Bookpost: The end of 2020

[roadrunnertwice]

It's been a minute, but I finally bothered to wrap up my reviews of stuff I read/played in 2020. Here's the last of them!

Isaac R. Fellman — The Breath of the Sun

Oct 16

This was really good, and it did some things I haven’t seen much (if ever) in a fantasy novel before. It also had an excellent narrative voice and some genuinely hair-raising climbing, and I’m still chewing on some of the questions it was asking about faith and truth. Solid and unique addition to the genre of non-Euclidean and symbolically authentic mountaineering adventures.

I read most of this on my phone while we were hiking the Wonderland Trail, which was an excellent setting for it. (We were going around a mountain rather than up one, but still.)

Especially recommended to anyone who was never able to get the back third of The Left Hand of Darkness out of their heads, the part with Genly and Estraven walking across the ice in the endless polar twilight.

Catalogue note: The author transitioned at some point after publication but not long enough ago for everything to finish reorienting itself, so depending on the edition you run into it might be listed under his old name instead ("Rachel Fellman").

Bonus Level: Ikenfell

Oct 31

I liked this a lot! Cute art, good characters, solid pacing and plot, really good soundtrack, and a really engaging and challenging battle system.

I kickstarted this project back in... 2016? 2015? And forgot about it for a long-ass time, and was entirely startled when it suddenly shipped.

I liked a lot of things about the story in this, but I don’t have much to say about that — well, either that, or I have a bunch of things I could talk about but I'd rather just leave you to encounter them on your own. It’s good! It goes to a lot of effort to be kind. I particularly like how the person who's initially set up as a Draco Malfoy analogue ends up being one of the most sympathetic people in your party.

The battle system was absolutely fantastic, and felt really well-tuned. It goes something like this:

• It’s somewhere between the Lunar games and a more standard tactics RPG, plus a Mario RPG style attack/defend timing system bolted on. (That mechanic seems to be having a resurgence lately; Sea of Stars is going hard on that too.)
  • The battlefields are extremely cramped, which forces you to think really hard about where you're moving to and how to stay out of the way of your own best attacks.
  • The timing bonuses/penalties are large, with sometimes a whole order of magnitude between a "great" and an "oops". Personally, I liked how that forced me to stay on my toes; Persona 5 gave me a taste for swingy battles where shit might turn hard against you if you're careless, and this is definitely that. But if you hate that mechanic or just can't get the timings down, there's a setting to nerf it (no "oops", so it defaults to medium) or disable it (always "great").
• There's no MP or spell charges (and only two or three skills have cooldowns), and there's no "normal" attacks; every character just has eight spells (eventually) that can be used at any time and are all very situational/positional. I loved this, it really encouraged me to use my whole range of powers.
• Somehow, and I have no idea how they sorted out the math on this, there is very little damage inflation over the course of the whole game. You're still doing single- or low-double-digit damage by the end, and although you can withstand a lot more whomping by the time the endgame rolls around, 15 or 20 damage still feels catastrophically massive. I think this really contributed to how tense nearly every battle felt! And also to how significant the equipment upgrades felt — plus or minus 2 damage a pop is a big deal.

And finally, just on a technical quality level, the game just felt really solid and well-constructed.

Strong recommend if you're at all in the mood for a wholesome JRPG that nods to the classics and then does its own thing.

Martha Wells — The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air, and The Gate of the Gods (re-reads)

Nov. 19 through Nov. 25

This series remains a huge fave of mine, and also remains wildly underrated. I keep hoping more people will discover it after running out of Murderbot.

Ann Leckie - The Raven Tower (re-read)

Dec 9

This book still rocks.

Bonus Level: Persona 4 Golden

Nov. 9

I'd wanted to play this game for ages, but never had a good way to do so... and then they re-released it on Steam! Hell yeah.

I've got a whole bunch of nitpicks, but first-off, respect where due: I enjoyed this a ton, and wow, playing the original in 2008 must have been incredible. I'm kind of amazed at how much of the Persona 5 formula was already up and running at this point! And the story explanation for how a person's persona emerges is actually more coherent than P5's.

Also, the translation is definitely superior to P5's. The story I heard (from a translator who heard it as gossip from other translators) was that P3 and P4's translations were an in-house team with way more access, context, and iteration time than normal, but they laid those folks off at some point and did P5 in the industry-standard contractor-based style. Boo to that.

That said: today this game is a flawed gem, and Persona 5 improved upon it in nearly every possible way. Still worth a play, but the state of the art has advanced.

• The story dungeons are boring — each one has its own style of corridors, but they're just laid out randomly without any interesting landmarks or distinct areas to traverse. Mementos was like this in P5, but all the story dungeons felt like solid places.
• The mook enemies are also boring! Well, okay, their visual designs do have a certain berserk charm. But they have no particular personality, and just kind of read as mathematical collections of mechanics to be parsed. For P5’s mooks they decided to just repurpose the massive stable of mythological Personae they've spent the whole series cultivating, and it was a brilliant move -- there's so many of them that they didn't need to fuck around with palette swaps or minor reconfigurations, and they all have their own weird personalities, and the hold-up negotiation dialogue, and and and! That also solved the issue of where the fuck your protagonist's personas come from — in P4 they're just awarded to you as cards after battle, because... why??? Who knows.
• The protagonist is a charisma-free pint-sized old man, which is confusing because of how good the rest of the cast is. I mean, yes, I sort of get it — a silent protagonist is a self-insertion vehicle, blah blah. But P5's protagonist was a distinct person with distinct personality traits and some major Byronic charm, and even 13 years prior to P4 you had Chrono Trigger showing how to let the audience project onto a silent hero while still giving him a life of his own.
• ACAB.
• Five or six of the social links were just filler, including the one they added for Golden (who is key to the best ending, but seems extremely pasted-on). P5 did a better job with making the bottom-tier confidants interesting and fruitful. (Like the disgraced politician — I totally overlooked him in my first playthrough, but he turns out to be completely OP!)

Well, still though, if most of my complaints just come down to "P5 was better," that's still a pretty great game — P5 was better than most things.