or better known as: Surviving As A Player. contains spoilers!
completely translated, 266 Chapters for main story and 9 chapters for R19 side story. novel is R15 tho, webtoon is fully R19.
where to read:
https://www.novelupdates.com/series/how-to-survive-as-a-player/tags: violence (quite a lot), nsfw (side story), fantasy, magic, virtual game, supernatural, monsters, angst, obsessed characters, possessive.
about MC (sehyun) : small, a celestial (have white wings, humanoid character) with golden hair, the king of the first ranked empire in Elix. his character is definitely TOO soft hearted and kinda pushover.
about ML (Luhak/Nellius/Nel) : MC’s grand duke, one who has to “control” his king so that their empire can grow stronger to face the final battle. tall, a dark celestial (he previously has white wings but changed to one white one black wings after MC changed their attributes/race for the game and finally now both of his wings are black after an “incident”). had a cold war with MC now bcs he believed MC abandoned him and their empire before but yeah yk the drill, that’s not it.
summary: MC and the other IRL players got sucked into the virtual game that they once play (it’s just the place settings tho, they actually got isekai-d into a different planet called Elix) and was tasked to save that Elix world from the destruction and a final monster. each players are “guided” by their own grand dukes and MC’s grand duke is having a cold war with him.
first of all, i have to make it clear that webtoon adaptation is NAWT it. i mean if you read the novel first and then got excited for webtoon adaptation, uh huh. that might not be good for you.
bcs webtoon adaptation removed a HUGE chunk of novel scenes, changed characters as well (like some characters that were meant to be on scene got replaced, got removed and their appearance also got changed etc), changed the time/place settings, changed the game/empire information (like their rank and their skills, strengths), and also changed the plot (subtly changed and mixed it up).
so someone like me -who abandoned novel at like first 3 chapters bcs it doesn’t click that much and just read the webtoon until the latest chapters- was naturally got hit by a massive “what the fuck is happening” once i turned back to novel. istg.
for a better explanation, 77 chapters in webtoon now covered almost 160 chapters in novel, HALF of the novel mind you. that’s how much scenes got removed, changed and mixed. that’s why i got confused for quite some time when i moved to novel so i would highly suggest those who got invested in webtoon AND novel, to actually read the novel from the beginning if you want to pick it up. bcs i honestly would just suggest to non novel reader to just stick to the webtoon until the end tho, just removed the information that the webtoon got a novel too for your own peace lol.
like after reading the webtoon don’t jump in to find chapters from the novel to pick it up just bcs you’re impatient bcs your mind will easily be destroyed by the confusion afterwards lmaoo. you just have to start from the beginning. why did i say this? bcs the genre is a “virtual game”, so naturally if you read from the webtoon alone and understand stuff that like “oh this is how they did/that’s how the empire works!”, you won’t be able to just jump in the middle of novel chapters with that kind of knowledge at all bcs in novel things are a bit different.
that’s actually the most shocking thing to me, like idk it feels really careless and sloppy for the webtoon authors and artists to actually modified SO many things from the novel that it’s actually feel like we’re walking with different plot and settings. but oh well, i’m not part of the production team so i believe that they did their best behind the scene and work closely with the original novel author. maybe they just tried to turn an almost 300 chapters novel into a very short ver instead bcs yeah a lot of scenes got dragged in novel too, like it doesn’t even need to get past 200 chapters tbh lol.
so talking about the novel experience overall, honestly i wasn’t impressed with how the author tried to turn every single scenes into something “deeper” or sentimental. like why do every single heroes character have sad + VERY predictable backstory for like 10 chapters each? (just an exaggeration btw but it does felt too repetitive and long for MC’s heroes backstory) and like wdym even that final, the most scariest monster villain that killed thousands of people and hundreds of planets got a happy ending too just bcs they TOO got tragic backstory?
that’s just ridiculous to me tbh, villains in this novel can’t even be hated properly. like atp even the author is too weak hearted for me, they’re certainly not fit to write these supposedly angst and violence genre novel bcs the yawn that i let out when each backstory laid out is insane, even my eyes got hurt from rolling it too much.
so yeah that’s what putting me off the most. it feels like this novel is nothing but “positive”, so it doesn’t invoke any other feelings in me other than i purely read it just to finish it out of boredom. not bcs it’s overly interesting or the plot is intriguing.
a shame, honestly. bcs at the very least it has a good writings. like those boring stuff got justified with a somewhat good writings ig ㅋㅋㅋ
i wouldn’t say it’s wasting my precious time for reading almost 300 chapters, but with how long i put this off and abandoned it for days, it just proves how my instincts was right all along. i was lazy to pick this up bcs it wasn’t interesting enough and throughout all those chapters, i was proven right.
i gave this a 4/10 bcs the fact that i have to take a nap between chapters was….brutal lmao. spent 4 days actually reading this, found this novel 2 weeks ago, read 1-3 chapters and got bored, found webtoon adaptation, abandoned at the first chapter for 3 days and then finished all webtoon chapters in 2 days, finally picked up the novel again and finished it in 4 days.
i….can’t recommend this novel but i won’t stop people who want to read this if they’re bored tho! like i guess i also did (albeit painstakingly) finished this novel after all so uh, try it? ^^’
edited: i forgot to mention that it’s kinda weird too how the author tried too hard to make up the R15 main story novel by writing weird shit like this. there’s a lot of scenes where ML sexualized MC by using his “wings” as a weak point. idk much about wings metaphor but the author certainly make their wings as a sexual symbols and it’s kinda uncomfortable with how sloppy it was written. it’s like they tried to replicate a sex/blowjob scene by writing shits like “pushing the tip of the wings deep inside, the feathers are entangled tightly, the wings trembled and continue to be entangled” uh..yeah that.
idk if anyone fw that type of sexual play but imo if it’s idk written carefully maybe it’s a good kink. but in this novel it’s just weird, so -0/10 experience for that, it’s just a mess nothing sexy about that at all.
Messages