Magic Made Simple

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

In an experiment gone horribly wrong, a team of physicists inadvertently open their solar system to the greater universe, changing their world forever.

And those who brought about the end? The system judges them worthy. For his contributions, River is given an S+ rank designation and 180 days to complete the tutorial.

River always wanted to understand how the world around him worked. He even dedicated his life to discovering the rules of his reality. Now the rules have changed — and he’ll stop at nothing to master them.

To master magic.

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2024
Author: Jacks of Clubs

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.3/ 5.0
Followers: 2,345
Views: 486,361

Reviews

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Community Reviews(10)

IncrediblyLargeBoiiRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
Lots of fighting, very little science. But that's not necessarily a problem. This is your standard tower climb story.
Style: Intruging pace, not afraid to jump through boring parts. We know MC is a glutton and eats lots of food, but we don't actually see him eat more than 5 meals or so. We actually don't see a lot of things, as the 1st person narrative keeps us in the dark about many things, just as the character would be.
Story: Author does a good job with wiping the modern Era away - if there are 8 billion people in the world, how can the story only focus on 20 of them? Time in the tutorial is limited based on set factors, so it's understandable that eventually the core cast of characters is left.
Characters: The story falls a bit flat here. The main focus is on combat and skills. Due to the 1st person narrative, a lot of things happen off screen while MC is challenging a boss somewhere. Makeshift civilizations rise and fall without his knowledge of it. We don't even know much of the MC's backstory or see ant internal monologue. However I don't see this being a problem for those who care about combat writing, as there is lots of that.
Grammar: Fairly consistent throughout the story, with minor word misuses. The occasional correct but incorrect word that never got highlighted by a spell checker. "Mana" cut off to just say "Man" or "he" when we know it should say "she".
Merchant04Royal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
I’m greatly enjoying the way river is doing things, he’s overpowered but in a way that sort of makes sense, he was extremely curious and working to understand the fundamentals of his reality which leads him to being able to break down the understanding of things easier so it makes sense that he’d be able to figure out magic decently easy up to a point. I’m looking forward to much more and highly recommend any to at least give a read of the first few chapters.
GarrdorRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
This story is mostly entertaining. Its cool watching a guy fight through dungeon floors while maintaining his (sort of shallow) personality. This whole review is gonna be me whining, but I promise I'm doing it for a good reason, I just want this story to be better than it is. I've read 430 pages, I think I'm entitled to air my (somewhat) subjective complaints.
Here are the things I don't like about it, in order of what annoys me most:
1) The tense switches all the time: It's actually driving me a little insane. It switches between present tense and past tense (but like, literary past tense, so it kinda still reads as present tense?), and it's as if I'm trying to read two subtly different font sizes at once. It just drives me nuts, and it happens fairly often.
2) the unfulfilled expectations of an intelligent MC: He's supposed to be a PhD researcher/scientist who literally created a black hole and sucked the whole world into the system, but all his exploits and experiments with mana are hand waved away. Beyond that, he doesn't act or think like an exceptionally smart person. He just blasts monsters in the head with mana bolts, absolutely no clever tactics or clever uses of magic. He seems to be able to cobble together any mana based skill he sees or reads about, and yet has barely done that, relying instead on the skills gifted to him by the System. Even with him gaining the "convert mana into other energy" skill, he still just hits enemies with mana bolt, but with added kinetic force. He's turning massless energy into KINETIC FORCE, and it's barely given a sentence worth of explanation.
At his second evolution, he gets the option to switch his class to one that has benefits when dealing with gravity, space and time mana. Instead of picking the class that'll give him hints about the secrets of the universe, he picks the one that gives him a stat multiplier against higher level enemies. He had the choice between archmage and duelist classes, and he choose DUELIST. Thr
GingerMuffinRoyal Road
★★★ 3.0
From the beginning, we are told the MC is a scientist. He works on a team as peer to a group of the most advanced scientists around on a cutting edge scientific breakthrough. As far as I can tell, his specialty is pushing a button or something.
We are never shown the MC engage in any sort of intellectual introspection. The MC is bafflingly incurious and lacking any creativity. When presented with an endless library full of information that we are explicitly TOLD he can understand, his first reaction is to punch a bookshelf to try and bring it all down. He doesn’t even pick up a book until it is all but given to him as a reward by the system.
The MC is given a physicist’s wet dream in the form of direct mana to energy conversion and beyond a few extremely basic uses in an area explicitly designed to make him use it, he remains completely uninterested in exploring the ability, leaving pretty much every ability unexplored in lieu of yet another pure mana control prodigy story.
As far as I can tell, the lie that the MC is a physicist exists only to serve as an excuse to have the MC start with an overwhelming advantage.
With that out of the way, the story isn’t bad. It’s nothing exceptional but with the understanding that this is, in fact, a generic battle junkie mana prodigy story with a few flavourings, it’s actually alright. There’s relatively few grammar or spelling mistakes. The style of the author is pleasant and mostly competent. The characters that the MC interacts with seems relatively interesting and the setting is shaping up to be something worthwhile.
Overall it’s an okay story, better than a lot of the stories you find on this site, but ultimately not remotely what the premise implied it was going to be.
Littleking77Royal Road
★★★ 2.5
The story isn't bad but it is not what it is made out to be by the summary. The MC is supposed to be this genius physicist and want to discover the intricacies of mana but he spends most of his time fighting. He very rarely experiments with his magic when there are so many obvious improvements he could make.
And honestly the character just seems a little flat. There is almost a nonchalant attitude towards the fights and little strategy. Afterwards he says it was full of risk where every moment death is on the line, but it doesn't seem that way. There isn't much emotion to the fight, more just a basic description.
The story is decently entertaining but I think falls flat of what it could be.
acidic_spermRoyal Road
★★★ 2.5
Let me say this first. This isn't a totally unsalvageable mess by any means. I admire the author for spending time to write this and publish it for free. It's decent work, but it had failed in one monumental aspect: expectations.
The most important critique I have for this is that the synopsis and very beginning of the story is basically false advertisement. The story is a bait and switch. It suggests that the protagonist, Physicist River, will be the scientist type. It suggests he will be conducting research to learn the laws of the new world. That is not what he does, not at all. What he does is fight, train, and level up. The study he does is minimal to non-existent.
The story does give us reasons as to why he doesn't do that, but it all seems like contrived excuses. "Oh, he must level up and get stronger to know of the new world," and "Oh, he can still study the new universe no matter what class he chooses," it's technically true, somewhat, but it fails to be enough to justify the disappointment the people expecting science and research has to go through.
The prose and grammar are serviceable. It's readable and simple, nothing more nor less. However, there are bits of mistakes in grammar and spelling at times, which do confuse me semi-regularly.
I can't judge the story or character development because I've dropped it quite early, but it's standard for a LitRPG up until I've dropped it. It's simple, but lacking in depth, which may be good for some of you.
In conclusion, if you're expecting science and research of magic and the new world, this is not it, not even close. However, if you're looking for an Action LitRPG with a combat mage MC that fights from mid-close range, this is fine.
(p.s. I'm using my standard of rating which does not account for the nature of web novel works.
I also notice a few similarities in this work with The Primal Hunter, which some of you may like. Though it's hard to say if these were directly derived from The Primal Hunter since I'm n
SirRoyal Road
★★ 2.0
So first of all, just like many others are saying, the premise the description and first chapter promise are just bait and switch, but it's fine as long as it's good right?
That would be the case, if sadly, it wasn't a gary sue power fantasy. For a quick rundown of what that means, basically the protagonist can do no wrong, everyone against him is wrong or bad, and everything falls into his lap without effort.
Character
The Most important part of almost any story; the characters in this one are quite... Flat. Every character fits into their role and never strays, occasionally having a hint of personality here an there but nothing permanent.
Lets start with the main character: River Bend.
River Bend is first described as someone who doesn't like his name, is studious, doesn't like reading long walls of text, plays DnD, and was second in charge of making a blackhole. After the first chapter these details are never shown through his character.
Upon teleporting to a new world and getting magic, what will the first thing this scientist do? Expirement? Practice? Talk with his fellow scientists, some of whom are magic users themselves? No the first thing he wants to do is kill. You could say exploration like he said, but he never even mentions any interest in his surroundings besides that the trees are taller and thicker, we don't even know if there is a sun till later chapters where it turns night.
But maybe he's just stressed and needed to vent, but surely omce he starts exploring magic we should see some of his personality? Nope. The only two things he wants to try with his magic, is make it bigger, and faster. No future goals either, that's it.
Okay but maybe when he gets advanced forms of magic he w- he doesn't. While saying he could probably learn how to make the skills he chooses on his own he never even attempts to. And once he figures out one basic thing to do with them, that's it. He's done exploring that skill.
Well he doesn't have time he needs to level up- h
AntaRoyal Road
★★ 1.5
So simple an incurious simpleton like River can master it.
This is not a story about exploring magic, it's a story about a battle-crazed battlemage. The bait and switch docks a star, but we can still review the actual content, or we could, if there was much of anything in the first place.
If we consider "unnaturally determined MC (who's kinda sociopathic) rises above in a litrpg apocalypse tutorial" as a genre then this story makes for a very uninspired and very fitting addition. If you're hungering for slop of this exact variety then dig in.
MagusHawkRoyal Road
★ 1.0
Pros: The author is very good grammatically and has more than decent pacing.
Cons: The characters, which started off decently well slowly lose actual characterization and start to completely seem like they are no longer the same character. The summary blurb is a complete falsehood compared to the actual story so far, as there has been no attempt by the main character to really dig into the magic system at all. Additionally the main character decides to pass up the class that is actually tailor made for an advanced physicist to go for solo edgelord combat focus. I love combat as much as the next guy but honestly that’s not what the story was sold as in the summary, and the comments on each chapter seem to agree.
Conclusion: If you’re looking for another fighter with a light flavoring of the arcane this is a great story, but if you’re looking for the story the summary describes this isn’t it.
NeonGhostRoyal Road
★ 0.5
The title and synopsis is a lie, the character largely doesn't care about magic except for how it can make him punch harder. He's given multiple opportunities between classes and skills to study and research magic and doesn't. Even the way he fights is using a dagger and a magic shield with the occasional arcane blast for the aesthetic. If you were looking for a story with a major focus on magic this isn't it, their are better stories for that that aren't even focused on the exploration of magic.