I've now wrapped up Black Vein Prophecy. No writeup on this one, as I went through it quite a few times and didn't especially enjoy it.
The book is very ambitious: it begins with you awakening in a sarcophogus with no memory and no statistics - you roll these up during the book itself - and quickly disgorges you into a ruined city and a surreal experience full of nonsensical creatures and odd happenings. After dealing with a talking horse and catapulting yourself into the sea where you fight a man trapped in a giant zorb ball the book settles down a bit, but remains incredibly strange thoughout.
I went round and round in circles for ages in this book - there are a lot of instadeaths and false paths, and choices at many times seem very arbitrary, meaning you can easily die or get derailed - until, reaching my wits end, I looked online and discovered that to succeed you need to FAIL the very first luck check in the book. That's not cool. Even if you do pass that the almost-final battle involves selecting from a list of magical powers in the correct order with no hints as to what to use where.
It's a shame as the story itself is quite clever at its heart - once you've got to the end, a lot of it makes more sense and there's a very good bit at the end where you can help yourself (I won't spoil that, just in case). I don't think the writing helps though: stuff isn't spoon-fed to you (for example, a character who is your friend can later kill you because you've killed a friend of theirs, but you need to be paying attention to work that out otherwise it seems very random) but mainly the text is quite terse and when combined with the obfuscating nature of the plot it can initially read like a lot of surreal unconnected encounters. There's not enough description to carry the atmosphere of what is a sort of wizardly Creature of Havoc, and whilst I had a better feel for the story by the time I'd read it several times, by then I was a bit sick of the book. The fights, at least, are easy.
There's also a bit where you're asked if you have an item but it's described a bit differently, which tripped me up first time.
Terry Oakes does the art, which is cool throughout: mainly of humans and has a bit of a Japanese feel to it with the costumes and the like.
Bit of a disappointment after a few really good titles.
The book is very ambitious: it begins with you awakening in a sarcophogus with no memory and no statistics - you roll these up during the book itself - and quickly disgorges you into a ruined city and a surreal experience full of nonsensical creatures and odd happenings. After dealing with a talking horse and catapulting yourself into the sea where you fight a man trapped in a giant zorb ball the book settles down a bit, but remains incredibly strange thoughout.
I went round and round in circles for ages in this book - there are a lot of instadeaths and false paths, and choices at many times seem very arbitrary, meaning you can easily die or get derailed - until, reaching my wits end, I looked online and discovered that to succeed you need to FAIL the very first luck check in the book. That's not cool. Even if you do pass that the almost-final battle involves selecting from a list of magical powers in the correct order with no hints as to what to use where.
It's a shame as the story itself is quite clever at its heart - once you've got to the end, a lot of it makes more sense and there's a very good bit at the end where you can help yourself (I won't spoil that, just in case). I don't think the writing helps though: stuff isn't spoon-fed to you (for example, a character who is your friend can later kill you because you've killed a friend of theirs, but you need to be paying attention to work that out otherwise it seems very random) but mainly the text is quite terse and when combined with the obfuscating nature of the plot it can initially read like a lot of surreal unconnected encounters. There's not enough description to carry the atmosphere of what is a sort of wizardly Creature of Havoc, and whilst I had a better feel for the story by the time I'd read it several times, by then I was a bit sick of the book. The fights, at least, are easy.
There's also a bit where you're asked if you have an item but it's described a bit differently, which tripped me up first time.
Terry Oakes does the art, which is cool throughout: mainly of humans and has a bit of a Japanese feel to it with the costumes and the like.
Bit of a disappointment after a few really good titles.