The nameless protagonist of Persona 3 — who is nonetheless commonly known by his name in the manga adaptation, Minato Arisato (有里 湊 Arisato Minato?) — is simultaneously easy and impossible to empathize with. He mostly falls into the 'silent protagonist' category: he has no voiced lines, except for the occasional battle cry; he also has no unvoiced lines of his own -- what lines he does "speak" are all chosen from a menu by the player. Still, one can figure a few things out from his actions and reactions during cutscenes and Social Link events, and from the selection of utterances presented during these.
What one learns is that Minato Arisato presents a different face to everyone, showing them exactly what they want to see — someone like themselves, who likes and understands them. He is as charming and manipulative as any psychopath, consistently willing to do anything for that extra boost in power — to encourage his closest friends down the worst possible path by telling them exactly what they want to hear. After reaching Social Link level 10 — which is often Intimacy 5 — the narration states that "[y]ou have forged a bond that cannot be broken". And it's true; Arisato can (where relevant) sleep around with other girls afterwards and never speak to them again for the remainder of the game, and the link will nonetheless remain at Level 10.
To the game's credit, it seems to be aware of this. It never explicitly calls the protagonist out on it, but there are two occasions — once after the typhoon, and once during The Journey's epilogue — where, if you've been ... charming enough, often enough... you can't help but be aware of the consequences this sort of behavior should be resulting in, and how Arisato is avoiding them only through chance.
(One theoretically does have the option of not behaving in such a fashion. Given that the mechanical benefits of Level 10 Social Links are significant, though, I'm not aware of anyone ever having taken it. — and yes, there is a jealousy mechanic, but triggering it is easily avoided.)
The subtext of NPC-relationship-minigames in JRPGs usually is creepy behavior on the part of the protagonist, if you step back and think about it: the player-character is running around charming the socks (and other underclothing) off of NPCs solely for material gain, with no lasting attachments implied on his part. (And it is, almost invariably, "his" — though Persona 3 Portable's female protagonist may be an exception.)
Persona 3 could easily have avoided this: close friendship would have served as well, in the overarching narrative, as promises of forever would. Instead, it dives in headfirst.
(But with eyes open. In my book, that counts for much.)
(TBC)
Friday, April 2, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Review: Persona 3 FES
Persona 3: FES is a video game by Atlus for the Playstation 2, released (in the US) in 2008. It is essentially a "director's cut" edition of Persona 3, for the same system, released in 2007 (again, Stateside), featuring a new postlude (entitled "The Answer"), as well as some additional content in the original P3 storyline (named "The Journey" to differentiate it).
P3 has been called, with some justification, a cross between a dating sim and a traditional JRPG — a description better matching Thousand Arms, Atlus' earlier work for the original Playstation. It presages P3's Social Link system in many ways.
What Thousand Arms does not take from dating sims (and other simulation games) is the scheduling aspect. Like Tokimeki Memorial (and, to a much lesser degree, such games as The Sims with its aging mechanic), Persona 3 proceeds from day to day over the course of a fixed time period; the protagonist only has 25 hours a day to allocate to such activities as dates, studying, shopping, sleeping, hanging out with friends, praying at the shrine for good grades, thwarting paranatural jihadist assassin squads, directing a creepy old man to splice random bits of your psyche together, and fighting unnatural monstrosities and reified universal principles in a time outside of time.
(One spends most of one's time at the controller doing that last bit. P3:FES is first and foremost a JRPG, after all.)
The really notable aspect of Persona 3's scheduling, which (to my knowledge) few dating sims or RPGs have done before or since, is this:
The game and storyline (of P3 and of FES's Journey) starts on April 7th, 2009, and continues up until January 31st, 2010.
It's almost curious that other games don't do this: they prefer to try for a "timeless" setting that dates itself within a dozen years. P3 dates itself immediately, and is a believable 2009. (Although no mention is made of the global recession; the dollar is still as strong against the yen as it was in 2006-2007; and Aigis is never asked, at least onscreen, to sing either "Still Alive" or "Miku Miku ni shite ageru".)
The Answer, being only a short postlude, opens on March 31st, 2010, with the ending sequence taking place today -- 2010 April 1st.
(TBC)
P3 has been called, with some justification, a cross between a dating sim and a traditional JRPG — a description better matching Thousand Arms, Atlus' earlier work for the original Playstation. It presages P3's Social Link system in many ways.
What Thousand Arms does not take from dating sims (and other simulation games) is the scheduling aspect. Like Tokimeki Memorial (and, to a much lesser degree, such games as The Sims with its aging mechanic), Persona 3 proceeds from day to day over the course of a fixed time period; the protagonist only has 25 hours a day to allocate to such activities as dates, studying, shopping, sleeping, hanging out with friends, praying at the shrine for good grades, thwarting paranatural jihadist assassin squads, directing a creepy old man to splice random bits of your psyche together, and fighting unnatural monstrosities and reified universal principles in a time outside of time.
(One spends most of one's time at the controller doing that last bit. P3:FES is first and foremost a JRPG, after all.)
The really notable aspect of Persona 3's scheduling, which (to my knowledge) few dating sims or RPGs have done before or since, is this:
The game and storyline (of P3 and of FES's Journey) starts on April 7th, 2009, and continues up until January 31st, 2010.
It's almost curious that other games don't do this: they prefer to try for a "timeless" setting that dates itself within a dozen years. P3 dates itself immediately, and is a believable 2009. (Although no mention is made of the global recession; the dollar is still as strong against the yen as it was in 2006-2007; and Aigis is never asked, at least onscreen, to sing either "Still Alive" or "Miku Miku ni shite ageru".)
The Answer, being only a short postlude, opens on March 31st, 2010, with the ending sequence taking place today -- 2010 April 1st.
(TBC)
Friday, January 8, 2010
Review: Lunar: Dragon Song
Lunar: Dragon Song is a game for the Nintendo DS, published (on this side of the pond) by Ubisoft in 2005. It was (I think) the first RPG published for the then still-new handheld system.
Certainly from a blind, objective standpoint, Lunar DS is not the worst console role-playing game ever. (That honor probably goes to Hoshi wo Miru Hito.) But Lunar DS had twenty-five years (counting from the 1979 release of Temple of Apshai) to learn from the mistakes and foolishness of its predecessors — and it was released into a market and to a population that had also had those twenty-five years to learn what was and was not a quality RPG.
Lunar DS is only the second console RPG* I have put down unfinished knowing that I will nonetheless never return to it. (The first, Legend of Dragoon, was a rental.) It is objectively the single worst game that I own a physical copy of — including the infamous Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man, which contributed measurably to the video game crash of 1983.
... I had what I thought was a nice rant going, but this guy leaves me in the dust, so there you go. It's also pretty informative, but it does miss a few points that are worth covering.
First: some enemies can break or steal your equipment. No, really. Not bosses, either; just random enemies.
Second: the enemies' level, bosses and normals alike, matches yours. This means that fights never get any easier — and in fact get harder; the only way to counter this is better equipment. (See above.)
Third: ....
One other thing that's neither positive nor negative, but just is, is the fact that the game is almost entirely playable without use of the buttons or control pad: you can do very nearly everything one-handed wielding a stylus. This includes such amusing absurdities as blowing into the microphone being the buttonless 'Escape' command. Curiously, the only thing you absolutely can't do is talk to NPCs.
So, yeah. If you happen to see Lunar: Dragon Song for sale in the clearance bin, and you enjoyed Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar: Eternal Blue... just content yourself with fond memories of those, and walk on by.
* One could dispute whether the DS qualifies as a console, but it doesn't seem very useful to classify DS RPGs separately from other console RPGs.
Certainly from a blind, objective standpoint, Lunar DS is not the worst console role-playing game ever. (That honor probably goes to Hoshi wo Miru Hito.) But Lunar DS had twenty-five years (counting from the 1979 release of Temple of Apshai) to learn from the mistakes and foolishness of its predecessors — and it was released into a market and to a population that had also had those twenty-five years to learn what was and was not a quality RPG.
Lunar DS is only the second console RPG* I have put down unfinished knowing that I will nonetheless never return to it. (The first, Legend of Dragoon, was a rental.) It is objectively the single worst game that I own a physical copy of — including the infamous Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man, which contributed measurably to the video game crash of 1983.
... I had what I thought was a nice rant going, but this guy leaves me in the dust, so there you go. It's also pretty informative, but it does miss a few points that are worth covering.
First: some enemies can break or steal your equipment. No, really. Not bosses, either; just random enemies.
Second: the enemies' level, bosses and normals alike, matches yours. This means that fights never get any easier — and in fact get harder; the only way to counter this is better equipment. (See above.)
Third: ....
One other thing that's neither positive nor negative, but just is, is the fact that the game is almost entirely playable without use of the buttons or control pad: you can do very nearly everything one-handed wielding a stylus. This includes such amusing absurdities as blowing into the microphone being the buttonless 'Escape' command. Curiously, the only thing you absolutely can't do is talk to NPCs.
So, yeah. If you happen to see Lunar: Dragon Song for sale in the clearance bin, and you enjoyed Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar: Eternal Blue... just content yourself with fond memories of those, and walk on by.
* One could dispute whether the DS qualifies as a console, but it doesn't seem very useful to classify DS RPGs separately from other console RPGs.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Review: The Eye in the Stone
The Eye in the Stone is a fantasy novel by Allen L. Wold, published in 1988.
So let me talk about In Nomine for a moment. In Nomine is a roleplaying game in which the player characters are Celestials, i.e., angels and/or demons. (The game explicitly assumes an Abrahamic mythos, although it doesn't declare any particular Abrahamic religion to be correct.) One of the decisions the writers of In Nomine made is this: that Adolf Hitler was entirely human, and that his actions were not significantly influenced by Celestials. "Humans, at their peaks and valleys, are better and worse than angels and demons (respectively)," the line editor has written.
In the setting of The Eye in the Stone, this is not true.
It's not mentioned in the story proper, mind; instead, it's mentioned in passing in at least two of the occasional one- to two-page expositions on the setting that Wold uses to communicate details that the protagonist already knows. It's these that present most of Eye's mythos. Eye doesn't quite use the Abrahamic mythos directly, but it does have a knockoff, almost-secular copy of half of it — the half that would allow for the existence of Satanic ritual murders in the setting. (Ah, the 1980s.)
There's enough clearly non-Abrahamic structure alongside that it doesn't, thankfully, feel like someone's just repackaged Fuzzy Christianity as fantasy (see: Knowing, Black Magic Woman). It might even be a slightly Abrahamized D&D-style cosmology (and this hypothesis may make more sense in a moment).
The protagonist, Morgan Scott, is a "[t]wentieth-century sorcerer"; the initial setting is the town of Harborbeach, Michigan [sic], and no other place on Earth; but over the course of the book Scott finds himself in a number of other planes of existence (mostly not of his own volition) as he tries to track down his missing brother, Michael, while avoiding or foiling the actions of the Servants of Evil.
The magic is RPGish, although not Vancian; spells are named (e.g., Heal Wound), draw from a pool of energy, and require both gestures and speech — either of which may be entirely performed in the mind given sufficient skill and familiarity. (The GURPS system comes to mind, and indeed it's not impossible that it derives therefrom: GURPS was published in 1986.) The language-of-spells, which is featured in snippets, deserves a call-out for not being the usual apostrophe-laden twaddle; it has a clear non-Latinate, non-Germanic phonological structure (CV[CV...], C `\in` {hl l r ng k ts d sh}, V `\in` ah ae eh ie, possible final n*). It feels somewhat incomplete given the lack of any back vowels, but not entirely unbelievable.
The story seems to wander as much as the protagonist. If there were, rather than a single, clearly primary protagonist, an entire group of them, I wouldn't hesitate in labeling this a novelization of a tabletop RPG session**. Even without them, that's still how it feels: notably, Morgan has to go on two separate quests for two separate MacGuffins in the course of the story (in both cases, on behalf of the Servants!). It is, at least, not transparently predictable.
The characters are largely not cardboard, but also not terribly easy to empathize with. Their feelings (like so much else in the novel) are largely narrated, not implied by their actions. There's little to say about any of them, so ... I won't.
Still and all, it's not really actively bad. The author narrates too much, but is at least a good narrator, so this is somewhat forgivable. The setting is not (strictly speaking) coherent, but is consistent, and consistently interesting — my dislike of the transference of responsibility for humanity's real-world failures to an ethereal scapegoat notwithstanding. I can't really strongly recommend reading this book solely for entertainment when there are so many better ones out there; but on the other hand, if you're looking for an idea mine for a game setting, there are a few rich veins of possibility to be found herein. It earns ... a single point, I suppose, for at least occasionally being different and weird.
* The language name "Raen" was neither italicized nor used in a Raen phrase, and may have been formed from the otherwise acceptable and attested syllable "Rae" with the Germanic adjectivizer -en attached.
** Not necessarily a bad thing; see Villains by Necessity for one I enjoyed, though other reviewers have panned it.
So let me talk about In Nomine for a moment. In Nomine is a roleplaying game in which the player characters are Celestials, i.e., angels and/or demons. (The game explicitly assumes an Abrahamic mythos, although it doesn't declare any particular Abrahamic religion to be correct.) One of the decisions the writers of In Nomine made is this: that Adolf Hitler was entirely human, and that his actions were not significantly influenced by Celestials. "Humans, at their peaks and valleys, are better and worse than angels and demons (respectively)," the line editor has written.
In the setting of The Eye in the Stone, this is not true.
It's not mentioned in the story proper, mind; instead, it's mentioned in passing in at least two of the occasional one- to two-page expositions on the setting that Wold uses to communicate details that the protagonist already knows. It's these that present most of Eye's mythos. Eye doesn't quite use the Abrahamic mythos directly, but it does have a knockoff, almost-secular copy of half of it — the half that would allow for the existence of Satanic ritual murders in the setting. (Ah, the 1980s.)
There's enough clearly non-Abrahamic structure alongside that it doesn't, thankfully, feel like someone's just repackaged Fuzzy Christianity as fantasy (see: Knowing, Black Magic Woman). It might even be a slightly Abrahamized D&D-style cosmology (and this hypothesis may make more sense in a moment).
The protagonist, Morgan Scott, is a "[t]wentieth-century sorcerer"; the initial setting is the town of Harborbeach, Michigan [sic], and no other place on Earth; but over the course of the book Scott finds himself in a number of other planes of existence (mostly not of his own volition) as he tries to track down his missing brother, Michael, while avoiding or foiling the actions of the Servants of Evil.
The magic is RPGish, although not Vancian; spells are named (e.g., Heal Wound), draw from a pool of energy, and require both gestures and speech — either of which may be entirely performed in the mind given sufficient skill and familiarity. (The GURPS system comes to mind, and indeed it's not impossible that it derives therefrom: GURPS was published in 1986.) The language-of-spells, which is featured in snippets, deserves a call-out for not being the usual apostrophe-laden twaddle; it has a clear non-Latinate, non-Germanic phonological structure (CV[CV...], C `\in` {hl l r ng k ts d sh}, V `\in` ah ae eh ie, possible final n*). It feels somewhat incomplete given the lack of any back vowels, but not entirely unbelievable.
The story seems to wander as much as the protagonist. If there were, rather than a single, clearly primary protagonist, an entire group of them, I wouldn't hesitate in labeling this a novelization of a tabletop RPG session**. Even without them, that's still how it feels: notably, Morgan has to go on two separate quests for two separate MacGuffins in the course of the story (in both cases, on behalf of the Servants!). It is, at least, not transparently predictable.
The characters are largely not cardboard, but also not terribly easy to empathize with. Their feelings (like so much else in the novel) are largely narrated, not implied by their actions. There's little to say about any of them, so ... I won't.
Still and all, it's not really actively bad. The author narrates too much, but is at least a good narrator, so this is somewhat forgivable. The setting is not (strictly speaking) coherent, but is consistent, and consistently interesting — my dislike of the transference of responsibility for humanity's real-world failures to an ethereal scapegoat notwithstanding. I can't really strongly recommend reading this book solely for entertainment when there are so many better ones out there; but on the other hand, if you're looking for an idea mine for a game setting, there are a few rich veins of possibility to be found herein. It earns ... a single point, I suppose, for at least occasionally being different and weird.
* The language name "Raen" was neither italicized nor used in a Raen phrase, and may have been formed from the otherwise acceptable and attested syllable "Rae" with the Germanic adjectivizer -en attached.
** Not necessarily a bad thing; see Villains by Necessity for one I enjoyed, though other reviewers have panned it.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Review: Hammered
Hammered is a 2005 science-fiction novel by Elizabeth Bear — her debut novel, and the first in an untitled trilogy consisting also of Scardown and Worldwired.
It's a little odd that there's no name for the series: Hammered isn't at all a complete novel on its own, and I expect (once I've read the others) that it will make more sense to consider all three of them to be a single novel sold in three parts. In the meantime, I"ll follow the convention of the Japanese translation and call it the Cyborg Shikan Jenny Casey trilogy, or Saishijenkei for short. ^_^
Yeah, no, not really.
Hammered is set in the year 2062, in a dystopia that I can only hope future SF readers will look back on and say, "oh, this was written during the second Bush administration, wasn't it?" The details are largely unimportant, however, except to ground the setting. (At least for the duration of Hammered; the excerpt from Scardown in the back of the book brings the ecological problems into focus.) Moore's Law has proceeded apace, and neural interfaces are just becoming reasonably safe.
The protagonist (as you may have discerned) is one Jenny Casey, veteran of a war some twenty-five years past, who has a working prosthetic left hand, controlled by the predecessor of the neural-interface technology that becomes important. Along the way, as we follow her, we're treated to wrecked alien starships on Mars, tainted Canadian Special Forces combat drugs being leaked onto the streets, quasipolitical/quasicorporate intrigue, and a benign rogue AI with the memories and name of Richard Feynman.
Unfortunately, almost none of this fits together coherently, at least not yet. The book ends as the overarching story is just beginning to come together. It's a coherent read, as far as it goes, but it just kind of ... cuts off. I don't have the other two books to hand to review the whole thing properly, and trying to do it to Hammered alone would involve event-spoilers just to start explaining.
So, what do I say? The setting is coherent and plausible (although I hope I don't still think that ten years from now), and the characters so far seem to be more than just cardboard cutouts — even the antagonists. On the other hand it doesn't have anything like a reasonable stopping point, and I've had promising series turn sour on me too many times before to grant the Jenny Casey books any points on potential. In the end I'll have to remain undecided, and give it `(1/sqrt2|\bb1:) + 1/sqrt2|\bb1:))` out of `\bb1`.
It's a little odd that there's no name for the series: Hammered isn't at all a complete novel on its own, and I expect (once I've read the others) that it will make more sense to consider all three of them to be a single novel sold in three parts. In the meantime, I"ll follow the convention of the Japanese translation and call it the Cyborg Shikan Jenny Casey trilogy, or Saishijenkei for short. ^_^
Yeah, no, not really.
Hammered is set in the year 2062, in a dystopia that I can only hope future SF readers will look back on and say, "oh, this was written during the second Bush administration, wasn't it?" The details are largely unimportant, however, except to ground the setting. (At least for the duration of Hammered; the excerpt from Scardown in the back of the book brings the ecological problems into focus.) Moore's Law has proceeded apace, and neural interfaces are just becoming reasonably safe.
The protagonist (as you may have discerned) is one Jenny Casey, veteran of a war some twenty-five years past, who has a working prosthetic left hand, controlled by the predecessor of the neural-interface technology that becomes important. Along the way, as we follow her, we're treated to wrecked alien starships on Mars, tainted Canadian Special Forces combat drugs being leaked onto the streets, quasipolitical/quasicorporate intrigue, and a benign rogue AI with the memories and name of Richard Feynman.
Unfortunately, almost none of this fits together coherently, at least not yet. The book ends as the overarching story is just beginning to come together. It's a coherent read, as far as it goes, but it just kind of ... cuts off. I don't have the other two books to hand to review the whole thing properly, and trying to do it to Hammered alone would involve event-spoilers just to start explaining.
So, what do I say? The setting is coherent and plausible (although I hope I don't still think that ten years from now), and the characters so far seem to be more than just cardboard cutouts — even the antagonists. On the other hand it doesn't have anything like a reasonable stopping point, and I've had promising series turn sour on me too many times before to grant the Jenny Casey books any points on potential. In the end I'll have to remain undecided, and give it `(1/sqrt2|\bb1:) + 1/sqrt2|\bb1:))` out of `\bb1`.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Review: The Accidental Sorcerer
The Accidental Sorcerer is a 2008 fantasy novel by K. E. Mills, a nom de plume of the Australian writer Karen Miller. It is also the first book in the Rogue Agent series, which may bring to mind James Bond-style espionage, but really shouldn't (at least not yet).
The protagonist of The Accidental Sorcerer is one Gerald Dunwoody, a third-rate washed-up wizard who, naturally, gains and/or discovers spectacular and largely undetailed powers in a way that gets him cast out of society.
This is, fortunately, not a fair summary.
To start, the setting is one in which magic is a science; standard science is advanced enough that electric lights exist; and poor Dunwoody starts out a thaumatological safety engineer, which is to say, a regulatory civil servant.
The novel throws the reader into the thick of things with no introduction whatsoever, letting character background filter in through dialogue and the rare narrative hint — the kind of quasi-in-medias-res opening and introduction that most authors reserve for sequels. It had me wondering what the prequel to this book was nearly all the way through. But there is no prequel — the protagonist and his circle simply start out as fully developed as those in most authors' sequels. It sounds like the sort of thing that could easily be a train wreck, but Miller seems to have made it work.
Despite being called the first book in the Rogue Agent series, Dunwoody isn't recruited as a secret agent until the denouement of the book; for most of it, he's the Court Wizard of New Ottosland. His hiring is the one event that really doesn't make any sense, in retrospect: ur'f cerffherq ol gur erpehvgre gb orpbzr na ntrag, jvgu gur uvag bs n guerng bs qrngu; ohg ng guvf cbvag ur'f nyernql orra guebhtu avar qnlf bs gbegher. V jbhyq unir gubhtug vg terngyl nccebcevngr vs uvf erfcbafr gb Fve Nyrp unq orra fvzcyl, "Ab. V jvyy abg znxr lbh n qentba."
Of course, then it probably wouldn't be titled the Rogue Agent series (if indeed there were a second book at all).
Except for that last, the story, characters, and setting hang together well, and it's an entertaining read from cover to cover. I suppose that's enough for me. 1/1.
(... oh, almost forgot: the incantations and magical terms consist of atrocious dog-Latin. As a student of the classics, I weep.)
The protagonist of The Accidental Sorcerer is one Gerald Dunwoody, a third-rate washed-up wizard who, naturally, gains and/or discovers spectacular and largely undetailed powers in a way that gets him cast out of society.
This is, fortunately, not a fair summary.
To start, the setting is one in which magic is a science; standard science is advanced enough that electric lights exist; and poor Dunwoody starts out a thaumatological safety engineer, which is to say, a regulatory civil servant.
The novel throws the reader into the thick of things with no introduction whatsoever, letting character background filter in through dialogue and the rare narrative hint — the kind of quasi-in-medias-res opening and introduction that most authors reserve for sequels. It had me wondering what the prequel to this book was nearly all the way through. But there is no prequel — the protagonist and his circle simply start out as fully developed as those in most authors' sequels. It sounds like the sort of thing that could easily be a train wreck, but Miller seems to have made it work.
Despite being called the first book in the Rogue Agent series, Dunwoody isn't recruited as a secret agent until the denouement of the book; for most of it, he's the Court Wizard of New Ottosland. His hiring is the one event that really doesn't make any sense, in retrospect: ur'f cerffherq ol gur erpehvgre gb orpbzr na ntrag, jvgu gur uvag bs n guerng bs qrngu; ohg ng guvf cbvag ur'f nyernql orra guebhtu avar qnlf bs gbegher. V jbhyq unir gubhtug vg terngyl nccebcevngr vs uvf erfcbafr gb Fve Nyrp unq orra fvzcyl, "Ab. V jvyy abg znxr lbh n qentba."
Of course, then it probably wouldn't be titled the Rogue Agent series (if indeed there were a second book at all).
Except for that last, the story, characters, and setting hang together well, and it's an entertaining read from cover to cover. I suppose that's enough for me. 1/1.
(... oh, almost forgot: the incantations and magical terms consist of atrocious dog-Latin. As a student of the classics, I weep.)
Monday, January 4, 2010
Review: Principles of Angels
Principles of Angels is the debut novel of Jaine Fenn, published in 2008. It is soft science-fiction: which is to say there are psychic powers, and the antagonists are called the Sidhe, and there is no particular explanation of how anything works, merely that it does.
It is billed as a "vivid, relentless all-action thriller." This is accurate, I suppose: there is action, there are thrills; there is little breathing room between one thrill and the next, and the descriptions are indeed vivid — one might even say lurid.
The setting, unfortunately, isn't terribly believable — not the part where it's a gigantic dystopian city of technology no one understands hovering within the toxic atmosphere of an uninhabitable planet*, but the human-scale details of the society that inhabits it. Short version: it's a quasidemocracy where disfavored politicians get sacked by means of public assassination. The assassins in question, the titular Angels, are universally feared and respected, even in the worst parts of town ... but they're not generally superhuman; one wonders why no Angel has ever been torn to shreds for an only borderline-popular assassination, or for that matter whether or not any gang has ever tried to pile up on one and shiv her for her purse-equivalent.
So yeah, they don't hold up to analysis very well.
The class-divided City itself is reminiscent of such quasi-arcologies as Midgar or Mega-City One: anvilicious and unlikely. The technology that keeps it up and running, as has been mentioned, might as well be made of fairy dust.
There's no point in focusing on the characters instead; the only character in the entire book who even comes close to being three-dimensional is Elarn Reen, the second of the two viewpoint characters. Everyone else (including Taro, the other viewpoint character) is either wooden and distant, a one-note villain, or both.
So yeah. There is action; there are thrills. If that's all you're looking for, Principles of Angels is for you. I don't think I'll be picking up Ms. Fenn's next book, however, without a coherent recommendation by someone else. 1 out of 1.
It is billed as a "vivid, relentless all-action thriller." This is accurate, I suppose: there is action, there are thrills; there is little breathing room between one thrill and the next, and the descriptions are indeed vivid — one might even say lurid.
The setting, unfortunately, isn't terribly believable — not the part where it's a gigantic dystopian city of technology no one understands hovering within the toxic atmosphere of an uninhabitable planet*, but the human-scale details of the society that inhabits it. Short version: it's a quasidemocracy where disfavored politicians get sacked by means of public assassination. The assassins in question, the titular Angels, are universally feared and respected, even in the worst parts of town ... but they're not generally superhuman; one wonders why no Angel has ever been torn to shreds for an only borderline-popular assassination, or for that matter whether or not any gang has ever tried to pile up on one and shiv her for her purse-equivalent.
So yeah, they don't hold up to analysis very well.
The class-divided City itself is reminiscent of such quasi-arcologies as Midgar or Mega-City One: anvilicious and unlikely. The technology that keeps it up and running, as has been mentioned, might as well be made of fairy dust.
There's no point in focusing on the characters instead; the only character in the entire book who even comes close to being three-dimensional is Elarn Reen, the second of the two viewpoint characters. Everyone else (including Taro, the other viewpoint character) is either wooden and distant, a one-note villain, or both.
So yeah. There is action; there are thrills. If that's all you're looking for, Principles of Angels is for you. I don't think I'll be picking up Ms. Fenn's next book, however, without a coherent recommendation by someone else. 1 out of 1.
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