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.