Windwalker: Won (with Final Rating)

Windwalker

United States
ORIGIN Systems (developer and publisher)

Released 1989 for DOS, Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and Macintosh

Date Started: 9 August 2013

Date Ended: 14 August 2013

Total Hours: 11

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 33
Ranking at Time of Posting: 54% (57/105)

Ranking at Game #455: 315/455 (69%)

Like its predecessor, Windwalker is a game with interesting ideas that doesn't take enough time to develop them. It's a simple action RPG masquerading as some kind of epic experience, and its uses of eastern themes are shallow and ultimately unnecessary to the gameplay. In this, it is characteristic of ORIGIN's 1980s "between-Ultimas" RPGs, almost all of which (Knights of Legend, Tangled Tales, 2400 A.D.) feel like half-hearted experiments designed to make the Ultima series look better by contrast.

Winning the game involved three major steps:

1. Defeating the Warlord in combat and sending him into exile.
 

2. Waiting until the night of a new moon and then "exorcising" the gate to the Astral Plane in the alchemist's house, trapping him there and ending the repeat possessing of the shrines.

3. Collecting a bunch of ingredients for an Elixir of Everlasting Life to awaken the imprisoned Emperor.

The first two steps are comparatively easy and could (I think) be accomplished by a knowledgeable player almost immediately at the outset of the game. The third involved exploring all the corners of the world.

Well...yeah. Why are you so surprised?

A key to winning the battle against the Warlord was finding the retired assassin on one of the islands. He told me a incense-burning chant that would double my speed for a few hours. With this active, I was able to defeat the two-bladed warrior with little problem (again using the analysis of the moves I'd made during training).

The amusing thing was that a single lost combat sent the Warlord packing. There was this whole animation in which he ran out of the palace, jumped into his ship, and fled the island. I suppose that's honorable and everything, but did it occur to him to just order his guards to surround me and kill me?

Oddly, the self-imposed exile of the Warlord doesn't change the disposition of the Palace Guards in the slightest. They still attack on sight and happily toss the character into the prison if he's defeated. Who do they think they're taking orders from?

Exiling the Alchemist was similarly easy. On the night of a new moon, I got a vision of him gloating that he'd summoned evil spirits from the Astral Plane to take over the shrines. I visited his house, learned about his plans (including the key fact that he'd paralyzed the emperor with a poison), went upstairs, and simply cast an "exorcise" fireball at the open gate.

It was nice of him to offer such a thorough villain's exposition.

Upon finding he's trapped in the Astral Plane, the Alchemist has an amusing reaction:

It's spelled "VENGEANCE," jackass.

The third step, collecting the ingredients, was by far the longest, but I had been doing it gradually throughout the game without realizing the purpose of what I was collecting. Probably the most complicated sequence involved visiting the Isle of the Dead during a full moon, navigating a series of caves, and speaking to the God of Luck to get a peach seed.

If you visit during a non-full moon, you just get an unhelpful panda.

 
The caves were full of "Oni" (a demon/troll from Japanese folklore) who the player cannot fight, only evade with magical protection. To get through the cave, I first had to bring my turtle shell and beggar's shoe to the shaman Ka Noh Bi in a nearby cave and get him to make an "invisibility" talisman, then use that to safely traverse the Oni cave. Bumping into an Oni or a wall removes the invisibility. The Oni can't kill the character, but if they strike him, he awakens in their cave, "confused" for a few rounds, surrounded by more Oni. I kept getting into a vicious cycle by which I'd get attacked by one, awaken in the cave, stumble around confused, and get attacked by another one.

Trying to avoid the Oni while invisible.

Perhaps the more annoying aspect was having to wait for a full moon. I ended up just sleeping days away until the right moon appeared.

While sleeping, the sleep restores body points at the same speed that the resulting starvation depletes them.

Another ingredient was some jasmine from Nubia, which I had to obtain from the imprisoned Princess. This was a multi-stage process of first learning some words of the Nubian language from a scroll in the monastery, then using them to convince the princess's guards that you're a friend, and then asking the princess for "pluumfir" (the jasmine flower). I learned the hard way that you have to talk to the princess while she's in her bedroom, not in her bath.

I'll spare you the details about finding the alchemists necessary to assemble the ingredients into a potion. Once I had the potion, I had to beat up some guards, sneak by the jailer, enter the Emperor's cell, and administer it to him. Once again, it's a bit baffling that the guards and jailer were still doing their jobs even though the Warlord was gone and the Alchemist banished. It sounds like the Emperor needs to do some serious housekeeping after he gets back on his throne.

See, "benevolence" is what got you in trouble in the first place.

Anyway, administering the potion resulted in the endgame and the closing screens seen above, including one by Greg Paul Malone's smiling face, telling me how proud he is.

Some part of me suspects he actually thought he had "disciples" out there, joyfully playing the game and absorbing his philosophies.

After winning, I consulted a couple of walkthroughs and realized there were aspects of the game I missed. I had been wondering why the training screen has you fight with a staff but a staff never appears in the game. It turns out I needed to join a monastic order to get both the staff and a robe that presumably would have offered some protection. I did find those monks, but I lost honor when I tried talking to them, which the game interpreted as me trying to force them to break their vows of silence. I didn't realize there was one monk that it was cool to engage in conversation. Anyway, no big loss: I preferred fighting hand-to-hand.

You can apparently enter the Astral Plane instead of closing it, though I can't find a description online from anyone who's done so, or what happened. I declined to keep returning to Ka Noh Bi with turtle shells and other ingredients to get talismans other than "invisibility" (immortality, water walking, levitation), but as we've seen, I didn't really need them. There are some water beetles scattered about the game from whom it's apparently possible to get some reagents, but I never figured out how to kill them before they attacked me. I probably needed to use "invisibility."

Before we get to the GIMLET, I need to rant about one aspect of gameplay that was so bafflingly stupid, I can't understand how someone didn't kill it in the production phase. As you explore the islands, the game occasionally comes to a halt to show you a storm. Rain comes pouring down and there are between one and five lightning strikes, spaced a couple seconds apart. You can't do anything--move, check your inventory, sleep--during this animation; I guess you're just meant to contemplate the majesty of the graphics. Late in the game, these storms come along with such frequency that you find yourself moving three or four steps, then having to stop and wait 10 seconds for a storm to pass. In the final hour, the ratio of playing to watching the storm animation was probably around 3:1. The whole sequence is horribly annoying and utterly pointless, and I have no idea what the developers were trying to achieve with it.

I also want to talk about the "honor" system a bit, because it was a good idea, poorly implemented, that anticipates the "karma meters" of later games (though of course Ultima IV did it first). It's vaguely fun to find all the different ways you can lose honor in the game: the ones I experienced were fleeing from combat, stealing from the houses of townsfolk or shrines, failing to liberate shrines seized by the forces of darkness, talking to monks who've taken a vow of silence, talking to the princess in her bath tub, and trying to slap the emperor awake.

The problems with the system are twofold. First, despite showing up as a "meter," the honor system is basically binary. If you have anything less that perfect honor, people won't speak to you and certain plot sequences won't work. Second, there's no way to incrementally gain honor. You have to get it back all at once, either by leveling up (which restores all the meters) or by burning incense and saying "restore my honor." If honor is so easily regained, it's not really all that valuable in the first place.

Oh, and all that I Ching nonsense spouted by the manual has absolutely no bearing on gameplay or any role in the game's plot.

Okay, on to the GIMLET:

• 4 points for the game world. I can fault the game and its manual for a lot of things, but it does set up an interesting world and back story. It just doesn't implement them very well during gameplay. Consider the "three religions" explained in detail in a scroll I found in the monastery: shamanism, idolatry, and Khisanism. It sounds like the game is trying to set up an interesting system of balance and conflict among the three approaches, but in practice your interaction with them is extremely limited: talking to alchemists to explore "shamanism," doing the "tantric dance" in front of stone idols to engage "idolatry," and burning incense to reflect "Khisanism." The manual is full of philosophies and asides to suggest a depth to the game world that never materializes. The world also doesn't respond well to the actions of the player. After I defeated the Warlord, there were a few NPCs who commented on my victory, but in general things continue as if he were still on the throne.

The game does offer some interesting in-game text to flesh out the game world.

• 4 points for character creation and development. Leveling is swift and satisfying, and I ended the game well short of the top level ("DRAGON"). There are no attributes and no way to customize the character beyond the name, but I like the way every NPC actually uses the name, which is an odd rarity in RPGs. I also give a point for the intriguing (if flawed) honor system.

• 4 points for NPC interaction. This aspect is considerably improved from Moebius and involves the ability to speak to a large number of NPCs for keywords about people, places, and things. Doing so is absolutely necessary to advance the game's plot and find necessary clues. There is no flexibility in these dialogue choices, and no role-playing, but still better than most RPGs in this era. I found no value in the I Ching fortune-tellers, but others might.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. Like Moebius, the game offers only four different unique enemies that you face in combat, though there are a few additional non-combat enemies that you have to navigate. Unlike Moebius, these enemies behave fundamentally different from each other in combat, and you have to study their strategies to find the best attacks and defenses. Still, there's very little depth to the game's encounters, and no challenging puzzles.

• 3 points for magic and combat. Although I grew to master it after hours of study, I never found the combat "fun." I give it some credit for the turn-based "concentration" mode and the ability to re-watch combats when they're completed, but it's simply not RPG combat. The "magic system" consists solely of burning incense while chanting one of half a dozen restoration or buffing prayers.

• 3 points for equipment. I missed out on the one weapon and one bit of armor the game provided. Beyond that, "equipment" consists of food, incense sticks, healing potions, magic talismans, and a few special items.

• 2 points for the economy. The game has one, but it really couldn't be simpler. You get money randomly from combats and can spend it at merchants' shops for food, incense, and ink and parchment necessary to make permanent copies of scrolls. I always had whatever I needed, and I ended the game with the maximum cash possible (99).

• 3 points for quests. The main quest is vaguely interesting, though with no role-playing options. There are quasi- side-quests in the liberation of shrines from the forces summoned by the Alchemist. I didn't cover these in my description of the game because they're so simplistic (cast "exorcise" at a possessed priest).

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics look okay in these screen shots, but in general I think the attempt at quasi 3-D failed, especially in the limited game window. I never got used to the floating heads and remain astonished that anyone thought it made sense to keep them from Moebius. The interface was intuitive enough--I got used to the many combat options surprisingly quickly. The sound was much better than Moebius, particularly in combat, and definitely worth hearing.

• 4 points for gameplay. Though the game world isn't very big, it does exhibit some limited nonlinearity: you can approach the islands in any order, and I suppose it doesn't matter whether you defeat the Warlord first or banish the Alchemist first. The difficulty level is about right, perhaps slightly too easy (though most players won't spend hours analyzing combat the way I did) and it doesn't linger.

I can't help but subtract one point for those stupid storms, giving us a final score of 33, considerably higher than Moebius's 24, but still lower than the threshold I'd use to suggest a game is "worth playing."

In the March 1990 Computer Gaming World, reviewer Dennis Owens completely disagrees. He calls it an "excellent" game and praises every one of its aspects, including the damned storm animations! He loved the "honor" system and says that "Origin's writers should be praised for their attempts to instill codes of conduct in their games." This is the third time I've consulted an Owens review after disliking a game only to find that he loved it. I'd like to know if he ever gave a bad review.

I don't know anything about how well the game sold, but I think it's telling that we never saw a third game in Khantun despite what seemed to be a setup for one.

The two walkthroughs I found are both lackluster and devoid of real fondness, encouraging the player to just get through it as quickly as possible. And the one user review on MobyGames (worth reading as a complement to mine) summarizes it as a "poor sequel to an average game." I'd reverse the two adjectives--I do think Windwalker is a better experience--but otherwise it basically describes how I feel.

And, of course, despite Mr. Malone's best intentions, waves of teenagers did not suddenly, at the turn of the 1990s, develop a craze for the I Ching.

With that, we're one step closer to the end of the 1980s. Next up is an RPG-adventure hybrid called The Third Courier.

The Wayward Windwalker

I'm having flashbacks to my honeymoon.

Windwalker has provided at least one unique experience: I have rarely in my CRPG-playing career been so baffled as to what I'm supposed to do. In a change from the small, closed, linear world of Moebius, Windwalker's world is quite large, and the game gives few hints as to any order of progression. I've spent the last few days just wandering around the various islands, fighting guards, assassins, and thieves, amassing equipment and gold, and finding the occasional special item. If I wasn't increasing in levels at such a good clip, I'd think I was just wasting time.

Leveling up.

Before I began playing in earnest, I spent a good four or five hours in training, trying to master the combat system. The game's opening menu gives you the ability to fight a cycle of combats with both staff and fists against each of the game's enemies. I found it so difficult that I started keeping an Excel spreadsheet of each enemy, my weapon, his position, his distance, the combat move, and the outcome.

This, right here? This is the definition of "nerd."

After these hours of practice and data analysis, I was able to distill strategies against each foe and win the entire cycle of training combats, which meant that I started a level higher, at BADGER. More important, all this experience has made the combats in the game comparatively easy. Enemies behave predictably and fall to the same strategies repeatedly. When I'm attacked by a royal guard, I know to advance one step, which invariably causes him to advance one. While he's mid-stride, I make a high kick followed by a punch, then cartwheel away and repeat until he's dead. Similarly, for assassins, I know to simply dance around them until they attempt their flying kicks. Then I back up while they're in mid-air, causing them to miss, and respond with a high kick to their heads as soon as they land. For thieves, you wait until they try to stab, then respond with a spinning roundhouse kick to the face.

Combat is frequent in the game, especially around the palace, where royal guards respawn constantly and provide plenty of grinding opportunities. But despite the heavy focus on combat, the game is strangely pacifistic. I've found no weapons so far, and based on the introductory training, I suspect that even when I do, it'll be a staff instead of a sword. The game is careful to mention that you don't actually kill your enemies and loot their corpses; instead, they "flee" when you beat them, discarding their equipment behind them.

He didn't "flee," dammit! I knocked him unconscious!

There is absolutely no indication of enemy damage during combat, so you just have to keep punching and kicking until they finally collapse. Even when you seem to beat the foe, there's a small chance that he'll be "determined" and rise again for a few more hits (this can also happen to the PC). Much of the game consists of sailing between islands, and enemies can sail up and attack from their own ships.

Imperial warships discharge four or five royal guards in sequence before they give up and sail away.

Aside from combat, the gameplay is inoffensive but underwhelming. It isn't a clear improvement over Moebius. Yes, there are more extensive NPC dialogues and an actual economy, but the series has lost the need or ability to hack through trees and rocks, the magic system is simplified, there are no animals (at least, none that I've encountered yet), and so far there haven't been any complex puzzles. The interface consists solely of directional movement, speaking, and using items from the inventory (even sleeping involves selecting the "straw mat" from the inventory, something that took me forever to figure out).

The economy is a nice addition to the game, though I don't know what a lot of this stuff is for.

Perhaps the biggest change since Moebius is the introduction of a clearly Ultima-inspired virtue system, represented by the "honor" meter. You don't have to achieve avatarhood or anything; the honor bar starts full and it's yours to lose. You can lose honor by stealing from cabinets in private homes and probably a few other things I haven't discovered. Stealing incense from a shrine causes you to lose all your honor, and no one will talk with you after that. I don't mind admitting I just reloaded when that happened. Anyway, it's there, but it lacks any of Ultima's complexity.

Gideon loses an eighth.

As I said, I've been wandering the islands, trying to figure out what to do. Some of the encounters I've experienced are:

• Visited a couple of shrines and learned the "incense" system. Basically, you find "common incense" throughout the game on enemies and in shops. You need a priest to "bless" the incense to use it, at which point you can invoke it with prayers like "heal my body" and "empower my spirit."

• Talked to a lot of townsfolk about the Warlord and the Emperor. The consensus seems to be everyone hates the Warlord and wishes the Emperor would be freed from prison, and that the Alchemist is a jerk for helping the warlord. The Nubian princess is being held in an unknown location.

Speaking with one of the Warlord's concubines.

• Found a cave with a stone idol and instructions for performing a "tantric dance" of 14 steps. Going through the steps in front of a couple of idols rewarded me with healing elixirs.

That's what it's all about.

• Discovered the house of an explorer named Di Ahn Jon. Notes left behind indicated that he went to the Isles of the Dead to investigate the recent appearance of evil spirits on the nights of the new moon. He left behind a helpful map.

I don't know if this is the whole world or just a part of it.

• Di Ahn Jon's journal also indicated that "by bringing a turtle shell and the shoe of a blind person to Kah Noh Bi [really?], I was able to get an invisibility talisman that makes it much easier to explore the island." I haven't met Kah Noh Bi yet, but I was able to get a turtle from a fisherman and a shoe from a beggar, so I'm ready for when I do.

In one of the few combats I lost against a royal guard, I was captured and thrown into the Palace Prison. Rather than reload, I decided to roll with the punches and see what happened. It took me a few days (in-game) to figure out how to escape, and during this time, the Warlord paid a visit and kicked my butt with his double swords.

Everyone seems to know my name in this game.

I eventually got the woman who delivered food to the prisoners to agree to leave the door unlocked. I escaped, defeated the guards outside, retrieved a key from the jailer's office, opened the cell next to mine, and had a lovely conversation with the Emperor's wife, who seemed in no hurry to escape. I didn't find the Emperor himself, but there was another cell that wouldn't open to the key.

I fought dozens of guards getting out of the palace, but not before looting the throne for a box of jade.

Is it really necessary to have the disembodied head a second time in this message?

As for next steps, it's clear that I have to visit the Isle of the Dead and see what I can do about the raised spirits, but I probably also need to visit the Alchemist on his island. I'm sure I'll have to rescue the Nubian princess at some point, but I don't know how. And I have some rumors about a legendary retired assassin on one of the islands.

I realize this posting is a bit disorganized, but then again so is the game--though I do think it's interesting that within the first hour of gameplay, you can just wander up to the palace and fight the Warlord. He defeated me so easily--I didn't land a single blow, and his one hit vaporized all my health--that I don't imagine there's any chance of winning this early. (Does anyone know otherwise?) If the game has one virtue, it appears to be a certain nonlinearity, though I'm hoping by next time, I have some slightly better direction towards the main quest.

Game 108: Windwalker (1989)

Every once in a while, a baffling sequel appears. I remember when The Whole Ten Yards came along. Don't get me wrong: The Whole Nine Yards was a pleasant-enough film, but it's hard to imagine some studio executives and scriptwriters saying, "You know, I don't think we fully reached closure on the tale of Jimmy 'The Tulip' Tudeski and Nicholas 'Oz' Oseransky. Viewers need to see what happens in their continuing slapstick adventure." Ditto Taken 2 ("Guys, wait! Listen! What would happen if Liam Neeson's daughter were kidnapped again?").

We've seen plenty of sequels on this blog so far, some of them good (Starflight II, Ultima V, Curse of the Azure Bonds), some bad (Ultima II, The Bard's Tale II), but few that seem as fundamentally pointless as a sequel to Moebius. I rated the first game pretty low, but I'm not saying it was horrible. It had its moments. But it didn't demand a sequel. I can only imagine that someone at ORIGIN Systems said, "Hey, what's better than one Karateka-inspired action RPG with a quasi-eastern theme?" and not realizing the answer he received was sarcastic.

The manual provides far more detail on the game world than we found in Moebius. The land, Khantun, is apparently ruled by Emperor Chao Ti, who's in trouble. Chao Ti sent one of his warlords, Zhurong, to the neighboring kingdom of Nubia to conclude a trade agreement. But Zhurong got a swelled head during the journey and decided to conquer and pillage Nubia instead, carrying their Ivory Princess back to Khantun. Upon his return, he colluded with the court alchemist, Shen Jang, to overthrow and imprison Chao Ti. Evil spirits have taken over the land's holy shrines, slaves are conscripted to work the jade mines, and the populace is forbidden to even complain about it.

Once again, a single disciple of Moebius must defeat the lot of them by himself. In the last game it was because there had been "no need" for an army after Moebius showed everyone the path of enlightenment. In this game, it's because "the priests and monks are sworn to non-violence; the cowed peasants make no resistance," and the few protestors against Zhurong's tyranny "cannot organize." Thus, I must "overthrow Zhurong, defeat Shen Jang and his evil spirits, and restore the Harmonious Emperor to his Nightingale Throne."

If there's one thing that you'd hope the makers of Windwalker would change from Moebius, it would be the weird disembodied floating heads that make up the character, enemy, and NPC icons. But they didn't change them; in fact, they made them worse:

There are meters on the main screen for body, spirit, honor, and karma, as well as an animal-based description of the current level of enlightenment. The "karma" meter seems to refer to your "lives." Food and water are again necessities.

You can't tell very well from static screen shots, but in the graphics, the game attempts a kind-of oblique angle rather than a top-down approach. As you move north, the horizon "scrolls" towards you rather than simply revealing the next line of tiles, and you can see the sky above the horizon. It's an interesting approach, but the screen is a bit too small to accommodate it well.
 

Inside a shop. Notice how my expression has changed with low health.

Buildings actually have separate interiors in this game, and NPCs have a little more to say when you talk to them, though so far most of what they have to say is somewhat unhelpful. One of the NPCs I met early was a fortune teller who had me cast coins in real life and then interpreted the results. I can't imagine how that possibly helps me in-game.

And this beggar demanded gold for every question.

Combat is far more complex than in Moebius. So far, I find it much much harder, and I'm losing almost all of my fights, even during training. One thing that hasn't changed is that hits that seem to land unimpeded on unguarded parts of enemies nonetheless do not "connect." There appears to be no sword in this game; combat is either by staff or hand-to-hand. One potentially-interesting innovation is the ability to switch to "concentration" mode, at which point the combat becomes turn-based instead of action-oriented, theoretically giving you more time to interpret your enemy's position and choose the best attack or defense.

This one could end very badly.

There are some more interesting combat moves offered, such as handsprings and cartwheels, though I don't know how helpful they are in practice. Once you finish combat, whether victorious or defeated, you have the ability to "reflect upon your experience," which basically means to watch a video re-play.

No, thanks. I'm just going to lie here and moan.

If you lose all your karma or "abandon" the game, you're treated to one of the most bizarre screenshots that I've ever seen in an RPG.

Why is my character suddenly a naked female hobbit?

I didn't play a lot of the game, so let's digress a bit into a discussion about authorial presence. The game puts author Greg Paul Malone more in-your-face than in Moebius, and at times it gets a bit overdone. The manual begins with a section titled "The Making of Windwalker" that compliments "the author's attention to detail and commitment to authenticity" and promises that "Windwalker may have been designed primarily as entertainment, but the experience of playing the game encompasses much more." Uh-huh. Later, Malone gets a page-long "author's afterword" in which he encourages players of all ages to "seek to increase your awareness of the intricate beauty that this life and the people you meet in it have to offer." If that wasn't enough, he then gets a half-page acknowledgements section where, after we learn the names and ages of his children, he personally thanks "human history, for being such a wonderful source of endless stories (and amusement)!" But we're not even done there. We also get a full-page "About the author" in which we learn about Malone's personal, eastern-based philosophies (the manual is full of quotes from I Ching), family, hobbies, and bland platitudes ("The world provides us with a true treasure trove of ideas and stories to draw upon," Greg declares enthusiastically). The game manual has a damned bibliography of 18 sources, including Chinese Herbal Medicine and Zen in the Martial Arts. Oh, and it's also clear that Malone used his own face for that of Moebius the Windwalker. Of course, this is all from "Lord British's" company, so it's not like there wasn't a precedent.

Origin: Where Narcissism Lives.

After typing all of the above, I realized I might be a little out of line. Why shouldn't the "author" of a computer game get as much face-time and credit as, say, the author of a book or the director of a film? My answer is that perhaps he should, but even in books and films they have to walk a careful line. Stephen King has said several times that he sees his stories as "found things, like fossils in the ground...part of an undiscovered pre-existing world" (this specific quote is from On Writing) and that the author's job is to"use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible." You might think the quote is silly, even offensive to authors who go through the exhausting process of creating, not finding, their worlds, but the point is that Stephen King believes it (or says he does) and writes his stories as if he believes it. Every time I read a Stephen King book, I'm fully aware that it is Stephen King who wrote the book, but I still don't feel his presence in the text. If the book is from a first-person point-of-view, it truly feels as if the narrator is telling the story; if from the third-person, it feels like a truly impartial, omniscient narrator. This is true even when King interpolates some direct address to the reader.

I'll contrast this with the works of Terry Goodkind even though there are probably plenty of far worse examples. When I first went looking for another mammoth multi-volume fantasy series to keep me occupied over a summer and picked up Wizard's First Rule, I was put off by the photograph of Goodkind on the rear cover. I'm not going to try to analyze why. Maybe he just didn't look like the sort of person from whom I really wanted to hear a fantasy story, or even contribute to his royalties. Whatever the reason, I nearly put the book down. But Stephen King has also taken some bafflingly horrid cover photos, so I figured don't judge a book by its rear cover and bought it.

In case you want to do your own analysis.

I found it passable. Not George R. R. Martin or even Robert Jordan, but passable. I liked it enough to buy the second and third in the series. But as the narrative progressed, I became more and more aware that the teller of this story wasn't some omniscient narrator, but the guy on the back cover. Through subtle shifts in tone, language, and plot, he made it impossible to maintain the illusion that he was telling the story rather than making up the story. His characters' objectivism-inspired philosophies became his philosophies. His increasingly-lame excuses to get his main female character out of her clothes didn't feel titillating; they felt like some pervert sharing his own fantasies. I got to the point that I just couldn't read any more. Most people who criticize Goodkind criticize the quality of his writing, but that wasn't the problem for me. His writing had always been average. I quit because I couldn't stop thinking of the words as specifically coming from his mouth.

But if Goodkind gave me a call and said, "Damn, Bolingbroke. You're right. Tell me what I did wrong. Tell me how I could be more like Stephen King," I wouldn't know how to respond. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what he did to break the illusion. By the same token, Richard Garriott/Lord British can appear in the Ultima series, and yet still make me feel that it's a real place and not the deluded fantasies of "some guy," whereas Greg Paul Malone/Moebius the Windwalker can't pull it off. Obviously, this is an area in which individual player opinion may vary, but I know that every time I read some I Ching nonsense about "winds of gradual change," I'm going to picture Malone smiling to himself at his computer, satisfied that he's giving the player a truly spiritual experience.

More soon, though my output is going to continue to be a trickle for the next few weeks.