Sooo! It’s been a long time since you uploaded these but hey, eventually I will find all Green Room works =D (And they have been on my list anyway!)

Hia!
I must say, I really like the start of your story. I think you set the scene really well and you really get into the head of your MC. Very very good! I’m having a good time so far! The setting really comes alive, even if I’ve never been to the Philippines. I love that!

I especially like this sequence of events xd “My gut made a sound like a dying whale. The guy beside me glanced over. I looked out the window.“

That said I don’t understand why you bother to have a long paragraph abt the parents’ relationship..?
I have no idea what you mean by that: “ I had to reach for it with my elbow locked“

I think that is also where the cracks appear. Idk if you are aware but these tangents that add very little to the scene are very common in AI-assisted writing. I feel like you do too much to set the scene afterward @.@

I kinda like that your MC memorizes random things. Considering where the story is going maybe that skill will come in handy? (I mean, they didn’t look up to see the 95% message in the sky that might have been there)

What do you mean by that? “Screens appeared in front of everyone.” What type of screens in complete darkness? How did he know it was screens and not just words?

That sequence is pretty neat: “where I tried to spec Razorsong into archery because a BongRip_CA guide said it was viable. It wasn't.“


Well that was an explosive end to the chapter. I think it worked well but that you took too much time to get to the action and then didn’t really describe the action in a satisfying way. I couldn’t rly picture the things you were describing, especially in the context you set them in. (the screens, the cards, did anyone else get to pick a role or are they now randomly getting them. Wish they all would have had a bit more time to figure out the cards and stuff)


Join the fight! Write more reviews!

Let me preface this by admitting something slightly embarrassing: despite arguably being the greatest long-since-retired dungeon master in the Western Hemisphere, I do not actually know what a litRPG is, or at least not well enough to review one as a litRPG with any real confidence. So, I am going to review this the way I would review a normal prologue or opening chapter to a book: as an opening piece of fiction whose job is to establish voice, place, character, atmosphere, and narrative momentum, and to make me want to keep going. On that level, I think this is pretty damn effective. It has an actual sense of life to it, which is the thing so much genre fiction fatally lacks. The fact that it is set in the Philippines is not just stated but felt, which is the more important thing. Manila here does not read like backdrop or flavor text. Between the jeepney, España, the Taglish, the lola with longanisa, and UST being rendered as an actual lived place rather than a generic “city university,” the setting comes through vividly and naturally. It feels observed rather than researched, inhabited rather than staged.

What really sells it for me, though, is that the strongest part of the chapter is arguably the part before the apocalypse gimmick fully arrives. That is a very good sign. The longanisa material, the jeepney, the particular exhausted bitterness of the narrator, the mildly comic disgust at existence, the lonely gaming-addled teenage consciousness — all of that is excellent because it actually gives the world density before anything “happens.” The joke density is high, but it is not the wrong kind of joke density, not that stale Marvel-ish quip haze where every character sounds like a screenwriter trying to reassure the audience that they too understand tone. Here the humor feels like it is arising from Josh’s actual way of seeing. The line about the jeepney smelling like four hundred years of the Philippines’ bad decisions, the gorgeous ridiculousness of BongRip_CA, the business about his parents being “extremely okay,” even the way he files away sexual awareness under information that must be taken to the grave — all of that feels like a real adolescent intelligence, defensive and funny and kind of miserable in ways that are not put on. It also helps that the prose itself is lively at the sentence level. There is enough texture, enough specific noticing, enough little tonal pivots, that I never felt like I was merely being walked through plot furniture. Some of it could use some work, and be balanced out a bit more, but otherwise it worked for the most part.

What makes your chapter stronger than average at making its protagonist legible without becoming programmatic about it. Josh is lonely, yes, but he is not lonely in the generic workshop-fiction way where the text keeps nudging you and saying see, he is alienated. Rather, his loneliness inheres in his manner of perception. He is the sort of boy who is too observant because he has too little real human participation in the world around him; he notices because he is not embedded. That is why the line about voluntary conversation landing somewhere between four and none works, why the failure to learn classmates’ names works, why the whole frame of “life is like watching a game through someone else’s screen” works. The gaming material is actually doing double duty, not merely as genre setup but as a metaphysical description of dissociation, passivity, and adolescent bewilderment. He is good at following other people’s guides, good at noticing, and has no idea what he is actually for. That is a very good capsule of sixteen-year-old male malaise, and you render it with more sympathy and wit than a lot of people manage (though it was certainly something all of us dudes felt like when we were at that age).

When the supernatural rupture finally comes, I think it is handled well, though I will say this is where the chapter becomes slightly less distinctive than it had been up to that point. The blackout, the floating screens, the “System Interface upload,” the sudden choice of class, the countdown, the cards materializing in the room — this is all paced effectively, and the scene has real tension, especially because the teacher’s attempts to preserve classroom order persist just long enough to make the collapse of ordinary authority feel a little pathetic and human. I liked the image of the professor making a sound like choking on longanisa when the crossbow appears; that sort of tonal continuity matters. But I do think there is a slight shift here from the richly specific to the more genre-familiar. That is not a disaster at all — an apocalypse is, by definition, allowed to introduce more schematic machinery than a jeepney ride — but it does mean that the chapter’s greatest strength remains not the system itself but the local, social, psychological reality into which the system crashes. Put differently: what made me care was not the class selection screen, but the fact that it happened in this classroom, in this city, through this consciousness. The ending choice of “Skill Thief” is clever and fitting, especially given the earlier material about borrowed tactics, following guides, and living through other people’s maps, but what gives it resonance is the groundwork laid beforehand, not the game mechanic in isolation.

That, I think, is the main reason the piece works as an opening chapter rather than merely as premise delivery. There is already a thematic line running through it: imitation, dependency, passivity, the desire to take or borrow competence because one does not yet possess it organically. Josh’s life before the apocalypse is already a kind of pre-apocalyptic diminishment. So when a cosmic interface descends and starts asking him to select a class under time pressure, it does not feel completely discontinuous; it feels like the externalization of pressures already present. That is why the chapter has more literary substance than the average “normal world interrupted by magic UI” setup. The best openings do not merely introduce an event; they reveal that the event, in some displaced way, was already there. This one gets fairly close to that.

If I had to point to what still needs the most work, it would be less the premise than the degree of trust the chapter places in its own strongest material. The Manila/UST/jeepney stuff is so vivid, so specific, and so alive that once the system apocalypse mechanics arrive, the writing risks becoming a little more genre-familiar than it had any need to be. That part is still effective, but it does feel slightly less distinctive than the opening stretch. In other words, the chapter is at its best when it is being local, concrete, funny, and socially observant, and a little less so when it starts relying on floating screens, countdowns, class cards, and the broader machinery of the premise. I would also say that, while Josh’s voice is strong, there are a few places where the inner monologue edges very close to being too polished for a sleep-deprived sixteen-year-old in the moment; not enough to break the illusion, but enough that I noticed the authorial hand just a bit. And finally, if this is meant to function as a true first chapter and not just a hook, there may need to be just a touch more grounding in Josh’s actual life stakes beyond generalized loneliness and malaise, because those are rendered well, but one or two more concrete emotional anchors would make the rupture hit even harder. None of this is fatal, obviously — the chapter is good — but those are the areas where I think it could become not just engaging, but really sharp.

And now for the slightly unhinged overreading at the end, which I fully admit may be me wanting the text to be even more devious than it intends to be. What ultimately makes this opening work is that the apocalypse does not feel like it is descending on a stable or healthy world and ruining it; it feels like it is arriving in a society already held together by fumes, filth, crime, habit, prayer, corruption, and improvisation. That is why, even beyond the bananas-litRPG machinery, I cannot help reading this as potentially more than just a fun premise. There is a real sense here of a country trapped inside the afterlife of empire, bad governance, imported systems, and normalized dysfunction, where collapse is less an interruption than a change in interface. Push that far enough, and yes, this piece of yours almost starts to seem like it's flirting with a critique not just of the modern Philippines, but of what decolonization actually delivered there in practice: not dignity and flourishing, but traffic, stagnation, incompetence, and endless adaptation to broken conditions. You could even read it as haunted by the ugly possibility that the country might have been more materially functional under continued American rule than under the long mess of its postcolonial order. Whether that is intentional or not, the point is that this chapter has enough social density, enough wit, and enough historical pressure to sustain that reading without collapsing into nonsense. And that, to me, is what raises it above mere genre setup. It is not just an opening with a hook. It is an opening with a world already half-broken before the fantasy system makes the break official. Whether you intend that or not, the opening has enough social grain that it invites that sort of reading. And that, frankly, is a compliment.

Gonna pivot away from this before I try to shoehorn in a Kipling reference or tangent.

Anyway, so, yeah, overall, I came away impressed. Whatever the technical rules or expectations of litRPG may be, judged simply as an opening chapter to a novel, this absolutely works. It has voice, it has place, it has atmosphere, and most importantly, it has an actual human center before the larger machinery kicks in. That is what gives the apocalypse weight. The world does not feel like a blank stage waiting for a system prompt; it already feels strained, funny, exhausted, historical, and alive. Josh is not just a genre avatar but a recognizably lonely, over-observant, slightly sardonic teenage boy, and Manila is not just a setting but a presence. If the rest of the book can maintain that specificity — that social texture, that wit, that sense of lived reality pressing up against the fantastic — then this could be not just an entertaining premise, but something with genuine staying power. In other words: even read by someone who knows basically nothing about litRPG as a form, this got me. And that is probably the most important endorsement I can give it.