Defiance of the Fall Review: The Crunchiest Series in LitRPG, and the One That Makes the Multiverse Believable

A marriage of two extremes

I'm sixteen books into Defiance of the Fall, and I enjoy it very much. It's also probably the series where my list of complaints is as long as my list of things I love. That's the honest shape of this review: a marriage of two extremes, and I'd rather show you both than sand it down to a safe summary.

Start with what works. Zac is very overpowered, but it's handled better than, say, Jake in Primal Hunter. Jake is dominant through pretty much all of Primal Hunter. Zac is overpowered relative to his own rank, and still utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of the multiverse, and sixteen books in, that's still true. The series never lets him, or you, forget how small he is.

Book one, and the Earth arc

Worth saying before the complaints: unlike Primal Hunter, where I struggled with book one, book one of Defiance is very good. The Earth arc, roughly the first three books covering the System integration, Zac's origin, and the early choices that define his power set, is excellent through and through. A lot of long series front-load their rough material; Defiance inverts that. If you bounce off this series, it won't be in the opening arc.

The crunchiest series in the genre

Defiance of the Fall is by far the crunchiest, most stat-heavy LitRPG I've listened to. Zac cultivates mind, body, and soul, and I mean that as a technical description: his skills, weapon arts, body cultivation, mind cultivation, and soul cultivation are all handled separately, in painstaking detail. This is a series where the author wants you to know exactly how you would go about cultivating if you lived in this world.

Early on, I liked it. When there are a hundred nodes to open, though, don't expect Zac to open two and skip ahead. You're there for the majority of them. And the trade never changes: half a book on an adventure to obtain the thing that sounds like it will let him defy the heavens, and then it lands as a ten percent boost to one ability, and you go, really? That's it? There are no big power spikes here. Zac's growth is dozens of small percentages across what eventually becomes something like eighty separate line items on his character sheet, and the author gives the one percent improvement the same airtime as the five. Nothing is summarized. You never get the highlights. You get the three-course meal, dessert, a second dessert, stay the night, and we'll squeeze in a brunch so you can hear the rest of the upgrades.

I have a running joke with a friend that I'm tired of listening to Zac do space yoga. There's a stretch where real power comes from him learning to paint his body with special hippie goop and hold poses, downward dog, rising lotus, turning dandelion, whatever the heck they're called, and you get chapters on learning the yoga, acquiring the tools for optimal yoga, perfecting the forms, feeling the yoga transform his body on a fundamental level, recovering from the yoga, and then reviewing the benefits of the yoga. At some point you catch yourself asking why you didn't hit the skip button twenty minutes ago.

So here's the survival guide I wish someone had given me around book nine: the author names his chapters, and the big plot beats never happen while someone is cultivating. When a chapter title is a skill, a technique, or anything involving seclusion, a cultivation array, or the prayer mat, you can skip it and miss nothing but the mechanism. Once I started doing that, my frustration with the series dropped by half. And fair warning about the character sheet itself: in the later books a full read-out runs five to ten minutes, and when Zac finally finishes powering up after a big event, his companions take their turns next. There are one or two books, book ten I think, though it might be nine, where close to half the runtime is stat, title, and ability upgrades. That's the series' one distinctly bad book, and it's bad for exactly this reason.

Here's the thing though. Fans have put this complaint to JF Brink directly in Q&As, and he flat out said no, he won't change it, because the dense, crunchy, fight-for-every-half-percent grind is what he loves about cultivation stories. And I respect that. When a man makes a choice and sticks with it because it's what he enjoys, I can't hold it against him, even when I'm the one holding the skip button. He's writing the story he wants to read. It just means the crunch is a permanent feature, so decide accordingly.

Infinite paths, and no best choice

Now the other extreme. The thing Defiance of the Fall does better than any series I've listened to: the paths to power truly feel infinite. On Earth alone there seem to be a hundred ways to cultivate, and there's never a best method, just individuals walking their own paths, with the pros and cons of each laid out. Then Zac enters the multiverse and you realize Earth was the tip of the iceberg. Every race has just as many methods unique to itself. Then you learn some techniques can combine into something entirely new, and the possibility space explodes again. It seems absurd, in the best way. Yes, this is the same excruciating detail I just complained about, pointed at world-building instead of stat sheets. I don't know if you can have one without the other. The extreme I love may not be possible without the extreme I skip. That tension is the series.

The multiverse is the pillar

When other series say multiverse, you get a handful of factions an author can keep organized, ten, fifteen, twenty at a stretch. Defiance has more than I can count, and it's the only series where the multiverse actually feels billions of years old: hidden powerhouses, supremacies in seclusion, heretics hiding from the heavens, eldritch things that predate the current heavens entirely. There are cultures out there whose mortal enemies live in universes they physically cannot reach, so the hatred just sits there for eons until some system fuckery finally lets them cross paths. The multiverse is so big that even the gods of gods can't simply travel from one side to the other. No other series has made scale feel like that to me.

And I have to be honest about a problem with reviewing this series: I keep saying it has more factions than anything else in the genre and then only walking through a couple of them. So, quick honorable mentions before the deep dives, because the bench is absurd: the Stellar Wanderers, who are essentially living collections of cosmic stars that got up one day and started cultivating. Beasts that have spent eons growing monstrous in the wild without ever bothering to join a faction. Horrors that existed before the heavens fell and were reborn, with all the baggage that implies. I could go on, and the series does, for sixteen books, without repeating itself.

Two factions to show what I mean. The Buddhists are one of the strongest religious powers, and on the surface they're pacifists; the way they interpret their teachings makes them some of the most dangerous beings in the setting, willing to sacrifice themselves, and commit violence they believe damns them, if it buys the greater multiverse peace. Pacifist on the surface, zealot underneath, and the real players all know it. It's like a high school reunion out there: everyone powerful has known everyone else for an age, and nobody is fooled by anyone's branding. I've never seen that worldview built into a faction this well anywhere else.

And the Undead Empire. Every fantasy story has undead. Brink is the first author I've come across who made undead society interesting, because it isn't one society at all: it's factions within factions, all the way down. Skeletons are their own nation with sub-types based on how they came about. The corpse lords Frankenstein themselves together from pieces of powerful beasts and defeated enemies, which means their cultivation is literally shopping for better parts. The draugr are their own noble race with bloodlines and politics that end up mattering enormously. The Reavers become one of the most important factions in the later books, and they carry the same internal structure as everyone else. And the vampires refuse to be considered undead at all and run their own society out of spite. Undead are background noise in most series. Here they're an empire with real history, and the series treats every layer of it seriously.

One more, because it's rare: money is power in this multiverse, and Defiance is maybe the only LitRPG that plays it straight. No spoiled weakling princes. The old-money factions have perfected paths and wealth beyond galaxies, and when they pour both into a descendant of merely average talent, the result is a power base that is frankly disgusting. Pay-to-win is real, it works, and watching Zac claw for every advantage against people born ahead of him is part of what keeps the story honest.

Zac, the least interesting person in his own story

A common complaint about this series, and I'll co-sign it: Zac is the least interesting character in it. He's a decent guy under pressure, trying to protect his people without selling out his morals, and that's the whole personality. No wild edges, no fits of anger, no darkness. Standard-issue hero, verging on milquetoast. I'll give him this: he fights with an axe instead of a sword, and as someone raised on anime who likes his katana-wielding samurai action, a main character who mains an axe is a nice change.

Then there's Arcaz Black, who is critical to the later books and double-edged in the purest Defiance way: I both love and hate him. Without getting into how it happens, Zac ends up leading a second life as a draugr inside the undead territories, with a separate identity and a fake noble backstory that spirals wonderfully out of control. The love: the Undead Empire politics that come with the Arcaz chapters are some of the best material in the back half of the series. The hate: Arcaz comes with an entirely separate character sheet. Zac's hundred-line laundry list of things to cultivate is literally doubled by his other half, so every grind now happens twice. And don't expect the mask to come with a new personality, because the body change doesn't touch who Zac is; the milquetoast is intact, and it's the setting and the Empire carrying those chapters, not some hidden edgier Zac.

It works anyway, for two reasons. First, the supporting cast is so much bigger in personality that Zac functions as the steady lens you view them through. Ogras alone, who enters book one looking like your trope demon bad guy and becomes a star of the series, has more charisma than Zac ever will, and the scions, ambassadors, and cultivators from all those factions arrive pre-loaded with the cultures that shaped them. Second, something is always happening in this multiverse, and Zac has to deal with it, and his relationships deepen through the dealing. Flat protagonist, spectacular orbit.

Pavi Proczko has narrated all sixteen books, one of the longest single-narrator runs in the genre, and the consistency matters in a series this dependent on accumulated context.

Verdict

S-high, and I'll own that this is a promotion: I had it parked at the middle of S-mid for a while. The knocks are real, a bad book or two, pacing that swings hard depending on how much cultivation a given volume carries, a main character who is the blandest person in his own story. But look closer at those bad books and they're bad for exactly one reason: they're overloaded with cultivation upgrades and Zac's endlessly bloated character sheet, not because the story under them breaks. Meanwhile the thing every S-tier series needs, one thing it does better than everyone else, Defiance owns outright: no work I've encountered, in this genre or any other, has made a multiverse feel this vast, this old, or this alive. Nothing else comes close, and an achievement nobody else can touch is too big to leave sitting at mid. The character-sheet bloat is what keeps it from peak. If you love crunch, you can argue me even higher. If you don't, learn the chapter-skip trick and the weaknesses mostly disappear. You won't miss a thing; the plot waits politely outside the cultivation chamber.

Don't make it your first LitRPG, it's too crunchy and too video-gamey to be anyone's introduction. Come in through Cradle, Dungeon Crawler Carl, or He Who Fights with Monsters, and make Defiance your third or fourth series. And pair it with The Stubborn Skill-Grinder in a Time Loop: a similar battle-beast of a melee main character with none of the excessive crunch, and my bet is that if you like one, you'll like the other.

Absolutely worth the credit.