Video Game Review: The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak

 

Trails Through Daybreak is technically the eleventh game in Nihon Falcom's "Trails" (Kiseki in Japanese) series of Japanese Role Playing Games (JRPGs). That said, like a long running book series (which I and others have compared the series to in the past), the Trails series contains a number of arcs, each of which form kind of a distinct plot grouping. Trails Through Daybreak is thus the start of a new (the fourth) arc, dealing with events in the nation of Calvard - one of this world's two most pre-eminent superpowers, and the one which we've really only gotten glimpses of in prior arcs. What that means is that the game's plot isn't nearly as reliant upon past games to work and the story can be used as a jumping on point for new players - some old characters show up and past events are referenced, but they are always to the side rather than the center of attention. Just as importantly, the start of a new arc allows developer Falcom to shake up the way the game plays: oh it's still recognizably a Trails game and certain systems from the past return, but much of the gameplay is drastically overhauled. Given that the last arc featured FIVE games (prior arcs were three games and two games respectively) all with the same system....well, fans who have played the whole series like myself are probably very welcome to try something different and new in both gameplay and story.

Now I am a big Trails fan. I've played all 10 prior games at least once if not multiple times and even played the second arc - the Crossbell games Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure - via a translation patch prior to the games being officially released in North America. So I have supremely looked forward to playing this game - even basically dropping my reading on the train for like a month to play this game all the way through - and am not the most neutral observer. That said, despite being a huge Trails fan, I haven't always loved every game in the series: the last arc, the Trails of Cold Steel games, drove me nuts in a couple of directions: the games were ridiculously easy mostly and incredibly easy to break in gameplay and the story in the last two games got really really cliche and bad, as Falcom seemed to avoid taking any difficult choices and relied on laughable plot turns to close everything down. The last game though, Trails Into Reverie, was a really fun fanservice-y game and the characters involved even in the bad games were still largely very enjoyable (except for Cold Steel protagonist Rean, who sucks), so I still had hopes for the series. And Daybreak delivered heavily on that front in both the story and gameplay...even if I had some minor complaints here and there.

I'm probably going to spend way way too long on this review after the jump, sorry, but the short of it is, Trails Through Daybreak is a really fun JRPG that I happily recommend to both newcomers and old players of the series alike.

SciFi/Fantasy Anthology Review: The Grimoire of Grave Fates, edited by Hanna Alkaf and Margaret Owen

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on June 6, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

The Grimoire of Grave Fates is a multi-author young adult anthology that features 18 different authors - of various backgrounds - each contributing a story that seemingly responds to the following premise: Showcase a teenager at an international magic school that used to be stolidly traditional and is now opening up to a more diverse - in race, culture, sex, and queerness - student body. The anthology further adds an extra bit to the premise by centering the book around a murder mystery - the murder of a bigoted traditionalist professor who nearly everyone hates.

And so we have 18 stories showcasing the 18 very different magically gifted teenagers as they deal with their own internal struggles - caused by conflicts of culture, typical teenage love (often queer) struggles, of queerness and struggles with identity, etc. - as well as these teens' responses to the murder. And well given that these are teenagers who have often had dreams of being a chosen one, well, for a lot of them that involves trying to solve said murder mystery. And that's where this book kind of struggles, because the multi author approach - and constant shifting of characters - to the mystery makes it feel incredibly disjointed, so anyone who comes here looking for a coherent mystery, rather than a collection of solid YA flash fiction, will be a bit disappointed.

More specific safter the jump:

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Chain-Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on May 2, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Chain-Gang All Stars is a book that's been described as both literary and science fiction, but most importantly is a novel that uses its dystopian science fiction setting largely for a critique of the USA's criminal justice and carceral systems and the way those systems are moving forward (especially into privatization). The book is INCREDIBLY hard to read - it took me a week when I usually would've taken two days for a book of its length - because it is so hard to read the horrors it contains for too much at a time. It's a book that combines its story of a world where prisoners are allowing to fight in what amount to murderous coliseum bouts for years in order to possibly earn their freedom with looks at the outside world accepting and occaisionally protesting it, and adds in footnotes and bits to boot that make clear how the horrors being described in this near future aren't too far of from the horrors faced by prisoners and people in our carceral system now (especially people of color, women, and LGBTQ people).

The result is incredibly powerful, even as I think that the story and footnotes occasionally become unsubtle and tangential enough to become a distraction that might be a little counterproductive. This is a harsh tough novel about pain, punishment, incredibly cruelty and greed and hubris, and love and forgiveness, and it is not one that will ever provide a happy ending - which you'll figure out quite quickly I think. And the story will make you care for individuals, most of whom were not innocent to start and certainly are not innocent of brutal killings in the end, and will try to make you see how and why prison abolition is such a righteous cause, even if the particulars and the methods may not be there yet. It's a horrifying but strong novel worth your time, if you can stomach it.

Trigger Warnings: Suicide, Suicide by Proxy, Murders, Maimings, Torture, Torture of Prisoners, Cutting, Rape/Sexual Assault as backstory, Beatings of Protestors, well you get the point. None of this is gratuitous and all of it is such that it used for a good purpose but yikes, there's a lot and many readers won't be able to stomach this book.

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz

 

The Terraformers is Annalee Newitz's third novel and is now a Nebula finalist for best novel. Newitz was once known for being the creator and editor-in-chief of io9 and has written a pair of interesting speculative novels - Autonomous (itself a Nebula finalist) and The Future of Another Timeline - both of which deal with ideas taken from today's world extrapolated to a speculative future (as does most sci-fi, but Newitz plays with these ideas as her forefront more than she necessarily does characters). The Terraformers is similar in that regard as it deals with Colonization and changing of lands to fit certain people's ideals in the far future and deals with the struggle for public and private control of such a world and the people contained within.

It's a novel set in three time periods, each 700 years from each other, as events on the planet Sask-E shift due to people's actions in each time period, with new central protagonists (with relations to the prior protagonists) in each act. And it works kind of well to tell an interesting sci-fi story dealing heavily with themes of colonization, of what it means to be a person and who gets to choose such, of indentured servitude to corporations, and of political and other means of rising up for a people's or a planet's rights in the face of corporate or colonizing greed. Things wind up working perhaps a bit too easily really and there's some plot elements that recur at times to the point of it being a little repetitive (as well as some shallow characters owing to the setup), but it's certainly a very interesting book - one whose Nebula nomination makes sense, even if I wouldn't pick it to win.

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Escape Velocity by Victor Manibo

 

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on May 21, 2024 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Escape Velocity is the second novel by Filipino author Victor Manibo whose prior novel The Sleepless was an anti-capitalist sci-fi Noir exploring a world where some people no longer had to sleep. It was a really interesting debut and made me very intrigued to see what Manibo would do for an encore. Escape Velocity is the result: a novel that takes the anti-capitalist themes up a notch, as the novel is centered around an elite prep school reunion for the ultra rich and powerful on a state of the art luxury space station....above an Earth those same rich and powerful have left devastated, such that the average person is barely able to survive a constantly changing for the worse climate.

The book is marketed as a thriller and contains elements of a mystery and yet...isn't really either of those things and yet it's still very interesting and very good. Most of the book is centered around the past and present stories of the 1% main characters, who you will very much wish will get their comeuppance very soon into the book as they are largely assholes, even if they have some sympathetic moments (Ava, the trans girl who was abused by her murdered brother and whose poor lover was blamed for the murder, is the most sympathetic but even still). And then there's the workers on the station whose perspectives show them scheming in some fashion underneath it all, whom you will hope more and more to succeed. The result is really an interesting exploration of class and anti capitalist themes that is also kind of a commentary on other books which center such rich protagonists - I'll try to explain better after the jump.

SciFi Novella Review: Rose/House by Arkady Martine

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on April 18, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Rose/House is the latest novella from Hugo Winning author Arkady Martine (A Memory Called Desire). The novella is ostensibly a sci-fi locked room murder mystery - except the locked room is an Artificial Intelligence that comprises the setting itself, a strange house built by an eccentric/mad designor Deniau who passed away and locked it up for no one but his protege to see...except someone else has gotten in and died there. And so three main characters Detectives Maritza Smith and Oliver Torres (investigating the situation) and Selene Gisil, protege of Deniau, come to the house to figure out what happened.

In the end, it's less of a murder mystery (although more of a horror novel) than a combination of a lot of ideas - of mentorship and training and trying to get away from one's shaping, of how we envision ourselves (whether that be humans or AIs) at any given moment, at desires and what people want with Art and what Art truly is, and more. Does it work as a coherent story whole? That I'm a little less sure of.

More specifics after the jump, although please be aware that I read this like two weeks prior to writing this review, so I'm gonna be a bit more vague.  

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Witch and the Vampire by Francesca Flores

 

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on March 21, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

The Witch and the Vampire is a YA novel marketed as a "queer Rapunzel retelling" featuring a witch and a vampire (hence the title).  I'd honestly forgotten about this marketing in the months between getting this book and reading it, and well...I have to say the marketing is incredibly misleading: there's little in this book that reminded me of Rapunzel at all.  Instead you have a YA story here featuring two female protagonists -Ava, a root witch turned vampire trying to escape to freedom and her former best friend Kaye, a flame witch whose mother was killed by a vampire and has trained her whole youth to hunt and kill them...both for the good of humanity and for revenge.  The story features a chase between the two protagonists until naturally they have to work together to stay alive in a dangerous forest, where they each discover surprising truths about the world and a romantic connection between themselves.

The result is a novel that's pretty to be honest rote by numbers and most readers, even younger YA readers (for whom this book might be appropriate, as there's no sexual content and the romance is limited to kissing) will see a lot of the twists coming.  I'm also not super sure the romance worked for me - the book tries to pull a bit of a former best friends to romantic couple plotline wit the main protags and I'm not sure I really believed in the shift the book was trying to sell.  That said, the story does work and the protagonists are easy to root for and care about and the book isn't very long, so readers are likely to have a fine time and aren't likely to be disappointed if they pick this up.  

More specifics after the jump: