The Swords Of Ditto
7.0
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The Swords of Ditto is a compact action RPG that creates a unique adventure for each new hero of...
Bloody Rose
9.0
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Book
Tam Hashford is tired of working at her local pub, slinging drinks for world-famous mercenaries and...
Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings
9.0
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Video Game
One year after the events of Final Fantasy XII, the protagonist Vaan is a sky pirate, possessing his...
Allies & Enemies (The Immortals #2)
6.0
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Book
A mortal who believes in a different god. A spy who betrayed his tribe. Allies…or enemies? ...
Young Adult Epic Fantasy
A Wrinkle in the Skin
7.0
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Book
Catastrophic SF novel. Seismic activity on an unprecedented scale leads up to a...
And so starts a series of events that will see the end of Tipu Sultans reign, Abbas’ journey to France and his subsequent quest to find and recover the tiger for himself. It’s a tale full of adventure, danger and romance. I really enjoyed it!
Possessed (Hollow City Coven #1)
8.0
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Book
A daring quest. A lethal enemy. A protector who won’t quit. Although Wiccan Gillian Granger’s...
Paranormal Romance
Ross (3284 KP) rated Awaken Online: Retribution (Side Quest) in Books
Mar 1, 2019
The brilliance of Awaken Online, aside from the storytelling and the novelty of having a main character with an "evil" alignment, is the sheer scale of it. Jason, the main character, summons zombies and skeletons to engage in large scale battles and assaults, and the focus of the books quickly became quite large-scale. The action is very much strategic where Jason orchestrates the attacks and defences from a distance, using all the weapons at his disposal to great, at time devastating, effect.
It is refreshing here to take a bit of a breather from all of that and focus more on a smaller scale. At the end of the second AO book, Riley was rewarded with an intriguing bow as a prize for completing an epic dungeon task. That reward came with a quest to complete to maximise the weapon's abilities. This book tells the story of Riley on that quest alone. Due to that reason, and her not being the same class as Jason, the book has a very different feel to it. The action is not large-scale and strategic, it is small-scale and pretty frantic at times.
The first half rattles along really well, with us getting more appreciation for Riley's personal life outside the game of Awaken Online, and the troubles she is facing at school. On her quest she quickly falls in with a gang of other players heading the same way, and she helps them to improve their skills. Once in the magic city of Vaerwald, the book takes on a different feel again, as the city feels more like early industrial than medieval. Here Riley sets out investigating an apparent "magic plague" that seems to have struck down some children and is spreading.
There are some thrilling set piece action sequences in the later stages of the book, and some great character development for Riley.
I hope the story here has more of a bearing on the final book in the main series as I can see some scope for this.
Overall, an engaging distraction from the somewhat heavier main books, with a different feel. While the book itself is quite short, it felt like a dragged a little in places, but has continued the overall world's story.
