The Soul Stone War 3

I was warned ahead of time that this game was different than the others in the series, and that's definitely true. It feels more like an intermission of the series as a whole or a denouement of the first two games.

The first game tells the story of you leaving home, meeting everyone, and getting your soul stone. The second game has your friends finding their stones and culminates in a raid on the enemy base. Both of these feel like a full 'act' to a larger story.

This one doesn't quite feel like that. There's a lot going on; you've found the revolutionaries against the high king, and yet again you get chances to trust or distrust them. There's a lot of time recuperating. Everyone reveals their darkest past, even you, and there's some library and magical artifact research about the history of the Dragons.

While it's shorter and less full than the other games, it does take the time to relieve a lot of dangling plot threads, especially the lingering 'backstories' threads. It allows the player to process everything that happened to them and their loved ones, and introduces your Soul Stone as more of a character.

I would not enjoy this as a standalone game, but as part of a longer series, it makes sense. Writing big games is hard enough; writing a series of over 1,000,000 words is an immense chore. Given that this is the third of five planned books, I suspect that readers will look back from books 4 and 5 and see that this book was a good breather (a lot of long-running plot heavy media do this; manga for instance, often do time skips or training arcs after heavily dramatic episodes).

So, overall, I'd say this entry gives me good hopes for the series as a whole, even if this particular episode didn't have a strong self-contained plot arc.

I loved the first book a lot! I enjoyed the second book too, but looking back, there were some issues I initially overlooked in book two that feel much harder to ignore in book three since they're also there and amplified. And I don't say this lightly as someone who loves to like things and is very forgiving of issues like this.

By the time the ending screen popped up, it felt like the story was just getting started. We (Spoiler - click to show)had learned a little about the resistance and (Spoiler - click to show)the dragon cities and now we were ready to put things into motion, then—'the end'. I know this is a multi-part series, but this didn’t feel like one complete installment in a series; more like the first third or half of the book (hence the review title). In contrast book one felt like a complete experience, that while you knew there was more to the main story and some unresolved threads, the major arcs and events of that book were completed. In book three you spend the entire game (Spoiler - click to show)in one of the few areas within the resistance hideout, across three days and two nights, with minimal progression—even the (Spoiler - click to show)heist lacked momentum in my opinion.

I live and breathe romance, and I like it to be dramatic and sappy but somehow, the schmaltz felt almost too turned up here—even for me. I didn't outright dislike it I guess, but something just didn’t quite click this time—I'm notoriously uninterested in romance stories once the relationship is built and committed (I much prefer the build up and wooing stage) so perhaps I've just hit the natural 'not interested anymore' phase for me.

Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy what was there and I'm invested in the characters which is perhaps why my rating may seem more generous than what I have to say about my criticisms.