers to figure out and decide.

Second, levels in this story have no real tangible role. Every level the MC gets an ability point to spend and unlocks more options for what he can choose, but most of these have no real impact on the story until much later.

Both of these two negatives lead to a aingular larger problem: there are no rules. At no point does the author explain levels, classes, mechanics, how things work, how they don't; everything that works just does because magic. Now, I understand many don't like heavy number crunching and massive stat blocks, I get it, but this takes it to the extreme where you could argue that it isn't a litrpg at all and would have been just as good, if not better, as a normal fantasy story. For me, it just didn't scratch the itch.

The final issue I have with this is scaling. There are multiple points where the MC should have died or lost in some way, but somehow he miraculously came out on top everytime. Plot armor was just a little too thick for my taste.

a very unusual book

I can honestly say I have never listened to a book like this.
not my first lit RPG, but I've never had an lesson in mythology that was so entertaining and educational at the same time.