Didread: Vernal Edge, Element of Fire, Forming

[roadrunnertwice]

Ruth and I got covid, for the second time. Bleagh! We're doing mostly all right. We had a Novavax update in the spring, and I'm hitting the antihistamines (double-teaming cetirizine and famotidine) per the recent indications that they both help block the virus's cell entry and reduce histamine-modulated symptoms (including long covid risk).

Anyway, nuthin better to do, so here's a bookpost.

Martha Wells — Some Murderbot re-reads (vols. 2, 3, 4)

First few days of September, 2023

Comfort re-reads, which I have nothing new or interesting to say about today. 👍🏼

Bonus Level: Vernal Edge

Nov. 5, 2023

I enjoyed this lush and polished combat-platforming sidescroller. (Genre notes: not a metroidvania. It has tool/ability-based traversal and backtracking, but it’s also got tons of inescapable arena fights and an overworld. The combat is centered around ripostes, timing, and guard breaks, and is intricate enough to steal primary focus from the platforming.)

The aesthetic is straight out of the PSX/Saturn era of 2D, when pixel artists finally had some wider colorspaces to work with and went a bit wild on the hazy neutral tones; it's somewhere in the same visual space that Alundra, Kartia, and the Suikoden games occupy. It's a cool look, and I'm glad it's coming back around again as one option among the many.

Your protagonist is an angry and motivated young woman on a mission to murder her father. As it turns out, he absolutely deserves this; someone needs to Fuckin Get that guy, and she and her stolen magic weapon have the best chance.

Mostly, I just really liked the atmosphere in this, and also found the combat challenging and compelling. Special shoutout to Vernal’s VA, who did a superb job of sounding appropriately pissed off and frustrated 100% of the time. (Dialogue is not really voiced, so it's just combat grunts. But they're good ones.)

Remember the particular vibe of late-'90s/early-'00s console "B" games from significant studios? This feels exactly like one of those.

Martha Wells — The Element of Fire (re-read)

Dec. 24, 2023

I don't think I've read this since like '06! This was the first book I read by Wells; she had just gotten the rights reverted, and was revising the text and serializing it on her LiveJournal. This re-read was basically the same version of the text — the self-published paperback she did after finishing those serialized revisions. It's now back in print from her current publisher, packaged as a two-fer with Death of the Necromancer as The Book of Ile Rien (wow, remember double-books?).

This book is messy in multiple ways, but it doesn't even matter — it's fun and heartfelt and exciting, and the leads have great chemistry, and so I find its flaws and imperfections charming. Reading it again now, I can totally see why I was ready to sign on with whatever this writer was up to.

Jesse Moynihan — Forming (webcomic)

April 14, 2024

Start here

Holy shit, I can't believe it's over. I don't think I can evaluate this thing as a complete unit at this point in time, but I am glad I got to follow it along the way. What a ride.