The Legion of Shadow

I had mixed feelings regarding this lengthy gamebook. Generally-speaking, it's like a traditional gamebook done in Fabled Lands style, with an obvious influence of CRPGs. It features an epic-length story where you get to choose which quest to do first, no perma-deaths, lots of gear, secret items, and even combat achievements.

I enjoyed the story and the writing, but I really disliked how it integrated with the gamebook part of it. The main problem was pacing. Once the book enters act 2, there's actually a serious sense of urgency, yet the Fabled Lands structure basically means you are taking your own sweet time before going after the main quest (ala the majority of computer RPGs). It breaks immersion when you stray from the all-important time-sensitive quest to do lots of little side quests that mostly have nothing to do with the main quest - and you have to do these, just to get better “loot”. But on the plus side, unlike Fabled Lands, DestinyQuest forces you to discard - you only have a limited number of slots, more akin to traditional gamebooks (and computer RPGs).

The other part about pacing was how each act ended (there are 3 acts - the last act is basically a cliffhanger for book 2). The way the acts end were badly done, from a storytelling point of view. The second-to-last quest is basically your climactic ending - the “boss” fight, so to speak. You finish that, and... you start the last quest of the act - it ended up really anti-climactic, a serious dampener to what was a “high”. It's like a really long epilogue that just drags on for no reason when all you want to do is to reach the next milestone.

While the combat mechanics are easy enough, it gets really tedious once you get to the middle parts, to the point where I mostly couldn't be bothered anymore, especially since you just get to try again anyway. Way too much dice-rolling when you're facing multiple enemies, and multiple special abilities. And each time you get “loot”, you'd likely have to look up and remind yourself what those abilities do (there's a lot of abilities). And just like computer games, these “item drops” can be rather silly (e.g.: body parts being used as “equipment”). It depends on what you're looking for when you read a gamebook I suppose.

On the side, it's actually rather interesting that the gamebook adopts the video-game style of letting you pick a character class/role/job/profession/path (whatever you're familiar with), and you even get variants depending on your choices. It's nice, and I do think they offer different fighting styles, but ultimately the fights are not balanced - there is one class type and one stat/attribute that's simply better than the other two. Also, too bad the narrative doesn't really distinguish between the classes.

For the book itself, unlike traditional gamebooks, there are zero illustrations (aside from the nicely-done coloured maps). Also, due to the book size, gamebook length, and large font, it's actually a bit unwieldy to play and read. But then again, despite the length, a lot of the paragraphs simply offer the illusion of choice. Many just branch off for one or two sections and then merge again - even when the choice is as significant as good intentions vs evil intentions (and that happened not just once!).

In summary, the writing was pretty solid - it's a good story with personality, to the point where I actually like the few recurring NPCs. There's enough “meat” and “flavour” in the plot plus the world-building that would have made a very nice high fantasy story - without it needing to be a gamebook at all. On the gamebook side, I didn't really enjoy it much.