픽 미 업!(Pick Me Up)

Description / Comments

Protag is your average korean dude who enjoys playing mobile/gacha games, but he is insanely unlucky at them, and the game he is playing for some reason even has permadeath for any of the characters you roll. The game releases a brand new event with the ability to get one of the highest star characters in the game, but once the event launches and he sends off some fodder characters to see what the boss is like, he instead gets sucked into a brutal world of one of the gachas he was playing surrounded by weak 1star units who exist solely to die to fodder, and a dumbass “player” who barely even knows how to play the game at a base level.

I did really enjoy this work a fair bit in the earlier chapters. There was a basic sense of foreboding dread of being trapping in a hellish roguelike game and everybody able to die off really easily, and the characters had to actually train and struggle to get strong enough to fight. Everything was an uphill battle and the protagonist had to actually strategize and make the best of what he was working with to make ends meet. There’s also a really cool struggle between fighting against an “omnipotent god” that is the “player” and their whimsical decisions possibly messing up what he does or even the threat of killing him outright.

However as the story went on that become less and less of an issue, and the protagonist started to be the god emperor of epic badassery and dabs on everybody singlehandedly with nobody even being close to his power level. He is the chosen one, the cool dude who knows all of the information and keeps everybody completely in the dark, with all of the skills and power, and everybody else lives solely to follow his directions because he knows best. Then as the work goes further and further along he is able to meet up with his original account/NPCs and becomes even more insanely broken that nothing else in the work even matters anymore. There is no tension, no struggle, the protagonist repeatedly pulls deus ex machina bullshit out of his anime hair while being the best of all time. All of the characters devolve into brainless NPCs that exist to make the protagonist look cooler, like every other korean power fantasy work by this god awful studio.

Chapter 90 is the dumbest thing ever lmao. Epic gamer dude games all over everybody else in games that he games the games so hard bro.

I regret reading 150+ chapters of this garbage after getting baited by the nice start. I do appreciate the cute twinbraid fairy mascot, but that’s about the only thing left that I like about this series. It’s not an F since I do feel like there is some merit in at least reading the beginning and seeing the Potential of what the series could’ve been, but I don’t recommend actually picking it up since you will likely just end up with disappointment as well.