He Who Fights with Monsters book 4 review

Whether you’re someone who has yet to get into LitRPG or a seasoned veteran of the genre, He Who Fights with Monsters is a great book to dive into. With a fantastic off-balance mean character and a fast-paced story adventure, it’s arguably the best LitRPG book series to read in 2022.

With 5 books in series to dig into, there is a lot of story to unpack. It has all of the elements of great LitRPG, including a unique magic system, loot, and tons of upgradeable skill trees. If you’re anything like me, you will burn through all of the books before you know it and be waiting for more.

Written by Shirtaloon (Travis Deverell), He Who Fights with Monsters is an action-packed magical adventure starring Jason Asano. Half-Japanese, half-Australian, Jason brings an off-balance yet hilarious personality that demands attention. His style of communication and fighting makes for an overall enjoyable read with just the right amount of RPG elements mixed in.

Pulled Into a Familiar, Yet Mysterious World

Like any good LitRPG, the plot follows the classic story line of modern isekai anime. Jason Asano gets yanked out of his life and sucked into another world. The new world is strangely familiar, however, and despite being surrounded by horrors and magic, he manages to find common ground with the people around him. And the best part about this new world, is that you get to read it through the eyes of Jason.

When Jason first gets pulled through interdimensional space time, he is naked, bald and confused. With nothing but his own thoughts and a new interface offering quest to guide him, he somehow makes his way through a scary new world of cannibals, monsters, and mysterious powers. The way he navigates every scenario adds a level of depth to the story and the overall atmosphere that really pulls you in.

The Good Guy but with Evil Powers

Although the world building done within the story is great, it’s the overall contradictions within Jason Asano that makes the story feel fresh. Jason always wants to do the right thing, almost to a fault, but he does so in many of the ways an evil villain would. He manipulates others through misdirection and schemes his way through political situations with ease. Despite good intentions, he makes a lot of enemies really quick and gets into a lot of sticky situations he talks himself into.

While it’s Jason’s sharp tongue and quick witted schemes that make him an interesting hero character, it’s his creepy powers that really bring it all together. Not only is able to feast on the afflictions of his friends and enemies, he has a familiar that is quite literally a pile of leeches. Despite fighting monsters and crime, he has the powers and demeanor of a super villain.

Cultivation of Power and Endless Loot

The accumulation of power follows a fairly straight-forward pattern. A character starts out at normal human levels and reach Iron Rank as soon as they receive all 4 of their “essences”. From there they make their way up to Copper, Silver, Gold, and then Diamond Rank while cultivating skills unique to their essence types. It’s a fairly simple system with a ton of interesting class and skill combinations to delight even the most casual of gamers. The characters have to upgrade their abilities through hard work and fighting endless monsters.

Naturally, because of all of the monster fighting, there is also a lot of fun loot for Jason to go through. Due to the unique abilities he gained when he was pulled into this new world, he gets a lot more loot than the average adventure. New weapons, money with his face on it, and a swath of other unique items are constantly finding their way into his storage space to be examined and used.

Where Can You Read He Who Fights with Monsters?

The easiest place to get a copy of the first He Who Fights with Monsters book is on Kindle or Amazon Audible. You can also pick up a paperback copy on Amazon or your local bookstore if they happen to have it available.

Books In the Series

• He Who Fights with Monster #1
• He Who Fights with Monster #2
• He Who Fights with Monster #3
• He Who Fights with Monster #4
• He Who Fights with Monster #5

Jacob is an established entertainment enthusiast. He has been writing content for about 6 years across multiple sites. He spent some time writing commerce content for digitaltrends.com before moving on to do some work on The Manual, where he has covered Netflix, Anime, and various movies. Now you can find his most recent work at IGN.

When he isn’t writing or working, you can find him watching endless movies and TV shows on his couch. He also plays a plethora of indie games on the Nintendo Switch and PC. And when neither of those suit his fancy, you can likely find him fiddling with his guitar and piano to attempt to make music.