No Game No Life volume 6 (read for fun)

This is an intense volume.  That is because its story is the final days of The Great War. Yes, that terrible and seemingly endless conflict in Dishboard's ancient history, which gave rise to Tet's ascension as the One True God, is the subject of this volume. 

It is just as bad as everyone in the present says it was. I have to give the author credit for that. Yuu Kamiya really conveys how shitty the situation was for humanity back then, when the Ten Commandments of Tet didn't exist to prevent war.  As an example, an entire human settlement has to pack up and move when a battle between higher ranked species starts near them, because the entire settlement could be wiped out in an instant by a single, stray shot.  All of them could be killed by accident without either warring party even noticing them. The emotional toll this takes is excellently conveyed. The first chapters convey the sort of survival mindset needed to exist in this world of endless war. 

That is not to say that the story is endless doom and gloom. There is levity spread throughout this story. Some of it is between the two leads, Riku and Schwi. Some of it is in the interludes, which move back to the present day, where Tet is telling this story to Izuna. Yes, the God of Games is taking a turn as a storyteller.  And, by his own admission, he is not a reliable narrator. He may have some hidden purpose for doing this, as Izuna suspects, or it may just be to amuse himself while he waits for Blank to challenge him again. 

Now, in comparing this volume to its film adaptation, No Game No Life Zero. I want to discuss, in vague terms, the resolution of The Great War. No spoilers, so don't worry about that. I'll just say that the movie does an excellent job of showing the plan in action, but not explaining how the plan works. The dual concepts of how The Great War started and how to bring it to a definitive conclusion take a bit of explaining. A novel is simply better as a medium for that exposition. It is a satisfying explanation. 

Trickster Eric Novels gives "No Game No Life volume 6" an A+

Click here for my previous book review: The Trials of Apollo - the Hidden Oracle (read for fun)

Click here for my previous book review:   A Certain Scientific Accelerator V2

Brian Wilkerson is an independent novelist, freelance book reviewer, and writing advice blogger. He studied at the University of Minnesota and came away with bachelor's degrees in English Literature and History (Classical Mediterranean Period concentration).

His fantasy series, Journey to Chaos, is currently available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback.

A Certain Scientific Accelerator V2

Find new stories at your local library! I found this one at mine. I read the first volume some time ago, so I was interested in picking up this second one. 

This feels like an episode. That is my impression of it. This volume is the content of one episode. The first several chapters are about one scene, which is mostly an action set-piece. It doesn't feel as though much happens for the first half of the volume. Then the pace picks up. It is like the event in the hospital was the trigger to set something big into motion. So, in hindsight, it was a good thing to make it a big event space-wise; give it significance. 

So, this volume struggled to hold my attention in the first couple chapters, but then attained a firm grip mid-way through. 

It was certainly interesting enough to make me want to look up specific terms used here. Anti-skill, Disciplinary Action, Dark Side of Academy City, I wanted to know more about these terms because I wanted to understand the volume better. I don't recall them coming up much in A Certain Magical Index, which is what I am more familiar with. 

Last Order is cute, like always. 

Estele is a good choice of foil/partner for Accelerator. A kind necromancer working with the brutal esper makes for interesting dialogue and comparisons. 

Trickster Eric Novels gives "A Certain Scientific Accelerator V2" a C+

Click here for my next book review:  No Game No Life volume 6 (read for fun)

Click here for my previous book review:   The Monsters Know What They're Doing

Brian Wilkerson is an independent novelist, freelance book reviewer, and writing advice blogger. He studied at the University of Minnesota and came away with bachelor's degrees in English Literature and History (Classical Mediterranean Period concentration).

His fantasy series, Journey to Chaos, is currently available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback.

Benefits of Blood Donation (at Memorial Blood Center)

 Benefits of Blood Donation (at Memorial Blood Center)

This here is the latest reward I received from Memorial Blood Center. It is 100% cotton and fits me pretty well. They were handing these out at the reception desk when I went in to donate last month. I think January is National Blood Donor month, so the center was doing a lot of things to promote blood donation. This shirt is one of them. 

I've been donating to Memorial Blood Center for years now, and I've gotten a lot of stuff like this. Long-sleeve shirts, short-sleeve shirts, coupons for restaurants, and even tickets for local sporting events. Memorial Blood Center does stuff like this to thank donors for volunteering their time and blood. And that's not all either. It's just the occasional stuff. 

Memorial Blood Center has something called the Hero Hub. It's an online thing where donors can schedule appointments, track their donations, and redeem reward points. For every donation, you can earn points, which can be exchanged for things like branded merchandise and gift cards. I typically go the gift card route, Barnes and Nobles. A number of the books on my shelf were purchased on gift cards from Memorial Blood Center. Regular donors earn points fast, and I haven't even gone into the once-a-visit benefits. 

All donors receive refreshments after their donation. Juice, cookies, snacks, lots of tasty treats. Donating whole blood is quick, like ten minutes, so there is little wait until snack time. Donating plasma takes a little longer. Donating platelets takes the longest, and so there is an additional consideration, complimentary Netflix. While donating platelets, donors can watch something on Netflix. I've watched at least four series all the way through (that I can remember while writing this) at Memorial Blood Center. So, you can donate blood while watching a good show. 

And I've saved the best benefit for last. 

You're doing good. You remember the shirt I mentioned at the top of this post? "Give Life". That's what you're doing when you donate blood at Memorial Blood Center. This is a not-for-profit company. It is not like some other places that collect blood, where the objective is profit. No, the objective here is doing good by giving life. 

And the staff appreciate this. I can't speak for Memorial Blood Centers in other places, but the one that I frequent has friendly staff. They greet you when you come in for an appointment and thank you for donating.  If there is a problem, and you can't donate that day, they are still friendly. They don't stop just because you aren't useful to them at the moment. I've even had fun conversations with one of them about something unrelated to blood donation, like anime. I leave my donation appointments there feeling good. 

The benefits for donating blood are numerous, and especially so at Memorial Blood Center. So, if you like the sound of them and you're feeling up to it, look up the center nearest you and give it a shot. Give life and feel good doing it. 

Brian Wilkerson is an independent novelist, freelance book reviewer, and writing advice blogger. He studied at the University of Minnesota and came away with bachelor's degrees in English Literature and History (Classical Mediterranean Period concentration).

His fantasy series, Journey to Chaos, is currently available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback.

The Monsters Know What They're Doing (read for fun)

So many monsters, so many choices, how does a Dungeon Master know what to do? They could read all the stats in the Monster Manual, crunch all the numbers, and brainstorm all the possible tactics for both practicality purposes and roleplay purposes,  and then keep all that information handy for their sessions. Or they could read this book and follow its advice. 

This is a third-play supplement for Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition, and it is designed to help DMs run monster encounters in their sessions. It is specifically for combat encounters. The author is very clear on this point. He only considers monster traits that are useful in direct combat, so if a monster has something like Clairvoyance, which has no combat utility, he is going to ignore it. However, if a certain monster is set up so that it is likely to avoid direct combat, then he will mention that. Night hags, Rakashata, and Succubus/Incubus are mentioned to be more like sub-plots rather than single encounters. This is due to their written lore. 

That's one of the great things that the author, Keith Ammann, has done in this book. He doesn't write purely optimize encounters.  This is not a book of "the most effective way to kill your players with monster x". No, the book has the title that it does for a reason. The Monsters Know What they're Doing, because the lore states that they behave in a certain way. Mr. Ammann looks at the written lore, considers the stat block, and then deduces how a given monster will fight. Then, once he has the framework of the monster's mindset, then he looks for the optimized way the monster would fight from within that mindset. 

Night hags, Rakashata, and Succubus/Incubus don't have much going for them in straight-forward combat. The lore states that they accomplish their goals outside of combat, and their traits support this perception. So, Mr. Ammann writes their entries that way. These monsters will avoid combat, only resort to it when cornered, and attempt to escape instead of fighting to the death. That, by the way, is another great thing about this book. 

D&D is not a video game. Not every monster will fight to the death in every occasion. Humanoids, for instance, will typically attempt to parley or retreat when their HP gets too low, as their lore dictates. This is because they are mortal creatures that have evolved over time, so they have survival instincts, and so they will try to avoid death. That is the standard Mr. Ammann uses, a mortal creature that has evolved over time. When such a creature becomes badly hurt (lost a specific percentage of their HP), it flees in a manner appropriate to it. Goblins will scramble in a disorganize rabble, hobgoblins will retreat in as organized a fashion as they can manage, and mind flayers will cast plane shift. 

Avoiding combat, fleeing from combat, now we come to the meat of the matter, how the monsters will act in combat. 

Each monster has a goal it wants to achieve. According to lore, few creatures will attack the party unprovoked just to kill them. Beasts and monstrosities will want to eat them. Fiends will want to corrupt them or use them in an evil plan of some kind, or they will come into conflict when the party tries to stop their evil plan. Elementals are forces of nature, and so the player party might just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

I will focus on that last one because it is one where I have experience. I am a dungeon master myself, and so I've read this book thinking about how I could use it in an actual session. In one of those sessions, I attacked the party with a water elemental. I followed the book's advice on running elementals. 

As forces of nature, the elementals don't have needs or desires like physical creatures. They don't need to eat, have no use for possessions, and don't have survival instincts either. In fact, fighting to the death actually helps them get what they want. They are creatures consisting entirely of supernatural energy from an elemental plane, so the only reason they would appear on the Material Plane is if some spell-caster summoned them to it and forced them to take on a physical form. If they "die", then they just go back to their home plane, which is exactly what they want. Until that happens, they follow their nature. 

A fire elemental, for instance, will want to set as many things on fire as it can. So, it will use its full movement on every turn to run to creatures and objects so it can set them on fire by touching them. Not attacking, just touching them. They will ignore opportunity attacks to do this.  Now a water elemental will attack differently. It wants to flow. So it will try to engulf as many targets as it can using its Overwhelm feature in its attempts to drown them. 

I followed that advice for my session, and it worked out very well. The party failed their DEX saves, which meant they took damage and were at risk of drowning from the start of the encounter. By the way, they had an average level of 4 and lacked magical weapons. It was a dangerous situation. They desperately freed the trapped party members and then escaped before the elemental killed them all. It was an exciting encounter. 

This book has great advice, and it is written in a friendly manner. Keith Ammann doesn't deliver his advice in a manner that suggests "my way is the best way" or that a DM should be antagonistic to the players. It is rather the confidence of someone who has crunched the numbers, read the lore, and considered long and hard about how a particular monster would behave in combat. The goal here is to deliver challenging, interesting and diverse combat encounters, so that everyone can fun playing D&D. 

Trickster Eric Novels gives "The Monsters Know What they're Doing" an A+

Click here for my next book review:  A Certain Scientific Accelerator V2

Click here for my previous book review:  A Certain Magical Index - light novel volume 2

Brian Wilkerson is a independent novelist, freelance book reviewer, and writing advice blogger. He studied at the University of Minnesota and came away with bachelor degrees in English Literature and History (Classical Mediterranean Period concentration).

His fantasy series, Journey to Chaos, is currently available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback.

A Certain Magical Index - light novel volume 2 (read for fun)

I picked up this volume from the public library because I've watched several arcs of the anime, this one included. The Misawa Cram School arc, the one with the so-called "failed heroine" Asia Himegami. I must say that it is much different from its anime adaptation. 

You might say, well, of course, it is. The adaptation is always different. This one was particularly extreme in its difference. The anime shows what happens to the characters. They clash over their goals and personalities.  The light novel presents the thoughts of the characters as they pursue their goals. It's not just Touma's either. It is Touma's and Stiyl's and Asia's and Aureolus's (both of them). The light novel shows the inner thoughts of five different characters, and they're all depressing. What's worse, it all appears to be pointless. 

Spoilers.

Spoilers.

Spoilers ahead. 

Spoilers. 

Touma is basically driven by guilt. It is guilt for "deceiving" Index about his memory loss and thus feeling like a fraud, and guilt for supposedly obstructing Aisa's escape from the Misawa Cram School. He even feels guilty about not being able to save a knight who was 99% dead before he arrived on the scene. Is he like Shirou from Fate Stay Night, and have this complex about saving people?

Stiyl has this hedgehog's dilemma thing over being Index's prior partner and some other dirty work I'm assuming that he's done. It's hard to get a fix on his personality. He cares a great deal about Index, but doesn't care about making her sad by using her precious current partner as a shield and distraction. The narrative says that he doesn't feel jealousy or envy, but the things he says and does are spiteful. It's not a pleasant narration. 

Asia, despite being this story's McGuffin Girl, doesn't really seem all that important. She is being used as vampire bait by Aureolus Isard, but vampires never appear, and so her esper power never comes into play. It kinda sounds like she is the subject of commodity speculation that ran ammuk. Yes, I know she has an interlude showing her power in effect, but the whole thing still feels like an over-reaction. Neither the magic side nor the science side are sure that vampires even exist. 

The two Aureolus characters are pitiful. One of them is a clone with Cloning Blues, and the other is the real deal who has a mess of other mental issues. Both of them are essentially defeated by the heroes provoking them into a self-destructive mental spiral. This brings me to my next point. 

The volume's story feels pointless. 

I don't mean this in the sense of "filler". That word is banded about a lot, and carries a lot of different meanings, and the most general of them is "I didn't like it". No, what I mean is that this volume's story negates itself. It negates itself on multiple ocassions times. 

1. Touma and Stiyl go to rescue Asia from Misawa Cram School but by the time they arrive, Aureolus has already hijacked the place and made a deal with Asia. She wasn't trying to escape early in the novel.  She was walking around trying to attract vampires for Aureolus in exchange for him concealing her /from/ vampires in his cram school lair the rest of the time and also for working on a more permanent solution for her. This solution is a Walking Church item like what Index used to use (or still uses, whatever). So, there was no need for a rescue mission. Asia explains this when Touma finds her walking around the school freely. 

2. Aureolus did all this stuff at the cram school and with Asia to fix Index's memory problem.  Yet, that problem has already been fixed. It was the subject of the previous novel. And Stiyl knew this. He knew Aureolus and what the alchemist was trying to do. Aureolus knew him as well. I don't get the sense that they were enemies outside of this particular incident. This means that We Could Have Avoided This Plot kicks in. He even explains this when he states that Aureolous will never succeed, because Touma already has. 

 I can only assume that Stiyl's apathy is the reason he didn't pick up a phone and call Aurelous. Surely researching the phone number of a school's principal wouldn't be too hard for the English Puritan Church. 

3. Aureolus's power itself negates a good stretch of the book. Styil and Touma fight Aureolus's clone in four rounds of combat. Lots of injury. Lots of property damage. Lots of death. All of that happens before the clone finally dies.  Then the real Aureolus resets everything. He reverses everything that happened as a result of the clone battles. Aureolus never mentions his clone,  (not that I recall anyway) so I wonder what the purpose of it was in the narrative. 

Also, Aureolus's power literally negates itself. Touma and Styil defeat him by making him doubt himself and fear Touma. Using the flaw of self-defeatism to do away with a reality warper is cheap. It is not a satisfying storyline. 

Despite all of that, I can't really say that this is a bad story. 

It is internally consistent.  All of its rules about science and magic appear to be followed. 

The motivations of the characters make sense, and the actions they take based on those actions make sense. Their emotions are clear and well developed. 

Aureolus and Stiyl are set up as foils of Touma. They are Index's previous partners who failed to save her. The way they handle this fact says much about their character and guides their actions. 

Asia is set up as a foil for Index herself, a girl with a valuable supernatural aspect that the science and magic sides seek to control for their own reasons. The key difference here is that she is not Locked Out of the Loop like Index was, and so she can take more informed choices about her situation. 

Even Styil's inaction on informing Aureolus about Index's improved condition can make sense. By taking over a school in Academy City, Aureolus upset the balance of power between the magic side and the science side. He was basically a wanted fugitive. There is an early scene dedicated to this bit of political entanglement. Talking things out with him was evidently never an option. 

I get the sense that all the pointless was the point. A theme of "how do you respond in the face of impossible desires" is what I'm getting from this book. So, while I can't say it is a "bad" story, I can say it is a "flawed" story. I can also say that it is not a "fun" story, at least not for me. 

Trickster Eric Novels gives "A Certain Magical Index - light novel volume 2" a C

Click here for my next book review:  The Monsters Know What They're Doing

Click here for my previous book review:  Spice and Wolf volume 10

Brian Wilkerson is a independent novelist, freelance book reviewer, and writing advice blogger. He studied at the University of Minnesota and came away with bachelor degrees in English Literature and History (Classical Mediterranean Period concentration).

His fantasy series, Journey to Chaos, is currently available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback.