Ancient Celtic Fantasy

 I couldn’t think of another idea for this week. Actually that’s not quite true--on Thursday evening I had a great idea, but as happens sometimes, I thought I would remember it without writing it down and I did not.

But I recently reread The Paradise War and The Field of Swords, one of which is a fantasy novel based off of Celtic mythology and the other of which deals with Caesar’s conquest of Gaul and the Roman invasion of Britain. 

[Also I’m sporking Hexed on ImpishIdea and that book sucks.]

So my mind jumped to this.

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On Celtic Fantasy

So let’s say you went through my ideas for what Greek and Roman-themed fantasy stories might be like, and you decide my opinion is still worth listening to. Well okay then. If you were to make a fantasy story in which the setting was based off of Celtic culture, what would it look like? In this case you have a very wide range-- “Celtic” is a label slapped onto a group of people that occupied a very large part of Europe at one point or another. Most people read it as “Irish,” or “Irish and Scottish and maybe Welsh” if they’re generous. But there were Celtic peoples living in what is now France, Spain, and Germany at one point or another. The Galatians that Paul wrote letters to are believed to have at one point been a Celtic-speaking group of people, and they lived in what became Turkey.

So yeah. 

Here are some things that I might expect to see in a fantasy that took cues from historical Celtic cultures. Obviously, these are suggestions, rather than demands (if they were demands I don’t know who I’d be making them to). But I think they’re at least things that people should be paying attention to.

Nobody Writes or Reads

Look, before the printing press, mass literacy was rarely a thing in Europe. I’d argue it’d be very impractical to even try. But in general, not a lot of people could read outside of the clergy in the medieval period. Now I don’t know how common it was in Roman or Greek society though. The Celts though? Almost all the sources we have from them are by other groups during their time or Christianized Celts. The pagan Celts did not write a lot of things down. So we have very little about their culture in their own words, having to go off of what other people said.

There IS Ogham, what’s sometimes called “tree writing” but most people can’t read it. We’re still not sure what the Pictish Ogham says because attempts to translate it just give us nonsense. The only ones who could read it were the druids.

So unless your protagonist is a druid/fantasy equivalent member of the priestly caste, they’re probably not going to be reading or writing a lot, unless another culture has come in and made them learn it (in a different language, probs). That is simply not how these people thought about transmitting information. Stories and legends would have been recited and memorized rather than written down, which probably means a lot of regional variations as time goes on. Probably explains why Celts had so many different but related gods all over the place. And libraries? Yeah, no. If there were, they definitely wouldn’t have been available to anyone other than druids.

Speaking of them.

The Druids Run Everything

A thing you see as a common part of historical fiction and fantasy settings is that religion… doesn’t play a huge role in people’s lives or mindsets? And this bugs me. If they’re there, the priests are generally just odd old codgers desperately scheming for power. And yeah, I’m not saying that never happened in real life, but what’s really odd in these stories is that everyone seems to know it and ignores them. If you’re doing Celtic fantasy, you have to understand this: the druids run everything.

One of the conflicts of Song of Albion by Stephen Lawhead is that after interacting with an Englishman from our world, one of the princes of Albion decides that he should inherit his father’s crown once his old man dies. But that’s not how it works in Albion, because the bards/druids decide who gets to be king next from a group of candidates. Skipping this process is considered something very much like blasphemy.

Fantasy stories treat druids very often like magicians or wizards. And that’s not bad for fantasy. But remember that druids were the scholars, judges, bards, and priests of their people. It’s not that no one else had knowledge, but the druids were the ones who had the most, and for that reason they were left to make all the important decisions.

If you have Celtic fantasy, the druids, or druid-equivalents, should be the top caste. Maybe not officially, in the sense that there are warriors and royals who take the top spots, but the druids are the ones making a lot of the major decisions, and the ones the kings consult for prophecies and nature and how the gods think of things.

Keep that in mind if you write a druid protagonist (and please make him or her better than Atticus).

Look, when the Romans got to conquering the Celts, they targeted the druids specifically because they were the ones who helped organize resistance. They killed them real hard, as much as they could.

And on the subject of Roman invasion:

Stories of Resistance

Arthur fighting the Saxons. Vercingetorix fighting the Romans. Boudicca fighting the Romans. Many of the cultural heroes that we see among the Celts are people who became famous for fighting off their would-be conquerors. And sometimes they failed--the Romans still took a huge chunk of Britain, after all, and Gaul fell to Rome. And whether or not there was an Arthur, the Saxons dominated most of Britain until the Norman Conquest. But those people were memorialized by their people because they resisted.

If you want to do a fantasy setting based off of the Celts, why not have them be faced with invaders? Because the Celts lived in a lot of Europe and had to face off against invasions from the Germanic and Norman peoples. Mind you, those Celts were fighting each other quite a lot, and they probably took their lands from conquering other peoples (this is pointed out in Field of Swords). In many cases, leaders had to convince former enemies to put their differences aside, either by force or diplomacy, to stand up to the invaders.

People like those kinds of story in fantasy, and thankfully they fit quite well in 

Casual Ableism

Nuada, king of the Tuatha de Danann, the old gods of Ireland, lost his hand (or arm) in battle. And guess what? It was then declared that he could no longer be king, because it was ruled that the king could not have any physical imperfection. It didn’t matter that the man was a BEAST in battle, that he was a good king; what mattered was that he no longer fit the physical criteria. He was labeled a cripple and cast out of the throne.

Spoiler alert: he gets it back when Nuada gets an artificial hand, for which he’s known as Nuada Silverhand.

And no, maybe these same standards don’t apply to humans the way it did to gods. But you know what? That’s pretty darn screwed up, that losing a hand made him an outcast. The Norse didn’t have this problem: Odin lost an eye, and Tyr lost a hand, and neither of them lost their job because of it. But apparently to the people of ancient Ireland, this was a dealbreaker for their god monarchs. You could not be top god with an “imperfection.”

Rough.

Water Monsters

One of the things that does really disappoint me with Song of Albion is that the Otherworld just seems like our world? In the sense that it’s just our world magnified, despite being based off of Celtic myth. The invasion of supernatural monsters is explicitly a very strange thing going on. There aren’t a lot of magical creatures like giants and giant cats going around, when those are practically a dime a dozen in Celtic myth.

Especially when it comes to water. Kelpies? Afancs? Nucklevee? Mither of the sea? Selkies? Jenny Greenteeth? These are all monsters associated with water. I have a suspicion that the Gaels of Scotland were scared of water. And also maybe horses. There are a bajillion monsters associated with rivers and the sea, and most of them are trying to drown you because that’s a horrible way to die.

The Loch Ness Monster is from Scotland, remember. And the Fomorians, the giant enemies of the Tuatha de Danann? They’re often associated with the sea.

If you’re doing Celtic fantasy, put in some giants and a monster boar or something, sure. Go ahead. But more than that, you’ve got to put a ton of water monsters all over the place. Because that was where all the monsters hung out, apparently, desperately trying to convince people to ride them or take a dip so they could drown and eat them. Maybe they appear as horses, maybe they appear as beautiful seducers, but there should be a few of them around, and a savvy protagonist would have heard of them at least.

And finally.

The Fae

The Fae. The Faeries. The Fair Folk. The Little People. The Lords and Ladies. The Daoine Sidhe. The Twylyth Teg.

You absolutely must address the Fae in a story dealing heavily with Celtic myth. I’m not saying they have to take front and center; they don’t. But there has to be an acknowledgement of the Fae and how they relate to the setting. What are they? Are they downgraded gods? Nature spirits? Half-fallen angels? Maybe they’re children of the gods, like in Iron Druid. Maybe they’re another party invested in what’s going on like in Prydain Chronicles. Later books in Dresden Files implies that they’re the descendants/successors of the Celtic gods. Discworld has the elves as interdimensional raiders, of a sort. In Invisible Library (which isn’t really related to Celtic myth that much but oh well) they’re archetypal story characters, and the closer they stick to their archetype and more well known they are, the more powerful they are.

You definitely don’t have to go off of how faeries are portrayed in modern fantasy, and you don’t even have to hue to much to how they’re portrayed in the mythology. But they absolutely must be addressed, must be a part of the setting. They’ve become such a large part of the idea of Celtic myth. And one of the ways to show that a setting is a magical world is that it has a race of magical beings apart from humans that inhabit it.

Are they like physical beings, but just not human? Are they spiritual beings? Are they benevolent? Are they malevolent? Are they both? Remember that the idea of faeries being split into friendly Seelie and unfriendly Unseelie Courts goes back to Scottish folklore. Figure out what the Fae are doing, how they’re different from humans, and how your characters relate (or don’t!) to them.

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Immortals and Famous People/Events

 It has been a WEEK guys, so I want to bury myself in the bed and not come back out again until… June, maybe? Sadly I can’t do that, because they pay me not to do that, and I suppose I would miss out on reading quite a few books. Also I need to get a haircut, or else my mother’s going to my head with scissors pretty soon.

I did finish the main story on Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. I’m thinking I might try to finish some stuff up on it, but for the most part I have very little motivation to keep playing the way I did in Odyssey? Look, something about playing a Nordic colonizer pillaging other people’s stuff just isn’t as much fun.

Anyhow. Maybe I’ve talked about this in a Note, but I am very tired and the third part of my Witcher 3 review hasn't been started yet.

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Immortals and Famous People/Events

So I was reading the Dragonology Handbook again and there’s a bit about determining dragon age. In the lore established by Dragonology, many dragons are capable of speech and are incredibly long-lived. Dragonologists of Ernest Drake’s (the “author” of Dragonology in the 1800’s) time didn’t actually know the age cap on Chinese Lung. So when talking to dragons, a way of determining their age is to try to ask them about world events--ask them if they remember things like when railroads were built through the countryside, or when ships arrived from a certain direction or with certain colors, or if this or that building was constructed.

Drake warns students that they absolutely shouldn’t ask about specific individuals, especially famous ones. Dragons aren’t part of human society, so it isn’t as if they’d know about that. Or care. The example of what not to ask about is if a dragon remembers Lincoln being President or being assassinated.

I’ve talked a bit about how immortals in fiction are always done in a way that’s incredibly obvious and sometimes quite annoying. Atticus in Hounded explains that he knew Galileo, went and saw Shakespeare’s plays during the Bard’s lifetime, and rode with Genghis Khan’s Mongols pillaging Asia enough to lower humanity’s carbon footprint. And yet he also turns around and tries to tell us that he’s spent his entire life running, trying to avoid attention or being noticed by people. He even tells us that he hasn’t bothered to learn anything about American politics, despite living in the US for years.

If he’s trying to avoid attention and risks, why on Earth does he spend history hanging out with all of the biggest name leaders, artists, and controversial figures that he can find? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Furthermore, as I point out in the spork, it’s always names that anyone on the street would recognize, not people like Paracelsus, or ibn Fadlan, or Marie de France, or Olga of Kiev, who were all people that were famous and influential in their time but aren’t as famous today.

Really, if a character was immortal, unless he or she was a glory hound of some kind, I don’t know why he or she would bother hanging around famous people? Sometimes people become famous by accident, to be sure, and sometimes fiction has an explanation as to why this or that person attracted supernatural attention. But often there’s not a reason other than the audience needs a household name to hang onto for reference.

And I think that people don’t really grasp as much that an immortal character would have seen a lot. People always try to make it so that immortal characters always knew all the famous people (or in the case of Stroud’s Bartimaeus or Moore’s Orlando, claimed to have known all the famous people). And I think the real questions I would ask an immortal would be much more… well, along the lines of what Drake instructs students to ask dragons.

There’s this absolutely lovely bit in Gunnerkrigg Court in which Jones explains her backstory to Annie, revealing that she’s as old as the Earth itself and mentions that she has seen dinosaurs, but tries not to divulge information about the past like that. Much to Annie’s disappointment, really, because she wanted to know about dinosaurs. It doesn’t help that Jones hints that the scientific community actually has quite a lot wrong about them.

How long did it take to build certain monuments? What was it like when the railroad was built? What was it like after toilet paper was invented? What was it like after firearms became commonplace? And heck, what about language? There are plenty of languages that aren’t widely spoken now that are in danger of dying out that might have been basic for a 700-year-old immortal.

Those are things that would have to be a part of an immortal’s life, inescapable parts of everyday life that everyone has to deal with, unless they managed to be buried for all of that time (which, with mythical creatures like vampires, is a possibility).

Very often in urban fantasy there are societies or government agencies dedicated to dealing with the supernatural. You’d think if they found an immortal or ancient vampire or something, they’d sit this person down and ask all the questions. I’d expect something like what we see in Kingkiller Chronicle (which is admittedly not about an immortal), in which there’s a long interview about the entire life story and what’s changed over time.

And if your fictional immortal is a people person, very interested in spending time with others, you would think that thinking about friends thare dead would be a bit of a downer and he or she would avoid talking about it? And instead maybe would be more willing to talk about how great indoor plumbing and air conditioning are?

Those, I think, are more interesting things to talk about with immortal characters. Not what famous people they knew, but what they witnessed. And sometimes those things may seem like small things to us at the moment, but in the long run are very important to certain people or places. Like, no, at the time when the new library building in town opened it wasn’t a big deal to me, but on reflection, that’s an important part of the town’s history.

Now imagine that, but for like historical churches in Charleston or Reynolda House in Winston-Salem.

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Witcher III: Wild Hunt Review, Part 2 - Gameplay

 So now we’re going to talk about the gameplay.

Part of the difficulty of talking about the gameplay of The Witcher 3 is that it’s a hugely influential game--some of the games I played in the past few years (I’m mostly thinking Assassin’s Creed, but it’s not the only one) take lots of cues from this game. A video game this big and successful gets a lot of imitators, and I played it five years after it came out, so I suspect that some of my criticism and comments on the gameplay are going to sound kind of dumb.

But we’re going to try anyway.

If there’s one thing that I think works as an overall criticism of the way the game works, in multiple different parts of the game, is that there are alot of complicated ways to do things, and not a lot of incentive to dive into it. Sticking with more basic approaches will almost always get you through any part of the game.

COMBAT

Combat in this game is, for the most part, loads of fun. It’s not difficult to work out the basics, and once you figure out a system that works for you (for me, quick attacks and dodging, with only occasional signs aside from Quen). There are some kinks: I know that Geralt’s whirling sword style is fun to watch and straight out of the books, but it also means longer wind-ups for basic attacks, giving opponents more time to attack. I’d also have liked if blocking arrows was already something you can do before you have to buy that upgrade, because it’s very annoying to have to deal with (although I imagine that’s the point).

I had it set so that Geralt automatically drew his sword when entering combat, and that mostly worked. Geralt has two swords (or whatever weapon you assign, but usually swords)--the steel one for human opponents, and a silver one for monsters and supernatural enemies. There were a few fights where there are both kinds of opponents, and so you have to switch swords mid-fight or else whale on opponents doing barely any damage if you’re not careful. There were also a few instances where Geralt, for reasons unknown to me, just didn’t draw his sword, which is one of the most frustrating things--going up against bandits or monsters and Geralt only attacking with his fists.

Opponents are helpfully given a health bar that tells you whether or not this enemy is too high a level for you to face. It is kind of dumb that some, like enemy guards, can kill you in one hit if you’re too far below the level. But it gives you a clear indicator of what fights you should or shouldn’t pursue.

The game gives you a helpful bestiary too, which tells you what works against certain kinds of monsters. It’s also fun to experiment and see what works for you. It makes monster encounters feel like I imagine it’s like to be a monster hunter--researching weaknesses and habits, and coming prepared for each fight.

Overall I thought this aspect of the game worked well. However, there are plenty of options in combat that I didn’t really see the point of. Like, I didn’t even work out the Whirl ability until the DLC--and that is, admittedly, a more useful ability, albeit still one that you really don’t need for anything. You’re probably better off just sticking to basic moves that work for you, although I suppose it is a big enough game that experimenting and branching out isn’t really punished. I guess my play style just didn’t really go for that.

SIGNS

Geralt has access to some basic magic, referred to as ‘Signs’ because they’re cast with quick movements of the hand. A bit like how it works in Runemarks, actually.

The Signs you can use are:

-Aard (telekinetic backward blast)

-Igni (fire blast)

-Axii (quick hypnosis/Jedi mind trick)

-Quen (shield/force field)

-Yrden (magic trap)

There came a point in the game in which I rarely used any Sign in actual combat except for Igni and Axii, the latter because it’s darn handy to have around. I did Aard and Igni for funzies, but I didn’t use Yrden much at all unless fighting a wraith in which you HAVE to use it to make the monster stand still. There are some upgrades you can do on Yrden but I didn’t see much point to sticking points into something in hopes that it might be useful.

Outside of some conversations, I don’t think I used Axii at all. I upgraded it enough so that I could use it in dialogue to get out of fights, but that’s about it. There was a way to upgrade it so that your enemies attack each other, but while that sounds cool I thought it’d take the fun out of whaling on people with swords.

LEVELING UP

I never liked having to select between different unlocked skills, and considering just how many things you can unlock, I didn’t like how few slots are available for you to assign those abilities. Especially considering that some of the upgrades that take up slots are increased damage or being able to resist damage better. Those are things that shouldn’t be taking up upgrade slots! I should be able to upgrade my damage and not sacrifice my ability to have cool whirly sword moves!

It also seemed at times that progression took very slowly. If you start doing story missions, it’s not bad, but combat will get you a pitiful amount of experience points, and there are some small side quests that I completed and got rewarded with, like, five experience points. And I get that not every side quest is going to give you a level up, but it was kind of lame. Once you get into the storylines, level ups are much more common, but there was a short while in Velen that I killed a  bunch of time exploring and running into things I couldn’t take care of.

I will say though: if you do go through the effort of doing side quests and levelling up before progressing with the story, you will find yourself vastly over-leveled for the story. Which is a great feeling! Coming up against the Witch Hunters or Wild Hunt or whatever and being able to kick their cans into next week.

Also! You had to buy a special potion to do this, but you CAN reassign your skill points that you earned, which means if you didn’t like the way your skills panned out you can re-do them. Again, this costs in-game money, but by the time you’ve developed your skill tree enough to care about re-doing it, you’ve probably got the cash to spend. AND you pick up a few of these without having to buy them if you explore enough--I had a few and I wasn’t even looking for them.

EXPLORATION

I would have liked it if it was more obvious how different areas are leveled? Or more strictly divided? I assumed that because Velen is one of the first sections in the game, that everything you find there will be around the level of the main story happening there. Except it isn’t--when I was level 7 or so I ran into a level 25 griffin just wandering around, and it killed me in one hit, which was… not great. But it also makes it great to go through the game and marking things on your map and coming back to them later when you’re strong enough.

There are also too many things on the map. It’s not too much of a problem in most cases, because I really like exploring open worlds, but it gets to an absurd extreme in Skellige, where there are bajillion floating smugglers’ caches as question marks floating in the ocean around the islands. I gave up on that pretty early on, because I just didn’t care! I had no reason to care about that. I didn’t need supplies or money that badly, especially when each one of those was surrounded by a swarm of sirens.

MOVEMENT

Movement was fine, but it took some getting used to on my part. I had just come off of playing Assassin’s Creed, Uncharted, Jedi Fallen Order, and Horizon Zero Dawn, all of which are games that include a lot more verticality than this game. The fact that I couldn’t climb up buildings and cliffs, but only over ledges--that was something that bugged me. But that’s not bad game design, that’s just that I was used to playing different kinds of games where climbing is one of the main game mechanics.

Still, I would have liked the jumping and climbing mechanics to have polished a bit more? Again, that’s not a large part of the game, so it’s not a massive problem, but at times Geralt had trouble with ledges and it was annoying.

The only incredibly frustrating movement other than that was while riding Roach, I think. And even then it wasn’t that bad unless you were trying to get somewhere in a hurry. Roach would sometimes get stuck on trees and fences even when you glanced against them, making her irritating to use. And of course, sometimes Roach will freak out if you’re in danger for too long. I didn’t have too many problems with this, as I didn’t try mounted combat a lot, but when I did wheeling around on Roach was a pain.

Races were… look horse races seemed okay, once you figure out your bearings, but I think that they could have made the checkpoint banners a bit easier to see, especially if you’re racing at night. I ended up following the map in the corner more than following the road and that worked out for me. I did still sometimes run off road, which basically meant you lost the race, and that’s annoying.

INVESTIGATION

This game throws SO many investigations at you, and I thought it was going to get old after the first few, and it surprisingly didn’t? They all run the same way: you show up somewhere, and to investigate what happened, you use your Witcher Senses to highlight relevant things, and then go over and interact with them. It sort of made one feel like a detective, and that’s what it was going for. So good job!

The main problem I had was when Geralt picks up a scent, and you have to follow the highlighted scent trail. Sometimes it was very easy to follow; other times, not so much, and I wandered the woods for ten minutes trying to pick up the trail again. They could have done it better in some cases, I think.

INVENTORY

HA! Alright this is not great. Look, the Inventory system is a massive mess. It’s not completely incomprehensible, but you’re likely to  have such a massive collection of random crap, that’s terribly sorted into vague categories. Skyrim also had a messy inventory, but it was sorted a lot better. You didn’t have to dig through a bunch of other random crap to find that one book you just picked up. You go into the ‘Book’ section and start there. In this game books are in a section labeled something like ‘other stuff’ for not weapons, armor, food, or potion ingredients. It’s pretty obnoxious. Maybe having all of these separate tabs would have been a hassle to go through, but it would have  been more organized! And easier to find what you’re looking for.

CRAFTING

This was one of those things that I wasn’t sure if I should care too much about, because part of the fun of an RPG like this is going and picking up new gear and weapons. Except if you crafted your own weapons and armor, you’ll be way ahead of any of the stuff you find, level-wise. When I crafted my own weapons, I kept finding weapons that were pretty crappy in comparison. I liked having superior weapons, but I felt like I was missing out, especially when I got new weapons and armor in story quests that were clearly meant to be important and I wanted to try them, but they were so behind the gear I had made myself that I just stuffed it in the extra chest and never pulled it out again.

It’s balanced slightly by the fact that, especially once you get to the upper levels, crafting is made less practical by how rare the ingredients you need are. You have to go quite out of your way if you want to craft half the things you get blueprints for, and it does feel pretty pointless when there are so many swords and armor sets lying around. It almost feels extraneous, like it was something they added because that’s a part of RPGs, but I did like it overall so I don’t mind that much.

CHARACTER ENTRIES & BESTIARY

The character entries are an incredibly helpful way to keep track of all the characters. Because there are A LOT of characters, and if you haven’t read the books then you’re going to need some help figuring out who is who. And it updates as the story goes on to tell you what happened, in case you forgot! It’s great!

The Bestiary is even better, because if you don’t care about the story at all, it gives you hints about how to kill monsters. It is a little annoying that some of the monsters don’t get entries until you kill one for the first time, unless you find the right books or materials beforehand. But once you do have that information, it’s valuable because it gives you each monster’s weakness and what materials you should use when approaching them in the future. Very handy!

EQUIPMENT DAMAGE

Your equipment can take damage! That’s annoying, and that’s one of the things I hated about Oblivion and Fallout 3 because you have to spend a bunch of resources making sure your gear doesn’t degrade too much. Mind you, it’s not as bad in this game because you find repair kits out the wazoo, and even when your gear gets a lot of damage you can still use it. So I didn’t mind this too much, but I didn’t like it very much either.

POTIONS & FOOD

It was good that you could map certain consumables to button inputs so that you can just chug them on the go. That’s great! However, not a lot of the food really felt… like it was that great for you? It only slowly regenerated tiny bits of health, so by the end of the game, if I was eating anything in a fight, I ended up just chugging forty potatoes or something. That’s kind of on me though; I imagine if I paid any attention at all to what different potions did, I’d find a helpful health potion that would have solved that problem.

I also didn’t use potions much at all. Black Blood, sometimes, and Cat and Orca. I suppose I used the oils quite a bit. But mostly I relied on basic solutions to the problems I faced. They came in handy when I did use them, I just wished that they weren’t as much work to make and brew.

ECONOMY

There will be a while during the main game when you will be struggling for cash. That’s okay. You would think that taking witcher jobs would win you much more money than it does, but it usually doesn’t. Where I made a lot of money was taking the weapons I’d picked off of bandits and selling it at the nearest blacksmith store.

You can negotiate for more money on witcher assignments. That way you can easily get a hundred or so more gold coins for any job. I usually didn’t, because I didn’t mind that much, and when it came to roleplaying the fact was that a lot of the people hiring Geralt seemed very desperate, and I played Geralt in such a way that I thought it’d be out of character for him to gouge a massive price from these people. Mind you, when it came to the Nilgaardian army, or the Redanian army, or any massive douchebag, I was happy to haggle for more money. 

DIALOGUE

Okay so there are some lines that Geralt will always spout that have become memes in the fandom, for good reason. 

“How do you like that silver?!” 

“Wind’s howling.” 

“What now, you piece of filth?!”

Good times, good times.

I didn’t have any problems with the dialogue choices for the most part. There are a few times when there’s a timer and you have to pick what to say quickly, and I thought that fit the situations. There were other situations I thought would make sense with the timer, but I don’t exactly mind not having the pressure of quickly picking a dialogue option.

There were a couple of occasions in which I thought I couldn’t really predict how the conversation was going to go? The prime example is this one conversation with Keira Metz in which depending on your dialogue she either goes off to her doom, goes off to help you at Kaer Morhen, or tries to kill you in an optional boss fight. The first time I tried this conversation I got that last one, and I was bewildered, because that’s not what I was going for at all, and I’m still not sure how it escalated to that point.

There are some other dialogue bits in which the way to get what you want isn’t clear. Some of the dialogue options that are critical to getting endings with Ciri are not so clear. You can look up what you’re “supposed” to say to get the result you want, but if you’re trying to organically get certain results on the first playthrough you might be up a creek.

STUPID CANDLES

Alright this goes beyond frustrating at times and goes into freaking infuriating.

So Geralt has some magical abilities, including Igni, which is a way to make fire. And one of the ways this manifests is to be able to light  candles, torches, and braziers with the push of a button. The thing is that this being a faux-medieval world, there are torches and candles EVERYWHERE, and the button to light them is the same as the usual action button. So very often you’ll be at the shop counter trying to talk to the shopkeeper and instead Geralt will light the candles.

This is especially rage-inducing when you’re doing an investigation or something, and you have to go grab something that’s on a desk, and you’re trying to pick it, and you can’t, because you just keep lighting and putting out the candles. And you have to position Geralt, and the camera, in a way that the candle or torch or what have you isn’t in the way, isn’t the thing highlighted when you’re trying to complete whatever action.

I understand that the makers of the game wanted you to feel like this was a cool little power that you had. And exploring caves, especially ones it was easy to get lost in, it was cool that I could light braziers or torches to make it easier to see, or to mark the way I had already gone and make it easier to tell which path to take. But there had to have been an easier way to implement this.

There’s something else I wanted to talk about, wasn’t there…

Oh yeah.

GWENT

Okay, it’s rare that I like minigames in video games that much. Usually I’m terrible at them. I absolutely despised Nine Man’s Morris in Assassin’s Creed III and basically all the board games in that series. Don’t get me started on Orlog or the drinking games in Valhalla. The only one I think I remember loving much was Shuffleboard in the tie-in video game for Madagascar (weird, I know). I’m just not any good at board or card games in general, as my Trivia group could tell you.

But Gwent? Gwent is pretty awesome.

The premise is that you pick a faction, and each of your unit cards (which can be melee, ranged, or siege)  has a point value that adds up to your total attack points. At the end of each round, whichever player has the highest point value wins. There are cards with special abilities, like destroying enemy units, bring back your discarded units, and switching out units in the field with ones in your hand.

And spies. Oh so many spies.

It helps that there’s a tutorial very early on, although even then it took me a while to pick up on a lot of the game mechanics. The Scorch card threw me for a loop for quite some time. But I liked playing it, and it wasn’t that difficult to learn the basic rules, and it felt rewarding as an activity in the game, because you gained new cards from each new player you defeated. You could also win money, I suppose, but I rarely ever wagered more than a couple of coins because I didn’t feel like losing money over a card game (especially at first, when I struggled a bit with gathering money).

Too often in video games the minigames take a while to learn, and there isn’t much reason to play them other than in-game money. Which is nice, I guess, but at the same time there are easier and less embarrassing ways to get cash in most of those games. 

I loved Gwent. I loved playing it, I loved collecting the cards, I loved trying out different play styles, and I loved playing with different decks. Gwent was one of the highlights of The Witcher III for me, that I felt kind of sad when I collected all of the cards because I didn’t have much motivation to play it anymore.

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This is, overall, a very well-constructed game. There are some missteps in how it plays, but for the most part it holds together well, and it’s loads of fun to play. And it’s not difficult to understand how to play either, so while it takes some getting used to in order to fully utilize all the mechanics, it isn’t that big of a learning curve.

It’s fun. And in a game, that’s what matters.

Right! So next time is the last part of the review, in which we’ll talk about design, music, and graphics!

Crossroads of Twilight was Wheel of Time at its Worst

 I had hoped that I would have done more of the review of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt by now, and while I do have a decent chunk of the second part finished, it’s not ready and that’s annoying. I was also hoping to bang out another sporking chapter. It’s Mother’s Day weekend though, so I don’t know if I’ll have the time to get to it.

There was a bit in which I considered making a Saturday Note about LEGO Star Wars: The Game (the one from 2005) and how it’s still one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, but I don’t know what I’d say other than… yeah, it’s one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, to this day.

Also, I think I’ve only got a couple more story arcs for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla left so that’s cool.

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Crossroads of Twilight was Wheel of Time at its Worst

Alright I’m gonna talk smack about a dead guy’s book for a bit.

Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, I am told, was in its time a pretty subversive series. We start with not one hero, but three, and none of them want to be heroes, they want to go home. And one of them is the Chosen One, and it turns out that being the Chosen One is not Awesome, it sucks, because he’s slowly going insane and causing suffering in all the people he cares about. And the aristocrats are not noble lords or obvious villains, they’re a bunch of petty feuding sycophants all trying to one-up each other in something called “the Game of Houses.” The wizards, the Aes Sedai, are all female, and instead of being organized, they’re basically all manipulative, and some of them are part of a Satanic cult trying to destroy the world.

Some of these things are not too surprising to fantasy enthusiasts today, especially in the wake of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and the television adaptation Game of Thrones. Subverting usual fantasy tropes is kind of normal these days, even if it happened long before Martin made it cool. But towards the end of its run, Wheel of Time was known not for being subversive epic fantasy, but for being seen as basically everything wrong with long-running high fantasy epics: an obscenely long, complex story with tons of characters hopping out the woodwork, convoluted plots that twisted into seemingly pointless detours, several viewpoint characters for every book, prologues that took up huge fractions of the books they’re featured in, and tons of foreshadowing to cover up that the author won’t get to the point.

For reference: when James Rigney (Robert  Jordan’s real name) pitched this series to his editor, he said it would be a trilogy. His editor knew that wouldn’t stick, so he made Rigney sell it to the publishing company as a six book series instead. When he died, Jordan had written eleven books in the series. And a prequel.

[He also left Brandon Sanderson instructions to wrap it all up in one final book, but Sanderson couldn’t make it fit so he shrugged and made it three, making it a fourteen book series.]

The problems are there much earlier, but I just read Book 10, The Crossroads of Midnight, and at this point I… look, I can’t say that I give up, because I’m really committed to finishing this series this time. In my last attempt to read the series, I gave up on the previous book, Winter’s Heart. But this was not a good addition to the series. It’s downright inexcusable that ten books into the series, the Plot is grinding to such a prominent halt and getting so bogged down.

So much of the Plot just doesn’t go anywhere in this book! There’s a lot of characters planning to do things that make the Plot move forward, but it doesn’t! In some ways, it regresses, because as the characters are talking about doing stuff, other stuff happens that hampers their ability to do that! So Perrin can’t rescue his wife and get about his business because the Seanchan invasion is interfering. So Egwene can’t just go and overthrow Elaida from being head of the Aes Sedai because she gets kidnapped. 

The past few books have been introducing characters out the wazoo and to someone like me who is terrible with names, it’s downright maddening. Look, I can get a few names, and I can figure out who is important and who isn’t. But since Jordan just keeps throwing names at me, and keeps giving viewpoints to minor characters, and I can’t really think of a system to group names--as far as I can tell, it isn’t as if names from one country or another are based off of any real world linguistics--I can’t work out who is who, what they’re doing, and whether I should be invested in what they’re doing.

It doesn’t help that there are important characters like Cadsuane who come right the FUDGE from nowhere and are apparently legendary in-universe and become major characters despite me having never seen this person in any of the books before.

And I’m baffled, guys. I’ve read on TV Tropes that Jordan considered The Crossroads of Twilight an experiment that failed, and I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m baffled that both he thought it was great fun to slowly grind his high fantasy epic to a standstill over the course of four books or so, and that his editors and publishing house let him do this. I’ve heard a lot of reader discontent, and that’s entirely justified because there’s no logic behind it! I can understand that maybe he got really caught up in the world and storylines, and thought it’d be cool to do a lot of things he hadn’t originally planned, or that things took longer than he originally intended, but this is not okay and he should have known that.

I’ve been told it picks up after this one. It better. Considering the next one is the last one published in Rigney’s lifetime, I think it’s possible he either realized, or someone cornered him and told him that he needed to get a move on with this series.

I want to be clear: the first few books in this series are good. They’re pretty darn good! And even the later books have some very good bits. Don’t make my criticisms make it sound like there was never any worth in this series. And when I get to the end, I’ll probably have a better assessment of how the series as a whole fares. But right now? The complete halt of the Plot, the cacophony of new characters, and being ten books into this makes me feel like I didn’t really make a mistake when I gave up the first time through.

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