Portal to Nova Roma Review: My Most Divided Verdict to Date

All the right ingredients

Portal to Nova Roma should have been a lock for me. Follow the pitch: an AI from Earth isekais itself into a fantasy dimension resembling a ruined ancient Rome, builds itself a superior body, and leverages machine intelligence plus the entire library of Earth science, architecture, even a gun, against a low-technology world. Post-apocalyptic Roman setting. Consistent, logical protagonist. Good writing, good narration, huge popularity, constant recommendations. On paper, this is my kind of series.

I didn't finish book one. And the best way I can explain it is a cooking analogy: sometimes you assemble premium ingredients, the good cuts, the fresh herbs, everything organic, and the dish somehow comes out bland, no better than diner food. Nothing in Nova Roma is done badly. I just kept waiting for it to taste like something.

Where it lost me

Two compounding problems, and the first is my known bias, so weight it: the grind. Roughly the first half of the book is the AI alone, hunting, exploring its system, optimizing skill growth and class access. Every decision it makes is structurally sound, the consistency is admirable, and it goes on forever. You know my rule: if a character needs ten ranks, give me one good fight and a summary, then get to the story. This book gives you the fights. All of them. Across a twenty-plus-hour runtime, I was skipping ahead out of boredom before civilization even appeared.

The second problem is the one I think actually sinks it, because it would have rescued the first: the supporting cast. When the AI reaches civilization, it goes looking for companionship, that's its stated inner drive, it misses connection, and what it finds is a pair of flat adventurers and then a collection of impoverished kids and young adults it takes under its wing. And here the structure eats the story: nobody it meets is remotely its equal, everybody depends on it for everything, skills, equipment, knowledge, protection, and so every relationship collapses into mentoring. Worse, because their abilities all flow from him, every character it raises is by definition a lesser derivative of the protagonist, with no room to branch into anything surprising. I finally got through the solo grind only to watch the story restart the grind with worse versions of the main character. There's a flash of life when a rival power base forces real confrontation, good fights, a glimpse of how the local players operate, and then it's back to fathering. With three or four hours left in the book, I realized I was looking forward to being done, and stopped instead.

Verdict

B-low, and I say that carefully. The series has no glaring weakness, the craft is real, and my two complaints, grind tolerance and a need for a strong supporting cast, are exactly the axes where my taste is strictest, so plenty of listeners walk this same road and love it; the popularity is not a mystery to me. But this site rates my experience, and my experience was premium ingredients, bland dish. If an ultra-methodical solo optimizer sounds like a feature, you may well disagree with this whole review, and there's a small chance I circle back someday when the queue runs dry. The queue has never once run dry.