DragonAge: The Stolen Throne - Review
I've got to confess I have quite mixed feelings from this book. On one hand I didn't expect much. Games and movies fiction tend to be a bit...not very well written, to put it lightly. Because of this I am not as much disappointed as I normally would be after reading such a cliché book. BUT!
On the other hand, I love the world of Dragon Age. It is elaborated, higly fantastical but still very logically organised. The dialogues in the game are witty making you crave for more of them and each charatcter has a fairly distingue and unique personality. The fact that the book and most of the game dialogues as well as the game story were created by the same person made me think it might be quite a good reading. However, I was very displeased to realise that there is not single scene in this book that can provoke genuine lughter or makes me love some character (although I must admit I liked Rowan...). So let's take a closer lok at it.
The story is pretty easy to predict since it takes place about 30 years prior to the game events and if you collect enough codex entries, you know just enough about King Maric and Loghain. But that was not the problem, at least not for me. The problem was that Maric was facing certain death for like four times and every time some dues ex machina came to save him in the last moment. First time, I accredited it to luck, second time I whought that it might be possible if you are born as the luckiest person in the world but third and fourth...there was just no way I would buy it. The plot just failed.
Another thing was the humour, or rather complete lack of it. Couple of times, I sensed that the author was trying to be funny but he just wasn't. He tries to present Maric as overall goofy and a bit childish with an inner fight because of his new responsibility to save the world but what I got from it: Maric is jester who has no idea what to do and were it not for Arl Rendon, Rowan and Loghain, he would have never had a chance to survive, not to mention win a war.
But the worst thing was probably the amount of cliché in this book. Every single battle was a bloody one, everytime someebody stabs someone RED blood drips from the sword/dagger (as if there was any other) and every time Loghain looks at someone, he gives them icyglare (or something like that ,I didn't read it in English, so I'm not completely sure about this one).
And the worst of all, Rowan, single best character in the entire story, dies in the end and they only mention it. But at least it's mentioned there. Because they obiously couldn't be bothered to explain how exactly it happened that sister Ailis was the sole survivor of the group of outlaws, led by Loghain's father and masacred by Usurper's soldiers even though the last time we saw her in the book, she rushed outside to take a stand with Gareth.
To sum it all up, Dragonage: The Stolen Throne is not what one might expect when they play the game. It is readable, but personally I can't stop thinking that were it given to a better writer, the book might have been much, much better.
My ranking therefore is 5.5/10 (just because I really love the game settings)
On the other hand, I love the world of Dragon Age. It is elaborated, higly fantastical but still very logically organised. The dialogues in the game are witty making you crave for more of them and each charatcter has a fairly distingue and unique personality. The fact that the book and most of the game dialogues as well as the game story were created by the same person made me think it might be quite a good reading. However, I was very displeased to realise that there is not single scene in this book that can provoke genuine lughter or makes me love some character (although I must admit I liked Rowan...). So let's take a closer lok at it.
The story is pretty easy to predict since it takes place about 30 years prior to the game events and if you collect enough codex entries, you know just enough about King Maric and Loghain. But that was not the problem, at least not for me. The problem was that Maric was facing certain death for like four times and every time some dues ex machina came to save him in the last moment. First time, I accredited it to luck, second time I whought that it might be possible if you are born as the luckiest person in the world but third and fourth...there was just no way I would buy it. The plot just failed.
Another thing was the humour, or rather complete lack of it. Couple of times, I sensed that the author was trying to be funny but he just wasn't. He tries to present Maric as overall goofy and a bit childish with an inner fight because of his new responsibility to save the world but what I got from it: Maric is jester who has no idea what to do and were it not for Arl Rendon, Rowan and Loghain, he would have never had a chance to survive, not to mention win a war.
But the worst thing was probably the amount of cliché in this book. Every single battle was a bloody one, everytime someebody stabs someone RED blood drips from the sword/dagger (as if there was any other) and every time Loghain looks at someone, he gives them icyglare (or something like that ,I didn't read it in English, so I'm not completely sure about this one).
And the worst of all, Rowan, single best character in the entire story, dies in the end and they only mention it. But at least it's mentioned there. Because they obiously couldn't be bothered to explain how exactly it happened that sister Ailis was the sole survivor of the group of outlaws, led by Loghain's father and masacred by Usurper's soldiers even though the last time we saw her in the book, she rushed outside to take a stand with Gareth.
To sum it all up, Dragonage: The Stolen Throne is not what one might expect when they play the game. It is readable, but personally I can't stop thinking that were it given to a better writer, the book might have been much, much better.
My ranking therefore is 5.5/10 (just because I really love the game settings)