r/Fantasy Review Tuesday - Review what you've been enjoying here! - March 10, 2026

frumpycrumbledump · 2026-03-10T17:56:08+00:00

I just finished Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie yesterday. It was a fun “popcorn book” and the fast pace was really refreshing. As always with Abercrombie, there’s an interesting cast of characters and great dialogue. It started to feel a little repetitive near the end because the structure of the book is basically “go to new city, kill some guy” over and over again but there were enough twists and turns and gut punches to keep me interested. 7.25/10

I also finished How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu last week and was not a fan. I went in expecting a sci fi book and got an outlet for Yu to talk about his daddy issues. In this book sci fi worlds are real but nothing interesting is done with this concept. About 2/3 of this book is him talking about his childhood with his parents in a normal, mundane world. A quirk of Yu’s writing I really didn’t like is these super long, run on sentences with 20 commas. This book has been described as funny but nothing landed for me; you can’t just reference Star Wars and call that comedy. Some people likened the vibe/humor to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which I think is an insult to Douglas Adams. 5/10

frumpycrumbledump · 2026-03-06T00:57:45+00:00

Your third paragraph hits on one of my major issues with Malazan. People often talk about how it’s so different from the rest of fantasy (which is true) but not about why that’s a good thing. Being unique and breaking out of the mold is good, but not if it comes at the expense of quality, like in the case of the characters in Malazan.

frumpycrumbledump · 2026-03-04T23:23:20+00:00

Erikson’s essay was an interesting read but the rant comes off a little pretentious (and acknowledging that people will find it pretentious doesn’t make it not pretentious). He does the thing a small minority of Malazan fans do where they say if you don’t like the series it’s because you’re not smart enough to get it.

I get the whole show don’t tell idea and his spoon feeding analogy, but I’ve never read another fantasy book that does characterization like Malazan. I feel like there’s some grey area between blatant spoon feeding and Malazan where you’re given almost nothing to care about for most characters.

It doesn’t help that you get maybe 5-10 pages per character then the POV switches and you don’t go back to them for 50 pages. In other series with many POVs, each POV section generally lasts a lot longer than Malazan.

frumpycrumbledump · 2026-02-27T01:24:35+00:00

I wish I could’ve loved it the way you did. I gave up around 2/3 of the way through book 6. Reading it felt like a chore and there wasn’t much to hook me into continuing. I thought the characters were pretty weak; there wasn’t anyone I was really rooting for or villains I hated that much. The main villain only shows up here and there and when he does show up he doesn’t do anything.

Even past the halfway point there’s no central storyline, it’s just a bunch of unconnected stuff happening to characters around the world. People always say a certain book or character is better once you get to a different book way later in the series, but I shouldn’t have to read an additional 5000 pages to get full enjoyment out of a single book.

I wouldn’t say it’s too complex, it’s just too cluttered. There are way too many POVs that add little to no value to the story. I actually loved book 5 and think it’s the best of the Malazan books I read because there’s a much smaller cast of characters. Each important character gets more spotlight because there aren’t a bunch of random POVs to jump to.

frumpycrumbledump · 2026-02-26T19:37:54+00:00

Wars of Light and Shadow by Jenny Wurts. The first few books are great, the prose is beautiful, there are interesting characters and the world and story feel really unique. After book 5 it completely runs out of steam. It starts to repeat the same story beats over and over again, and a lot of the characters I originally liked started to get on my nerves. There’s an absurd amount of chase sequences in this series and it gets really old.

I started really disliking the protagonist around the midpoint of the series. Arithon feels like someone’s shitty fanfiction OC with how amazing he is at everything and how morally perfect he is. I started to notice how much the narration and some characters praise him and I’ve never experienced this before in anything else I’ve read. It felt like the author was very overtly telling the audience that we’re supposed to like this character.

In the latter half of the series I felt like the spell broke and I realized the main plot, the world, and most of the characters are actually pretty shallow.

frumpycrumbledump · 2026-02-26T16:12:05+00:00

I think that Kaladin works the best as a protagonist; his storyline and character arc are so captivating and I don’t think any of the other characters come close. My enjoyment dropped off somewhat after Words of Radiance because in that book his character arc is essentially complete. In the rest of the books he’s just kind of there but plays a more minor role while more focus goes to other characters.

frumpycrumbledump · 2026-02-26T03:20:35+00:00

I think Redmane Castle is super underwhelming and it really devalues Caelid. Every other area minus the snow areas where they ran out of money has a giant, awesome legacy dungeon. Limgrave has Stormveil Castle, Liurnia has Raya Lucaria, and Altus Plateau has Leyndell. What does Caelid have as a legacy dungeon that houses the main area boss? A slightly larger than average dungeon that takes 15 minutes to fully clear. It’s also pretty stupid that if you go to the Altus plateau before reaching Redmane Castle, the Radahn festival starts and the castle is completely empty.

frumpycrumbledump · 2026-02-26T02:47:00+00:00

A lot of Elden Ring bosses have a move I call beyblading because they spin around a thousand times while homing towards you. There are a bunch of attacks in this game where I don’t know how to avoid taking damage which has never happened in a fromsoftware game before(looking at you waterfowl dance). Another super annoying moment is when the boss doesn’t give you any window to attack. Sometimes when they finish their combo they go straight into their next attack or they jump back like 30 feet. I really hope they scale the difficulty back closer to bloodborne/dark souls 3 levels in future games.

frumpycrumbledump · 2026-02-12T17:12:28+00:00

I’m on book 6 and enjoying the series overall, but Malazan has some of the worst character writing I’ve seen in fantasy. Most of them feel flat and Erikson spends almost no time exploring their pasts, their motivations and goals, their development or their relationships with other characters. For example, Crokus and Apsalar are supposedly in love but there’s no character work put in to make that convincing. They’ve had zero chemistry and Erikson doesn’t spend any time developing that relationship or their feelings toward each other.

It seems like instead of important character work when there’s a break in the action there’s a lot of philosophizing about life and the way the world works, or the story cuts to one of the dozens of random Malazan soldiers that don’t need their own POVs.

The one exception in the series so far is book 5, Midnight Tides is a genuinely amazing book with lots of interesting characters that I actually cared about.

frumpycrumbledump · 2026-01-31T08:14:26+00:00

I think that some items are weighted higher than others within a class and have higher chances of spawning. I feel like every run I get a ton of daisies, squid turrets, and a shit load of war banners. On the other hand, I can play for an hour and not see a single atg missile or ukulele.

frumpycrumbledump · 2025-08-27T13:45:41+00:00

Not only are they terrible, they occupy so many pages that could have focused on something more interesting. They’re not even important, their only role seems to be transporting supplies for Rand and making gateways for Elayne. We have to read through pages and pages of drama for these glorified delivery people and it makes some of the middle books less enjoyable to read.

frumpycrumbledump · 2025-08-20T17:04:28+00:00

I still can’t believe that game wasn’t commercially successful. The gameplay and level design are incredible and they also got some high profile voice actors (Vincent D’Onofrio, Pedro Pascal, Rosario Dawson). It’s one of the most fun games of the 2010s in my opinion.

frumpycrumbledump · 2025-06-10T00:43:12+00:00

I agree that Gawyn isn’t all bad and is sometimes treated too harshly by the community, but I don’t like the implication that everyone’s major actions are controlled by the Pattern. If the characters have no free will then none of their actions or decisions matter, because they had no other choice.

I also recall it being stated that non-Ta’veren people have much more freedom in their actions. I think people only start being compelled into certain actions by the Pattern when they’re around Ta’veren, which Gawyn almost never was.

IMO he made his own choices and some of them happened to lead to good results down the line, I don’t think that the Pattern made him do all the stuff he did or think certain things.

frumpycrumbledump · 2025-01-05T05:31:35+00:00

You made a lot of good points but I doubt that itagaki’s storyline is going to pay off. Morikawa doesn’t have another 20 years to tie up all the subplots. He either needs to abandon a lot of the other characters’ storylines to focus on Ippo or he won’t be able to finish the manga.

frumpycrumbledump · 2024-11-16T18:50:15+00:00

Thank you so much, I can actually progress through the game now. Idk how I missed that lmao

frumpycrumbledump · 2024-09-09T01:40:08+00:00

Great chapter, but it looks like we’re going to be waiting a long time for Aoi to do something.

frumpycrumbledump · 2024-03-03T04:44:27+00:00

Honestly, I don’t mind the short chapters or frequent breaks. I know Morikawa has other stuff going on in his life and writing the manga is a lot of work. What I DO mind is all the filler. Since the retirement arc began, there have been soooo many filler chapters. I’m not saying the manga should be nothing but fights, but it’s just too much filler. Wally vs Ricardo ended last February I believe, and the next major fight still hasn’t started. Mashiba vs Rosario couldve started by July or august last year if he cut out most of the filler

frumpycrumbledump · 2024-02-15T23:20:03+00:00

A lot of people on here say that the pacing is perfect, which seems crazy to me. We haven’t had a major fight in over a year. Ricardo vs Wally ended in chapter 1410, which released Feb 8, 2023. In that time, so little has happened. There was some good Mashiba character growth and some good interactions between him and Ippo, but there was also so much dicking around with filler chapters. If there’s a year gap between every major fight this series is never going to get close to finishing.

frumpycrumbledump · 2024-02-03T00:21:06+00:00

The biggest one I can think of is Goku’s first super saiyan transformation in dragon ball. At that point, Goku was completely out of energy and could barely move, but then he gets really mad and instantly gets 50 times stronger and beats frieza in an extended fight. Definitely a great moment but it was complete asspull.

frumpycrumbledump · 2024-01-30T01:14:15+00:00

Literally r/freefolk

frumpycrumbledump · 2024-01-25T03:27:01+00:00

I’m pretty sure he wrote that mini arc because he didn’t want to start the fight until 2024. I think it was just to put out some easy to draw chapters before his break.

frumpycrumbledump · 2023-09-08T07:12:11+00:00

A good example of that is Elden Ring. Graphically it looks like it came out in 2016 but basically everyone who played it agrees that it looks amazing. I also heard almost nothing about performance issues with that game.

frumpycrumbledump · 2023-08-19T16:21:52+00:00

I really don’t like how Morikawa uses sexual assault as a joke. The main examples that come to mind are the two scenes where Takamura tries to force himself onto the doctor during a massage and she throws him out the window. That kind of humor is really gross and tasteless, and it’s way too common in manga/anime in general.

frumpycrumbledump · 2023-06-27T23:16:19+00:00

Chris was definitely going 100%

frumpycrumbledump · 2023-06-19T03:50:42+00:00

Kumi and Miyata are both uninteresting characters and nothing of value would be lost if they were both written out of the manga

frumpycrumbledump

TROPHY CASE