The Dragon Girl’s Ascension (Volume 1)

By: Invayne _

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

Desaray, a normal 14 year old girl, living a normal life.

Her everyday life suddenly changed when the world as she knew it ceased to exist.

Her world, but not her world.

Monsters appearing out of nowhere.

90% of the population disappeared.

An apocalypse like none other.

A system gained from killing a single monster.

Once human, now a dragon...

All of these things happening all at the same time, turning Desaray's world upside down.

How will she cope in this new world, not as a human but as a dragon?

Reya isn't weak!

The Mc is much more capable than any other 14yr old would be in such a stressful, confusing and chaotic situation. I was initially hesitant to read this when I learned it was about 14yr old. kids are weak and can't make good or rational decisions to survive because Reya proved otherwise. she's a strong and intelligent leader. These really help progress the story along because it doesn't waste time on her breaking down or crying at every bad that happens like the unless boy.

Virtual voice has no emotion and makes it bland at best.

Did not like virtual voice. Very bland. Most human read totals at least try to change voices for male and female characters like I would in my mind if I was reading.

good story held back by phrasing and the TTS

some of the phrasings and conversations were not the best writing, but perfectly acceptable. the TTS is very monotonous and well not the worst I've heard it holds the text back

No human editor/badly OPed MC.

It would have been fairly easy to have one person listen through and make edits as they went, HP into Horse Power could have been fixed, by someone typing H P or hit points for example. Additionally, it would have been easy to have someone go through and change the voice(s) used so that when different characters talk, the voice changed with them to make each sound unique. Swapping the AI voice to make things a bit more interesting, kinda like having a full voice actor cast, it is simple to do nowadays; natural reader, for example, has dozens of available voices to use, and it is a web browser program, you could also tweak the voice settings to make two characters sound similar but distinct from each other. This was a very lazy application of text to speech. I would be shocked if it was more than a copy past job.

(Very Minor spoilers below.)
As for the MC, she is never challenged. Between this, and the first half of the second book(I have not finished book2, so I will not comment further) She shows her self as a psychopath who can't make up her mind about being a Psychopath in contrived ways, She will kill people without real warning.
We're talking and posturing but nothing has happened yet? You started out aggressive because you thought I was enslaving people? I'll have one of your guys killed for being a mouthy jerk and then still act like I have the moral high ground! Then, next scene, I will swear protection becuse random kid and I'm the 'good guy' and I must be shown to not be a cold harted ****. I would respect her as a character more if her faults mattered and she was allowed to fail, the last half of book two may make me eat my shoe but I'll shocked as things stands.
She, and the supporting cast, powers up like mad very quickly, while it seems nothing else dos the same. (again, by half way though book 2)
Also, her faction mindlessly worships her and to them, she can do no wrong, they seem to have selective memories. (Execute someone who is not even in your faction, while you're in a tense standoff when the goal is to get their party to leave in peace? Genius.)

I give it a 3 because while it is not great, it works well enough for a background book while I do something else.

It's...... a functional Story

It suffers myriad issues but it's functional at best.
it's story is stable/rickety, as it has a storyline similar to Fantasy Korean Manhua's (like solo leveling as a popular example), where the plot has a character become overpowered, while really liking to have frequent time skips. It touches on topics for less than 2 mins then moves on.
As for how the virtual voice, it...... it's a thing.
Discovering how a V.V. handles has been test of my attention span. There is minimal effort to differentiate characters, that you have to physically remember who was who as the narration tone barely changes. The only plus about V.V. is that they remembered to put it as a female voice as the book centers around the Dragon despite the near monotone voice for both gendered characters.

Bad Virtual Voice

Using AI (Virtual Voice) as a narrator ruined the telling of this story. Firstly, where the author has a character stuttering, the AI is saying the individual letters in the stutter until it gets to an actual word. Second, when the author is indicating a pause by using an ellipse, the AI is skipping over the ellipse without pausing. Lastly, the AI's reading of the story is without the emotional input that a human narrator would include (good or bad).