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SQUIDS is a unique mix of action strategy and RPG: build your team of heroes for epic turn-based...

Ross (3284 KP) rated Empire of Grass: Book Two of the Last King of Osten Ard in Books

May 27, 2019

Better than the previous book, still *too* epic

*** I received an advance copy of this book from the publishers and NetGalley ***

The second book in The Last King of Osten Ard series is a continuation from The Witchwood Crown. There was no grand finale of that book, so this coming straight off the back of it seems natural.
Where the first book was all about bridging from the previous series to the new one, and setting up some of the plot to come, this one was allowed to get on with the job at hand. And boy does it - there is so much plot. We chop and change from one character's PoV to another. At times this is a little jarring as they don't tend to be closely linked. And at certain points, we are reunited with a character we haven't seen for 100 pages or so and frankly have forgotten what they were up to.
This massive cast of characters, and epic strands of plot which barely converge throughout the book, is something I don't take well to. I found this with John Gwynne's books and the same is true here - I find it quite hard to remember who is who. And it doesn't help that some of the characters are fairly interchangeable, having very similar backstories and positions in their respective houses.
Some of the plot is revealed as we go through the book, which keeps the reader guessing (why are they doing that, why are they going there etc). However the narrative style is a little towards the "describe everything"/Stephen King end of the spectrum, which can get tedious at times.
There are key points in this book where characters converge together and they are truly wonderful pieces to read and really engage the reader. However there are so many tiresome trudges through the forest, and a few too many times where people suddenly meet up at the right time to be rescued.
An epic fantasy tale in every sense of the word, and definitely something different to the current crop of writers in the genre. But a massive commitment is needed from the reader (I think of myself as a medium speed reader but this took me nearly 4 weeks to finish).

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Ross (3284 KP) May 28, 2019

They are pretty enjoyable, but really really long. Over the last couple of years I have read less and less epic fantasy so was out of practice a little. I think these are the longest books I've read on kindle, and it gets too depressing not seeing that percentage marker change for ages (which shouldn't matter but it does!). I haven't read the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series, but have heard this one is back to that quality (though the Witchwood Crown a step down).

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Cori June (3033 KP) May 28, 2019

Hmm.... Thanks for the heads up. I've noticed that with ebooks it sometimes takes until the second or third swipe before you reach a "new page" (depending on your screen and font settings) and that bothers me. If you read the Otherworld books on kindle be prepared those are 1000+ pages per paperback book.

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LoganCrews (2861 KP) rated Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) in Movies

Sep 20, 2020

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

2001 | Adventure, Animation, Sci-Fi

6.2

(22 Ratings)

Movie Rating

I have almost nothing new to add, everything you've heard is true: the animation is almost religiously astounding for the time and even now (in spite of some expected hiccups for the rudimentary motion capture of the time: i.e. speed being an issue - anything that moves above 0.1 MPH has an unsightly motion blur all over it and all the running looks like mall-jogging), CGI wouldn't look this good for years and years afterward but the thing moves at a snail's pace with an oddly apparent avoidance of any sort of fun. Certainly still weird and visually prepossessing enough to get a pass (if this didn't have its unforgettable photorealistic animation it would suck just as hard as any other generic sci-fi fodder, this is home to some truly bracing imagery) - but what the actual hell were they thinking with this writing? All the characters are nonentities in their own story (delivered with similarly boring voice acting by an all-star cast, which most animated films would later replicate directly) and whatever remnants of a story are left behind in the rubble *do* have the potential to be poignant and thought-provoking but are rather just passively mentioned a time or two by way of banal exposition into a mess of things that don't add up to anything more than a stupid story. Can't believe they thought this would work with... anyone (especially fans of the character-driven games given that they turned this into some odd but rather bland alien film for some confounding reason lol) considering all the massive amounts of money they shoveled into it - and minus a few more points for being another tech-heavy future fantasy set in a world that's entirely grey and decrepit. However, the last half hour is some squarely invigorating, enigmatic spectacle that finds an intense beauty in how mind-boggling and glamorous it all is - you'd think the whole thing is always one second away from collapsing into the best of non-western genre surreality. In fact It seems almost unreal in and of itself to be watching something so conventional yet so unrestrained and auteurish. Really needed like eight movies to fully explore these themes but I'm also kind of glad they didn't - half epic and half yawnsville but the epic is more epic than the yawnsville is yawnsville.