Review: The Gospel of Loki

Okay, first off, this isn't a bad thing, but a lot of the time sentences would jump out at me in Tom Hiddleston's voice. It was pretty cool.

Anyway, so what's this book! It's The Gospel of Loki by Joanne M. Harris, the first person retelling of Norse mythology, with Loki as the main character, straight from the horse's mouth (and that's not just a phrase in this case!).

Before we get onto the story, writings and characters themselves I just want to make a quick comment about how the book itself. I can be a bit of a nerd for how books look and feel, I think that can really bring a book together. Even if the writing is phenomenal but it looks like something a dolphin’s sat on when it was waiting for the bus then it’s going to put me off.

Thankfully, there was no dolphin. The title and look of this book work very well together. I very much like the juxtaposition of the title; The Gospel of Loki, as he is a well known fiendish liar, and yet here we have his gospel, his truthful word.

Just lovely

Equally the cover illustration is exquisite. The bold lines and solid colours of the illustration is reminiscent of a stained glass window. The illustration draws upon many elements of the story to provide a wonderfully diverse colour scheme across the cover. All in all a brilliant design for this book.

But anyway onto the actual work.

So we follow Loki all the way from his origins in the very heart of chaos right up until Ragnarok, with all the highs, lows and middle-y bits that go with it.

At first I found it slightly jarring at times that the language was quite colloquial, that sort of thing doesn't happen so often in an epic fantasy tale. It was slightly odd to read a sentence or a piece of dialogue with the gods talking to frost giants or something similar when the dialogue read; "Okay, just, like, calm down!" Alright it wasn't that colloquial, but you see where I'm coming from.

But thankfully that doesn't happen very often and once you've seen it happen a couple of times it actually fits in very well with the image of the cheeky and mischievous Loki with the silver tongue that I'm sure we've all come to know and love.

Cheeky devil

We start the story at the very beginning and get a nice overview of the characters, the setting and how everything generally works. Harris' writing immediately puts you at your ease and lets you gently settle into how the tale is going to be told.

Harris very much captures the essence of the Loki character; mischievous but altogether good. It's from the first person perspective of Loki and so comes across in pretty much all the aspects of her writing. There is never a word or phrase that doesn't weave this image further into the book.

The storyline also presents a side of the mythology that doesn't seem to get much of a look in nowadays. Odin is presented as a much more shady character than you would expect. This gives the book plenty of opportunity for twists and turns to keep you guessing and then keeps you guessing about guessing.

This book is very entertaining, it has all the right amounts of epic fantasy and tongue-in-cheek humour and an excellent mix of heroic and dastardly characters. Harris skillfully weaves the stereotypical evil Loki into a self-aware but misunderstood antihero with a heart of gold. Or at least a heart of fire that's covered in gold.

I hope that you check this book out, it’s a wonderful piece by a wonderful author. Well worth your time.

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Steelheart Review

I thoroughly enjoy superhero stories, going right back to watching Spiderman cartoons every Saturday when I was a kid.

And given my absolute enjoyment that I got out of the Mistborn books I thought that the Steelheart books would be a no brainer enjoyment roller coaster. In some ways, it was.

The story tells of a world after Calamity, a big burst in the sky that’s given some people superpowers. And these people became Epics, but far from saving the world from its ills and evils, the Epics essentially became the superhuman overlords of the mortal populace. If you’re not an Epic, then you’re not worth anything, you just keep your head down and try to do the best you can without pissing off someone with any powers whatsoever so they don’t kill you.

Some of the Epics are strong and capable of ruling both Epics and normal people alike with an iron fist. It is one of these Epics that is the main antagonist, Steelheart who has taken Chicago and all the people in it and become their Emperor. Steelheart is essentially a superman like character with invulnerability, flight, super strength, energy blasting out of his hands, and most interestingly can change inanimate objects to steel.

Our protagonist, David, is the only person alive who has seen Steelheart bleed, everyone else believes him to be invincible. Steelheart went on a rampage when he did get injured, killed all the witnesses, the rescue workers and buried the bank it happened in. So he feels it’s vital that he meets and goes with the Reckoners, the only group of normal people who stand up to Epics.

But that’s enough of the story, I don’t really want to give too much away.

The writing of the book was never bad and I thought that some of the aspects of the world were quite interesting, like the Epics weaknesses. It provided an excellent sense of danger to fighting the Epics, even if they knew what the weakness was they still have to try and make sure the situation was just right to pull it off.

Technologically Sanderson made good use of the Epics to kick start some very sci-fi devices and so keep the world fresh enough that you never know quite what’s going to happen next.

The main character, David, was never irritating, always tried to do the right thing and I think that Sanderson did a good job of making his love story seem a bit immature like the character was. Pushed into the dangerous and very mature world of fighting Epics, we still find David emotionally immature in other areas, despite his encyclopedic knowledge of Epics.

But for all that it lacked a certain something. It almost felt like Sanderson was publishing this book just so he could write something about superheroes. The underlying theme of the book, whether power corrupts and the lengths you should go to stop dictators, didn’t seem to be organically worked into the story. It seemed to me that all of a sudden this theme was shoved right in your face. Something that reinforced this for me was the whole ‘geek’ thing with David. Sanderson seemed intent on making sure that you knew David was being identified as a geek. This could just be me being cynical but it struck me as something cheap to try and get David to connect with the readers at this point.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed with Steelheart really. I was hoping for something just as enjoyable and occasionally mind-bending as the Mistborn series. But what I got was the written equivalent of an okay action movie. It wasn't a bad experience and it wasn't badly done, it was enjoyable, but it wasn’t anything that would leave you speechless.

So if you’re looking for a bit of a romp through a post-apocalyptic world with superheroes rampaging about then this book will suit you. Don’t set yourself up for the most amazing read you’ll ever see, but you will find an enjoyable story with action and adventure to keep you entertained.

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The Banner Saga

You might remember The Banner Saga from its days on Kickstarter, the project of Stoic Studio which includes a lot of long time heavy-weight game makers from Bioware. And I did say that this blog was about all things fantastical, and what's more fantastic than a story about giants, men and the end of the world?



That's basically what The Banner Saga is about. You come upon the story as the sun stops in the sky and the gods are dead. 

First you play the role of Ubin, an old Varl (basically their version of giants), collecting taxes and then as can be assumed in some sort of epic fantasy game; it all goes down. As I mentioned, the sun has stopped in the sky only a few days prior to your taking over the reins and the gods have been dead for longer. Some people are calling it the end of times, and let's be honest the evidence is certainly pointing that way. After a short while, which is long enough to give you a grounding in some basic history and work out how the game mechanics work, you find out that there is a flood of destructive armies called Dredge bearing down on you.

Later on you transport yourself over to the other side of the continent and follow another character, Rook. This time you're following a mainly human settlement as they deal with the death and destruction that the tide of Dredge brings with them.

It's turn based fantasy RPG game and it has a lot of elements that I really like in it. In fact, mainly what I didn't like was that it ended. It's not a really long game, but I think I'm also taking that from the other RPGs I like to play, like Borderlands 2, Skyrim, Rogue Legacy and Dark Souls, which let's be honest have a whole continent of playtime in them. Alongside the story (that we'll come onto later) that you manoeuvre yourself through, and the towns and hamlets that you encounter, you also have to worry about how you travel. By that I mean when you're marching; how long you want to march without rest (rest increases morale), dealing with random occurrences on the march (from attacks to births) and making sure you can stock up enough when you can to avoid any starvation (I did not manage that the first time around).

The art style was very well brought together so that nothing ever felt out of place within it. From the sweeping landscapes, to the towns and then down to the little arenas of combat. It was all well drawn, with as much detail as you could want from each of the screens, and well maintained so you still felt drawn in (forgive the pun) with it.

This also extends to the enemies that you face (excluding those humans or varl that you might be on the wrong side of). The Dredge, the way that they look really excacerbates the situation that you find yourself in that you're being chased by the inexorable. Starvation is hard fought against and if you're not careful you will find yourself losing followers like flies. Rest is weighed against the ever present threat that's looming alongside the scarcity of your supplies. It does an excellent job of making you feel frayed by both your task to reach your destination and the burden of making sure as many people as possible do that. 

Now onto the story.

I outlined the brief jist of the story already, but I think that the way the game is structured really helps it along. You get options alongside the conversations as they talk, and because you're taking part in an epic adventure with both a heroic Varl and a hunter-turned-leader you really get the sense of the story from both sides. The epic and sprawling, but also how it affects the lowliest of people. This is most assuredly helped along by the fact that as you travel across the vast expanse, fleeing the Dredge, you need to scrape together from every village and hamlet that you possibly can.

I don't want to go into too much detail about the story, you know, spoilers. But I found that the pacing was good, the actual conflict was compelling and the characters were very interesting. That doesn't necessarily include the protagonists, which isn't to say they don't have their own charm, but when you're playing AS the character I think it's harder to fully flesh out and map a character when the player has the option of saving the orphaned kittens one minute, making them a lovely person, and then they also have the opportunity to follow that up by kicking an old lady down some stairs on top of a cliff for no reason (none of those actually happen).

The points at which you break from one set of characters to the other mark the Chapters of the game. I found that the moments the Chapters moved from one to the other were very well segmented. I'm not sure if I was expecting less because it's a game, but I was very impressed with the cliffhangers and how it made you want to come back for more. It is frustrating I think talking about the story, game-wise, because I don't want to give anything away that might affect anyone's in-game decisions!
Suffice to say the deliberate placement of your baggage train as of tiny, but potentially many, figures against the sweeping backdrop definitely accentuates the feeling of being overwhelmed with your relatively small numbers and the ever present dangers that your fleeing party faces. 

So overall I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a very sweet game (as in good... not as in sweet, it's kind of dark) even if it felt short. I can't remember if there are any more instalments of it coming out, but I would be very happy to have them. It's a splendid fantasy tale alongside good game mechanics and an art style that hammers home the feel of the story and ties it all together very nicely. 

I would also like to point out that this is very much a game that changes depending on what you choose to do. Having only played through it once, (halfway through the second now) I may not be doing justice to the length of the game. There very much is a story to continue at the point at which I left it. So I'm hoping that either there is another instalment coming out, or if my choices led to the credits shorter than another choice would have. 

If you're a fan of fantasy, role playing games, or general nordic mythology, I would definitely recommend this to you. 

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