Throne of Magical ArcanaArcane Divine Throne

奥术神座

for anyone who had read the Library of Heaven's Path, this is like the superb version of it minus the cheap plots, brainless face slapping, and excessive amount of showing off, or you could also say that Library of Heaven's Path is ripoff version of this story. both MC got the exact same cheat, so if you haven't read Library of Heaven's Path, you can read this once and be done with it

Throne of Magical Arcana (2013)
Library of Heaven's Path (2016)
coincidence? ┐(´～｀)┌

Throne of Magical Arcana has little to no value to a reader other than a convenient way to pass time. After reading Lord of Mysteries and being greatly satisfied, I looked towards Throne of Magical Arcana. Made by the same author, I expected similar quality. After reading hundreds of chapters, I can safely say that not every novel made by Cuttlefish is a huge hit.

I do admit. One of the reasons why I kept up with this novel was purely for the future prospects that it could get better. Unfortunately, that never happened. However, another thing that struck me as interesting with some upside was the power system. Similar to Lord of Mysteries, it's power system isn't completely out of left field, but takes some basis off of popular concepts found in all sorts of media to form a comprehensive system. The problem is that Throne of Magical Arcana's system, albeit interesting, is far less unique and innovative as Lord of Mysteries. It's like night and day. Sure, I think that combining scientific methods and magical spells are interesting, but overall, it's much more tame. Plus, I think that Cuttlefish put a lot more thought into Lord of Mysteries's power system than Throne of Magical Arcana's just by virtue of text emphasis. Throne of Magical Arcana's magical model system is extremely rushed and glanced over, while every tier in Lord of Mysteries is extremely complicated and explained over the entire novel. Lucien will progress multiple tiers in magic over the course of less than a hundred chapters, and all spells he learns is summed up in "he learned this spell after working on it for a few months." Despite power progression being the most essential part of this novel, it's not explained how Lucien makes any progression, and instead, it's more rushed, and you don't really see him building his repertoire of magic as a result, but rather him rising from rags to riches in a few short moments.

Plus, he just blatantly uses his cheats to gain power, and manages to get away every single time. Klein in Lord of Mysteries hid his true identity for the longest time, but you're telling me that Lucien is able to exploit his spiritual library at apprentice level and get away with his antics? Plus, all the research papers are just of course, copy pasted from a wikipedia article essentially. Same goes for his music. I'm sure cuttlefish needed a lot of word count, so he decided to go in depth into explaining Lucien's music that he got by looking up a wikipedia article about the symphony he references in the novel. Low effort, high word count.

Finally, the characters. God, even with such a small cast of relevant characters, Throne of Magical Arcana manages to have absolutely zero characters with depth, including Lucien. Extremely one dimensional, predictable, and the most boring dialogue known to man. There's no soul, and if they're getting a lot of time in the novel, you bet it's because it's a plot device to progress Lucien faster through his magic ranks. Otherwise, they get discarded or barely mentioned despite it being an "important person" to Lucien. On the topic of plot device characters, you manage to see a pattern of the hypocritical nature of people valuing his talent, yet failing to be overprotective of him, and extremely powerful people favoring Lucien for no real good reason other than the fact that it provides more plot armor to him when encountering dangerous situations that shouldn't be happening to a genius anyway. Contrast that to Lord of Mysteries, where despite there being a large pool of characters, with some of them cast away and discarded because they're dead or got too weak, there still remains a large pool of characters with actual personality and characterization. Best of all, their dialogue is varied, personality dynamic, and their actions cause a butterfly effect that later gets beautifully spun over the span of a few arcs, or even the entire story that you get to enjoy first hand. They're not just some sort of NPC meant to guide the main character to greater heights, as it is with Lucien.
Sure, is the plot sort of interesting? Yes, the underlying is definitely interesting to a degree, but it's honestly not worth reading through with such bad characters and storytelling devices.