Reviews: Six of Crows and Nier

Leigh Bardugo — Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom

Sep. 3, Sep 9

This was an excellent heist story! I always love a solid bit of fantasy crime.

This takes place in the same world as at least one other series, and... I might not be interested in reading that one! AFAICT that other series is all about the war(s) in Ravka (fantasy-Russia), and tbh I didn't find the geopolitical situation in this world super interesting. Of of the (many) character backstories, I was much less invested in the ones tied to big events in fantasy-Russia and fantasy-Scandinavia; I was here for shitty fantasy-Amsterdam and its asshole street crooks.

I'm being less glib than it sounds with my place names in that last paragraph. The worldbuilding in this has a certain roughly-sketched-overlay feel: "OK, this can just be fantasy-Russia; override where needed, and leave the defaults otherwise." Which is perfectly fine as long as you move fast and don't let the depth of field get away from you; for example, it works great as a backdrop for a story about gang warfare, payback, and an Ocean's Eleven-style impossible heist. Ruth compared this style of worldbuilding to the Kushiel's Etcetera books... which I haven't read, but maybe that'll help a few of you see what I'm talking about.

Re: recent insufferable monologues about series structure, this was an uncommonly well-balanced duology! I feel like those are really hard to get right, and this particular approach to it was real interesting to me: basically, the first book stays focused on the heist, throwing you in with an ensemble cast and expecting you to just keep up, and then the second book is half about payback for the double-cross and half about backstory and loyalty missions for everybody. It almost feels like a videogame structure?! IDK; I don't have a complete theory of this, but shape-wise it kind of reminded me of FF6 somehow. A tick/tock structure: "Learn how this all works / see what you're made of."

Bonus Level: Nier: Automata

Sept. 7

WELL, that was, definitely, a lot of something.

I liked this quite a bit. A bizarre and personal game with incongruously triple-A production values.

I enjoyed the gameplay a lot, but tbh I felt pretty bad about it a lot of the time — like, we were very much the villains of this story pretty much from the word Go, and participating felt gross. It was a fascinating story, and I was always interested in finding out what happened next, but, Jesus, what a persistent downer. When the time came to accept the offer to delete my save data, I was ready.

Albeit, a downer punctuated with a LOT of weird comedy bits. These intense tonal shifts strike me as very Japanese, and at some point I started wondering — do y'all reckon that taste started with Tezuka? Or does it go back further? My money's on Tezuka. In answer to most questions, really.

The lore in this series is so wild. I never played the first Nier, and definitely had to do some deep wiki reading to understand what the hell was supposed to have happened 7000 years before this game started. I still don't 100% get it, but I guess the only thing that's legit confusing if you skip it is why Devola and Popola matter so much. There's some significant thematic reinforcement, though.