By Kai Hsu
Genres: LitRPG, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure
Age Range: 14 - 18
Summary: On paper, Jason has a great life. He attends a prestigious private school on scholarship and his parents are reasonably well off.
Yet life hasn't been easy for Jason. He has spent most of high school being tormented by both the students and faculty and his parents are never home.
Frustrated and alone, his one escape has always been video games. In-game, he can feel the type of power and freedom he lacks in his day-to-day life. Fortunately, a new virtual reality game (the first of its kind) has just been released, which promises the opportunity for an even greater escape.
Once he begins playing, Jason quickly finds himself on the path to becoming the game’s villain. In the process, he also starts to suspect that there is something unusual going on within the game.
While a story that might initially feel cliched, Awaken Online is an entertaining series that really delves deep into modern societal problems, and how characters in the story overcome them. Through video games. Yeah. This series focuses on the LitRPG genre, which essentially is just a genre about people with video game mechanics like stats and abilities. This genre is an entire rabbit hole in itself, and there are a lot of bad stories. This series is likely one of the best ones out there, being my personal number 1 favorite series due to its concepts and ideas. Taking place in a modern world with a newly developed technology which allows people to delve into an extremely in-depth virtual reality video game, Awaken Online essentially dumps a bunch of modern world people into a fantasy world. Along with their idiosyncrasies and problems. It’s actually really creative how the author manages to write about how they deal with their problems through the game.
For example (and spoilers ahead), in a side story of the series, Dom, a star athlete who just received news of his terminal cancer, goes into the game as a sort of therapy to try and get away from his problems, with his future athlete career possibly ruined. How does he take this aspect of his life into the game? He learns to die. A lot. He eventually develops a playstyle which involves him surviving more often when close to death, and less when he’s not. Through the game, he learns to appreciate life… by dying.
See what I mean about modern-world problems? It’s not the only thing that the author addresses in the series. The existence of such an in-depth video game also causes controversy. Throughout the entire series, moralities are blurred, and although some antagonists are negatively portrayed, they’re presented in a manner in which you could likely see someone in the real world as this kind of character. All in all, Awaken Online likely tops the entire LitRPG genre with its creative and well-thought-out storytelling.
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