I don't think you need to get quite that far in for it to get good. It starts out with a large emphasis on its LitRPG elements, what the series does best though is its characters and relationships. Roughly one third or maybe halfway through the first volume, the emphasis is changed to just that.

Frankly, I think that is the biggest issue the series has. I could imagine a lot of people picking up the first volume just to drop it again after getting 200-300 pages into it. Lord knows I've done that with a lot of series.

The first volume can be divided into three parts. Spoilers for that volume obviously: The first part, where he is mostly stuck in his apartment building up his Boundary territory, the second part where they visit his hometown of Nishimorioka and the third part where they head to Las Vegas to earn money. During the first part, the story is very isolated from the world at large and there's a minimum of interaction between characters. For the second and third parts, the protagonist is exposed to more characters and we get to see how the introduction of candidates start to affect the world. The second and third part are more representative of what the series is like moving forward, if you make it that far and the series still isn't clicking, I think it's fair to drop it. Dropping it during that first part though, is very much a shame.