Best of 2024

These are my LitRPG picks of 2024, and I’ll be honest, it was a quiet year for the genre on the blog. I only got one new LitRPG book review written all year, plus a season of anime that’s about as close to a LitRPG on screen as anything I’ve watched. So rather than pretend that’s a top nine, I’ve done what I’d actually tell a friend who asked me what to read. Start with the new one, watch the show, and then go back to the books I was still pushing on people all year. Every pick comes from a review that was already on the blog by the end of 2024, and the scores are the ones I gave at the time, no changes. Most of my LitRPG happens on audio these days, between Scribd, Kindle Unlimited and the odd Audible credit, usually while I’m driving or out walking, so a few of these come with a word about the narration as well. The earlier list for this genre is my LitRPG picks of 2022.

I’ve been reading LitRPG long enough now that I can see the formulas coming, the chosen hero, the tragic backstory, the grind towards godhood, and it’s fine, but it gets tiring when every book is built the same way. What the two new picks this year have in common is that they both start with a hero who’s at the very bottom, and both of them make the climb feel earned rather than handed out. That’s the thing I keep coming back for. The older books further down are the ones that got me hooked in the first place, and they’re still the yardstick I hold everything else up against.

The one I’d start with: Mark of the Fool

Mark of the Fool has one of those premises so clean you wonder why nobody did it before. Every century the gods of Thameland mark five teenagers as Heroes to fight an ancient evil called the Ravener, the Champion, the Chosen, the Saint, the Sage and the Fool. Four of those are gifts. The fifth is a punchline. Alex Roth gets the punchline on his eighteenth birthday, a mark that lets him learn any skill at superhuman speed but floods his head with every failure he’s ever had whenever he tries to cast a spell. Past Fools ended up as mascots, sacrifices or traitors, and Alex looks at that menu and decides he’d rather not order anything. So he runs, with his little sister Selina, his best friend Theresa and her enormous three-headed dog Brutus, for the University of Generasi, the greatest magic school in the world.

What I loved is that he wins with his brain instead of a bigger fireball. A monster in a cave becomes a problem to solve rather than a fight to win, and when he can’t fight for himself he learns golemcraft at speed and builds a clay bodyguard, Claygon, with Selina sculpting the body. Once they reach the university it turns into a proper magic-school book, classes and exams and money worries and Baelin, the ancient, unbothered Chancellor who’s a joy every time he turns up. It’s a slow burn, and the big threat fades into the background for a long stretch, but honestly that’s part of the charm. I gave it 9 out of 10, and I finished it wanting the next one straight away.

On screen: Solo Leveling

I’d read the Solo Leveling manhwa years before the anime turned up, and I went into Season 1 with the specific dread of somebody who’s seen a favourite story flattened before. It lasted about ten minutes. Sung Jinwoo is an E-rank hunter, the lowest tier there is, hurt all the time, mocked by everyone and scraping together money for his mother’s hospital bills, until a double dungeon goes horribly wrong and a mysterious System picks him as its only player. From then on he’s got a game interface only he can see, quests, stats and an inventory, and early on the quests are push-ups and running, and there’s something genuinely funny about how much he celebrates one stat point. Then it gets nasty. A C-rank raid leader abandons the weaker members to save himself, the System drops Jinwoo into a hundred-floor dungeon guarded by a three-headed Cerberus with no backup at all, and an agent sent to quietly get rid of him turns into a vicious close-range fight.

That’s exactly the mechanism I turn up for as a LitRPG reader, and the show gets why it works. Every new ability feels earned, every stat point traces back to a hospital bill he can’t pay, and the animation gives the fights real weight, the Igris fight in episode 11 most of all, which I rewound more than once. His friendship with Yoo Jinho gives it heart, and the ending, when he finally says Arise and pulls his first shadow soldier out of a fallen enemy, changes everything that came before. I gave it 9.5 out of 10, and the only reason it wasn’t a 10 is that I already know how much bigger the story gets and now I’ve got to wait.

Carried over: Dungeon Crawler Carl

If someone asked me in 2024 for the best LitRPG I’d read, the answer was still Dungeon Crawler Carl, and it was a 10 out of 10. Every building on Earth collapses in a single night, and Carl only survives because he’s outside in his boxers chasing his ex-girlfriend’s show cat, Princess Donut. Then the planet’s announced as repossessed, turned into an eighteen-floor dungeon and broadcast as the biggest reality show in the galaxy. It’s brutal and it’s laugh-out-loud funny, and the dungeon’s snarky, corporate AI is one of my favourite characters in the genre. Carl’s a former Coast Guard who’s practical, stubborn and completely uninterested in being anybody’s entertainment, Donut’s a pampered Persian who learns to talk and grows an ego to match, Mordecai’s the old crawler teaching them a rigged game, and Mongo is a velociraptor. It’s also the series I’d hand to people who don’t even like LitRPG.

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario was busier and messier, but the Desperado Club alone made it worth it, and The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook gave us the Iron Tangle, every underground railway on Earth tied in a knot, plus Katia and a secret manual for sabotaging the whole show. Both got an 8 out of 10. I did all three on audio, and the full-cast performance is one of the best I’ve ever heard, which matters a lot when a floor’s packed with clowns, bird-people and talk show hosts and you still never lose track of who’s talking. Donut’s voice in particular is a small miracle of comic timing. And the world past the dungeon, the sponsors and producers and galactic viewers placing bets and sending gifts, is sketched in just enough to make you feel watched the whole time, which is really the point.

And the books that got me hooked

Life in the North was one of the earliest LitRPG books I read, and quite possibly the one that got me hooked on the genre. John Lee is camping in the Yukon when Earth turns into a dungeon world and monsters start spawning all round him, at a level well above his own, so just getting off the mountain is a fight. The elves and orcs are nothing like Tolkien’s, and there’s as much science fiction in it as fantasy. I skip a lot of the character-sheet counting, I’ll admit, but it doesn’t really take me out of the story. Ali, the wisecracking spirit who helps John work out the new world, is half the fun, and by the end there’s a mecha suit with real Iron Man overtones.

Land of the Undying stood out because the two leads have a life outside the game as well as in it, and their romance grows in both. Their abilities grow in a nice, realistic way without too many windfalls, even if they’re both a bit too competent in real life. Then there’s Legend of the Arch Magus which turned out not to be LitRPG at all once I got into it, more a wizard who wakes up thousands of years later in the body of a spoiled noble. He’s a bit too overpowered for his own good, but it’s a good, uncomplicated listen with plenty of world-building, and the narration made every character easy to pick out. Put the whole lot together and it’s a short list for a quiet year, but there isn’t a book or a show on it I wouldn’t recommend, and if you only try one, make it Mark of the Fool.

What did you read in LitRPG in 2024 that I should have covered? Tell me in the comments.