Tag: reviews

#REVIEW: Cursed Daughters, by Oyinkan Braithwaite

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This is going to be one of those reviews where I talk more about myself than the book, so … brace yourself, I suppose.

I frequently make snap decisions about books. I learn of their existence and thirty seconds later money has left my bank account and a couple of days later I have a book. The problem comes when I don’t read that book immediately, and it gets worse when it sits on my Unread Shelf for four months.

(There are two books on that shelf that have been there longer. Soon. I swear.)

I have no idea why I purchased Oyinkan Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters. No idea if someone recommended it to me, if I came across the author on BlueSky and decided I liked her … nothing. And by the time I got to it, I’d also completely forgotten what the book actually was. See, that cover kinda yells “fantasy” at me? And the book has the same physical format and size as every hardcover YA book I’ve bought for years. And note the “from the author of” at the bottom. Come on! You’re telling me My Sister, the Serial Killer somehow isn’t genre fiction??

Cursed Daughters is not a fantasy novel and it is absolutely not YA. It is, in fact, hated Litratcher.

It’s fucking brilliant.

I keep saying this, over and over: you should read more books by Nigerians, goddammit. The book scene out of Nigeria is amazing right now.

This is the second time this year I’ve had to apply the word “brilliant” to a work of genreless Literary Fiction. I remain salty about it. Because this is the only book I’ve read this year that came close to Tom’s Crossing. I need the swords and lasers and magic contingent to step up their damn game, is what I’m saying.

At the beginning of the book a Nigerian woman intentionally walks into the ocean to die. The same day, her cousin Ebun gives birth to a daughter. The baby resembles the dead woman, Monife, to such a degree that Monife and Ebun’s mothers immediately decide that the baby is Monife reincarnated. Ebun is … unconvinced, and frankly quite a bit upset by the entire thing. There is also the minor matter of a generations-old family curse, that no woman of this family can be happy in love.

It’s still not a fantasy book. There’s some traditional beliefs mixed into a book set in the modern day in Lagos, and there’s a juju woman as a minor side character, but it’s not a fantasy book. Ebun believes none of this nonsense, and her daughter Eniiyi wants nothing to do with it either, but has to live her entire life in her dead semicousin’s shadow. She dreams of Monife occasionally, and by the end of the book genuinely resents the effect on her life that this woman she’s never met has. She remains Monife’s spitting image, so when she occasionally runs into people who knew Monife she either provokes shock or is genuinely thought to be a ghost. And as her great-aunt gets older, she begins regularly mistaking Eniiyi for Monife, and eventually her dementia increases to the point where she forgets Eniiyi exists at all.

The book follows three generations of the family, with Ebun and Monife in the middle, and jumps back and forth from the nineties to modern day. You eventually learn why Monife chose to walk into the water, and I’m not going to spoil anything but God damn does it end well— like, “I gasped and had to put the book down for a minute” well. I started this yesterday afternoon, read a chapter or two and put it down. When I picked it up again in bed last night it cost me at least an hour of sleep, and I got home from work today and sat down in my chair and didn’t get up again until I finished it.

Absolutely phenomenal work. I ordered My Sister, the Serial Killer about ten minutes ago. It’ll be here tomorrow. Oyinkan Braithwaite is on my “buy immediately” list forever now, and I’d really like to know what the circumstances were that brought this book onto my radar. If it was you, thank you very much.

#REVIEW: The Reanimator’s Fate, by Kara Jorgensen

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Standard disclaimers! Kara Jorgensen and I are mutuals on basically everything, although we have never met, and which precise social media thing we met on has been lost to the mists of time, at least to me. The Reanimator’s Fate is the fourth and final book of the Reanimator Mysteries series and the fifth of their books I have read. Somehow, this will be the first full review I’ve written of one of them— Book Three, The Reanimator’s Remains, got to share a review post with a couple other books, but somehow I appear not to have mentioned the other two books in the series. I’m not sure why— I’ve liked all four of them.

At any rate: The Reanimator Mysteries are the story of Oliver Barlow, an autistic necromancer who works as a coroner, and Felipe Galvan, Oliver’s partner and investigator. Both work for the New York Paranormal Society; they aren’t cops, precisely, but the Society gets brought in on investigations that obviously involve magic in some way, so they keep pretty busy.

Oh, and Felipe’s dead, technically, although nearly no one other than the two of them knows that, and the two are linked through a magical tether that allows some limited psychic linkage between them (strong emotions can bleed through, and they can “tug” on the tether to communicate if they want) and keeps them from being able to get too far apart. Oliver and Felipe are a great couple and I love reading about how they interact with one another; the way they balance each other out is fascinating. Oliver’s issues are a little bit more front and center, especially since he’s the primary character, but Felipe needs Oliver just as much as Oliver needs Felipe.

The Reanimator’s Fate begins with a naked man trying to steal a magic book, which promptly turns his blood to ink and exsanguinates him, just in case you were thinking this was just a romance book.

There is a lot going on in this book, above and beyond the central mystery, to the point where I really wasn’t sure Kara was going to be able to pull the ending of the book off successfully with about 20 pages left. The Paranormal Society itself gets a lot of development in a way that I don’t really want to get into to avoid spoilers, and while everything does knit itself together satisfyingly at the end, I feel like the book could maybe have used another 25 pages or so to breathe.

The problem is I really want to talk about the ending, and I can’t do it especially effectively without indulging in spoilers, which I don’t want to do. This is the last book of the Reanimator Mysteries series, and while Kara doesn’t kill off the main characters or anything like that there is a major status quo shift at the end of the book that fully justifies calling this the last book.

What I’m really hoping for, though, is that this is the last Reanimator Mysteries book, but it’s not the last Oliver and Felipe book, because there’s no real reason it has to be. Kara’s wheelhouse is the nineteenth century (have I mentioned this is a period book? It’s a period book.) and following the characters would involve taking them out of that context, but I really want to see it. I don’t know if that’s the plan or not, but it should be, damn it. The people demand more Oliver and Felipe! I am the people!

Meanwhile, you should read the series so you can join in the popular uprising for more books.

Fail!

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I had a plan to present you with the third book review of the last three days tonight, but … um … it turns out I haven’t finished the book! I mean, it’s the fourth book in the series, and I liked the first three, and I’ve liked the first 250 of its 340-some-odd pages, so I could probably guess where my opinions are gonna go, but that seems kind of unfair. So I’m gonna go read, and y’all just hang out for a while. If you want, go buy the first three books in the series so that maybe you can be caught up by tomorrow.

I mean, do that anyway. They’re good.

Back later.

#REVIEW: Of Mountains and Seas, by Emily Renk Hawthorne

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Let us take a moment to appreciate this cover, while I collect my thoughts, because I am about to write a review of this book and I’m still not 100% sure what I think of it. So I’ll start with the bit I’m most enthusiastic about, which is that if you’re going to buy this book, get the hardcover, because the paper and the cover feel absolutely amazing in the hand and it looks awesome and it’s somehow less than $10 on Amazon right now. Which … hell, less than $10 for this book may push me into enthusiastic recommendation regardless of whatever else I might think about it.

I was contacted by Emily Renk Hawthorne’s publicist and offered an advance copy of her forthcoming novel From the Depths. That book sounded up my alley, but I hadn’t read the first novel in the series yet, so she went ahead and sent me Of Mountains and Seas, with the idea that I’d read that first and then see if I wanted to read From the Depths as well. I sent a follow-up email at about the 3/4 mark of OM&S asking her to go ahead and pull the trigger on the second book. And this is the part where I want to stare at the screen for a bit, because my opinion on this book is genuinely mixed, but one way or another it’s definitely positive enough that I still want to read the sequel.

Let’s start positive: Of Mountains and Seas is a nicely complicated little novel, with multiple POVs stretched between 1932 or so and the near-present. Parts of the book are set in 1932, 1935, 1936, 1955, 1985, 1990 and 2000, with 2000 being the “now” of the book, and shut up, 2000 is so the “recent” past. There may be another couple of years sprinkled in here and there but that’s good enough for now. There are at least half-a-dozen POV characters, some of whom appear in multiple time periods and some of whom are young enough that we only really see them toward the end of the timeline. Some of them change their names partway through! It can be kinda rough if you’re not paying attention, to be honest. The main thrust of the story is that most of the characters are Shifters, shapeshifters who also possess other magical abilities, almost, but not quite, X-men style— all of them can change shape but some can manipulate rock or affect memories or various other things, and there are also a handful of magical tinctures and other objects as well. Where’s the book set? California, of course, so mostly in the real world. Shifters have their own government set up— indeed, one of the characters is running for office for part of the story— and take careful pains to avoid being noticed by the humans, who they call Statics.

Davis, one of the more important POV characters, is born to a Shifter family, but without powers. This leaves him as an exile within his own family. And then he discovers that special stones exist that will allow him to steal abilities from other Shifters, leaving them powerless (there are also special marks that can be etched into a Shifter’s skin to take away their powers, by the way) and temporarily transferring their powers to him. “Temporarily” can mean for decades or for a much shorter period of time, depending on how powerful the Shifter he stole from was and how often he uses the abilities. At any rate, that kicks off the story, as Davis goes on to make a whole lot of trouble with these stones. Oh, and he also finds a mine full of them.

On a story level, the book is pretty cool. I may actually reread it before I read the sequel; it’s fast, and there’s enough going on that I suspect I’ll need the refresher.

Unfortunately, Emily Renk Hawthorne is one of those writers who consistently violates Twain’s thirteenth rule of writing: Use the right word, not its second cousin. Opening the book to a random page, I see her use pretense when she means pretext. Opening to another, I see someone use the word apparently to describe someone losing a hand, which is not a word someone would use in this particular context. She definitely lost her hand! It’s not there! On the opposite page from that, we have a clunky bit of dialogue where someone reads a cop’s full name to them off of, specifically, their badge. First, you would not say “Thank you, Officer… Brad Smith,” because that’s not how people talk. Second, their badges don’t have full names. Police badges don’t have names at all, in fact! His name may be on his chest somewhere, but it’s almost certainly his rank and last name and maybe a first initial, and that’s gonna be it. There’s lots of stuff like this, lots of little violations of logic and words that are 90 degrees away from being the right word for the context. This will bother some of you more than others. It’s the same exact problem I have with Ryan Cahill, actually. And, interestingly, I begin a review of one of his books by praising the book for the exact same physical things I just praised Hawthorne’s about. I wonder if they used the same printer?

At any rate, this book could have used a bit more editing, so your enjoyment of it will depend directly upon how much the good story distracts you from the less-good writing. I went back and forth; I barely noticed any issues with the first half of the book, then there was one particular chapter that was riddled with problems, and after that I either got a lot more critical or the book got sloppier because I started noticing stuff all over the place. Again, I’m in for the sequel even if I end up having to buy it myself, I’m just hoping for a slightly stronger sophomore effort on the prose front.

#REVIEW: The Door on the Sea, by Caskey Russell

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I’ve not had any diversity-related reading goals for several years now, but that doesn’t mean I’m not constantly on the lookout for books by authors from underrepresented groups, so when The Door On The Sea was represented to me as “a Tlingit Lord of the Rings” I bought it damn near immediately. And, in the way of such things, it perhaps lingered on my Unread Shelf for too long— most books linger on my Unread Shelf for too long nowadays— but now that I’ve read it, I’ve pre-ordered the sequel, and it’ll be devoured quickly once it shows up.

Forget the Lord of the Rings comparison, by the way; the books have little in common other than being journey-focused and party-based fantasy, and Door mostly takes place in an outrigger canoe rather than on foot and horseback, and there’s a clearly identifiable main character instead of LOTR’s omniscient third person. There’s a shapeshifter and a foul-mouthed talking raven, though, and that’s cool.

The main character is Elān, a young Storyteller— basically a bard and a scholar— who is dispatched along with several warriors to recover a lost weapon belonging to an immensely dangerous invading enemy race called the Koosh, who are posing a threat to everything and everyone Elān knows. If you’re wondering why a bard might be put in charge of such a journey, don’t worry; Elān is too, and everyone constantly questions his leadership despite him ending up being fairly level-headed and good in a tight situation. Elān is the grandson of a legendary warrior and he secretly wishes to be a warrior himself, but the others on the journey with him constantly call him a Bookeater, which seems to more or less be warrior slang for “nerd” despite being an objectively badassed thing to be called. It’s not entirely clear what the Koosh are; sometimes they come off as basically orcs, but they may actually be from another dimension, and the one Koosh that gets some dialogue and page time turns out to be really fascinating. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes here, and I’m really looking forward to learning more about this world in future books. This isn’t exactly a YA novel, but there’s definitely some coming-of-age stuff going on with Elān and his youth and inexperience and, well, softness are an ongoing theme in the book.

Speaking of “a lot going on,” the book is told in the style of an oration around a campfire, and there are even some hints that the teller— probably not Elān, but who knows— knows that people on Earth in 2026 are reading the book. I can’t find the passage to quote it directly, but there’s a bit where the narrator refers to an animal by its indigenous name, then a brief aside something along the lines of “in your world, you’d call it a moon jellyfish,” which … well, I also don’t know what a moon jellyfish looks like, but whatever.

A quick word about the language in the book; you may have noticed that diacritical mark on Elān and wondered how it was pronounced, and unfortunately I have to tell you I haven’t the slightest idea. Russell doesn’t hold anyone’s hand with spelling, and there’s no pronunciation guide in the book. On top of that, there are diacritical marks in this book that I’ve never seen in any other context, and I feel like I probably have more experience with languages than a lot of people do. There’s a character named Snaak, for example, and yes, that K is underlined on purpose, and I don’t know why. Or, just to pick a couple more words, xaax’w or ax xoonx’iyán, which means silence-sharing friend, or Kusaxakwáan, which is the land of the cannibal giants. Yeah, there are cannibal giants. They may not be cannibals, though. There’s a whole thing. Word meanings are always clear from context, but man, I feel like the audiobook narrator might have gone through hell on this book, and I almost want to listen to it just to find out how to pronounce some of this stuff.

One way or another, though, big thumbs up. Check this one out.

#REVIEW: Macbook Neo (2026)

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I’m not going to pretend to have super unique insights here, but I figure if anyone is in the market for a new laptop, hearing from an actual person and not a tech website might come in handy. Honestly, the biggest question for me is what color the Citrus version of the MacBook Neo actually is. I’ve been thinking of it as green, but I’ve heard people call it yellow? So naturally my picture of it is directly underneath a red monitor which is throwing the color balance all off. One way or another, the Citrus color is really pretty and it’s not picking up fingerprints or anything annoying like that.

At any rate: I went with the slightly more expensive version of the laptop, with twice the storage space and a touchID button for an extra $100. I mostly need the extra storage space for my music collection, which mostly lives in the cloud right now anyway, but $100 for an extra 256 GB isn’t bad one way or another. I’d say unless you have a reason to upgrade you probably don’t need to, but either way you’re getting a deal.

Here’s what I use a laptop for: web surfing, watching videos, writing, lesson planning, listening to music. Any video editing is going to be done on my (much more powerful) desktop, and the main reason I went back to a laptop is that the iPad I bought a while ago actually proved to be too big for, well, lap use. At 13″ this is the perfect size to balance on one knee in one of my comfortable chairs while I write, which I couldn’t do with an iPad even with a more laptop-style case on it.

And here’s the verdict: buy one if you think you want one. There are a couple of shortcuts taken to get this thing down to $600 or $700 for the higher capacity version: the touchpad is physical, so you will actually be clicking on things rather than Haptic Touch feedback, and it charges via USB-C and not MagSafe. It comes with a nice, braided USB-C cable– at some point, I’m not sure exactly when, Apple decided to upgrade their cables so they aren’t breaking off at the plug-in point any longer, which is awesome. I don’t love the touchpad but it’s fine, and the Neo battery lasts long enough that I can’t really pretend that the port to charge it is a big deal. I’m recharging it right now for, like, the second time since I’ve bought it. The keyboard is snappy and responsive– I type fast, so keyboards are important to me, and this one passes all of my tests– and the monitor is bright and clear.

It’s not the fastest laptop in the world, of course; it takes a little longer to start up than my desktop, but once it’s running, again, my computing needs aren’t currently anything that are going to challenge it so it’s fine. If you’re doing something complicated with your computer– or, if, in other words, you need to worry about how fast it runs– it might not be the best one for you. It’s not slow, by any means, it’s just not touching the Speed Force like some of my other devices. But the fact of the matter is I interact with my computing devices mostly as a writer and not as, say, a programmer or a gamer or a multimedia person. Lesson planning doesn’t exactly tax the CPU either, y’know?

It goes without saying that the build quality is solid as hell; it may be a budget Mac item but it’s still from Apple. It does not in any way feel cheap.

So, yeah: if you think you’re the target audience for a $600 MacBook? Go forth without fear. I’m happy I picked this little computer up, and I’ll likely be using it for quite a while.

#REVIEW: Tom’s Crossing, by Mark Z. Danielewski

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Buckle in, as this is going to be a bit meandering, but you’ve no doubt read my book reviews before and know to expect some degree of that, and frankly “a bit meandering” is a fair description of large parts of Tom’s Crossing anyway.

We’ll start with this: I bought this book out of spite. I don’t know anything about Mark Z. Danielewski as a person; as far as I know he has no social media presence, or at least I’ve never encountered anything from him, and I’ve never read an interview or anything like that. My only previous knowledge of his existence was from his book House of Leaves, a book I have never read and I kind of hate. The reasons I hate House of Leaves are probably not something I need to go into too deeply for this post, but I will give some brief notes:

  1. That the word “House” is supposed to be in blue; note that that is the case where the book is mentioned on the cover of Crossing up there.
  2. That the book frequently has blocks of sideways text;
  3. That the book’s fandom is excessively incel-coded and are very much the type of people who will recommend House of Leaves to you no matter what kind of book recommendation you have asked for. Dark fantasy? Have you read House of Leaves? Potboiler romance? Try out House of Leaves. 1940s etiquette manual? Let me tell you about House of Leaves.

These three things combine to make this book a big nope for me even if I might like it otherwise. I particularly refuse to read it because reading it might, somehow, make one of its fans happy, and I don’t want to do that.

A second thing: I like big books and I cannot lie. I currently have three other 1000-plus page books on my TBR, and at 1,232 pages I am pretty certain that Tom’s Crossing is the longest book I have ever read— Brandon Sanderson’s Wind of Truth has more pages, but the text on Crossing is smaller and denser and I’m pretty sure the wordcount is significantly higher. I saw this book in Barnes & Noble, thought “Oh, shit, Mark Danielewski wrote a new book,” then made the mistake of picking it up and noting the length and all the sudden I owned it. It is possible that I bought this book out of some bizarre need to stick it to House of Leaves, which is an inanimate object and does not have feelings.

This, an excerpt from page 34, is what you should expect from the prose in Tom’s Crossing. Yes, I read this on my Kindle; I bought the hardcover and then checked the book out from the library, because I’m not holding that huge fucking thing in my hands for twelve hundred pages.

Note a few things:

  1. There is not a single gerund in the book that ends with -ing. The g is dropped on every single one, including gerunds that are nouns; this book is very concerned with horses, and the word “geldin” really got on my nerves for some reason.
  2. Excessively long sentences. There are only nine sentences on this page, and sentences that take up entire pages or the majority of one are far from uncommon.
  3. That the narrator is the most highly-educated hick in the history of Utah. The dialect leads you to expect a certain kind of prose and then the book hits you with at least gettin a taste of a place where the bonds of birth and fortune have loosened their hold.

I rather expected to hate this book, to be honest, and I was hoping to hit something objectionable enough within the first couple hundred pages that I could put it down. By page 34 I was griping about it on a Discord I’m a member of. Around page 75 the language clicked.

This is one of the best fucking books I have ever read, and guys, I am so salty about that.

I am normally a Story Guy. I am a Setting Guy. I am rarely a Character Guy and even more rarely am I a Prose Guy. The story for Tom’s Crossing is serviceable but simple— it’s a Western, and it involves fulfilling a final promise to a dead friend by freeing two horses that are destined for slaughter. The main character is a teenager named Kalin, and his friend Tom tags along with him for most of the journey despite being dead. Tom’s sister Landry also comes along; she is not dead, at least most of the time. (Nearly every character in the book spends some time being dead, for the record.). Along the way the two get framed for a murder by the wealthiest family in town, the Porches mentioned in the above excerpt.

The setting? Sort of Utah, although it’s not our Utah, and the now of the book is also sort of the future, I’d estimate around 2045 or so, although the story being told is set in late October of 1988. Why is it not our Utah? Well, there’s some simple stuff, like there being a town in our Utah named Provo but none named Orvop, which is where the book is set, and then there’s weirder stuff like renaming Joseph Smith to Joseph Mith, which I thought was a typo for a while until it kept happening. Many of the book’s characters are Mormons, as you might expect from a book set in Utah, but the word “Mormon” is never used, although there is some criticism of The Church toward the end of the book. (Danielewski is not a Mormon, but apparently spent a good chunk of his youth in Utah.)

Also, when things that feel like specific references to Mormonism come up, they’re often changed too, beyond just the Joseph Mith stuff. The angel Moroni is renamed, and there are occasional scriptural references to books that don’t seem to exist. I actually went and found my copy of the Book of Mormon to check a few of the references; they aren’t in there, I swear.

Also, it appears that everyone in the world is fully conversant with all of the events in the book, even the ones that they would have had to have been present for; the book frequently cuts away to provide comments from random other people like the Reed Beacham mentioned above. Adding to the weirdness, nearly every time one of these random people is brought up, the book mentions how they died.

I also have the feeling that if I knew the Iliad and the Odyssey better I’d have picked up on some stuff. It’s been a while since I read either. This isn’t some kind of clever conjecture on my part; there is at one point a several-page conversation between three people about which characters in the book line up most precisely with characters from the Iliad. The book interprets itself. It’s nuts.

It’s the prose, y’all. I could bathe in this book’s language. About once every page or two Danielewski will hit you with a sentence or a phrase that will literally stop you in your tracks with its beauty. It’s 1200 pages long and I read it in eight days, during most of which I was also tearing apart my house.

I suspect I’m not quite smart enough to fully appreciate what’s going on in this book, to be honest. There’s a reason I make fun of Litratcher so often around here; I dislike pretentiousness in general, and while I’m very much not a The Curtains Were Blue guy, I also like my narratives nice and straightforward. I am not, as I frequently admit, the world’s most careful reader, and in fact the speed I read at frequently hurts me on more complex books. But, God, once this one had me, it had me, and I’m so glad I didn’t cave to my baser instincts and put it down after the first 40 pages just so that I could say I’d tried.

The worst thing? I think I might have to read House of Leaves now. And there is literally no higher praise that I can imagine giving to a book than that it made me decide to read House of Leaves.

#REVIEW: Nioh 3 (PS5, 2026)

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I mean, come on. It’s a Nioh game. I rate it 800/10.

I officially beat Nioh 3 this afternoon and collected the Platinum trophy, with about 80 or so hours of gameplay needed in order to do it. This is the easiest of the trilogy by a long shot; anyone who has been around for a long time and has a really good memory might recall that the hardest boss fight I’ve ever had was in the original Nioh, and there were a bunch in Nioh 2 that were tough as nails. This one? I’m either a much better gamer after all this time or it’s easier. Both are possible; I’m going with “easier” anyway. Nioh 2, along with Elden Ring and Sekiro, is one of my favorite games of all time.

How does this one stand up? Pretty Goddamn well, although it’s not going to get four complete playthroughs before the DLC comes out like 2 did. The biggest change Nioh 3 makes to the series is the addition of an open-world aspect to the game; there are still more linear missions like in the earlier games, but in between there’s a wide-open area with some side missions and a whole ton of exploration to do. As I’m getting older I’m appreciating exploration-style games more and more, so that was something I really liked seeing in a series that was already in my personal pantheon. All of the technical stuff— the combat, the graphics, all the gameplay, basically, is up to expectations against the previous games; I can’t imagine any reason why anyone who enjoyed 1 or 2 might not like 3.

What didn’t work? This is going to be kind of a weird gripe, because it’s kind of a weird system, but this series has always been pretty big on build diversity, right? You can go with super-fast ninjutsu weapons or a magic-heavy build or a more armored, slower samurai-type build or you can mix and match to your heart’s content. This game added a system that I’ve never seen in a game before; you get a “samurai” build and a “ninja” build, which share certain things like ability scores and health, but who have different weapons and armor and Guardian Spirits and skills. Ninja have their complement of ninjutsu skills like shuriken and bombs and a whole mess of other stuff; Samurai have the three combat stances from the earlier games (the ninja weapons drop the combat stances) and a few other things. You can switch between your ninja build and your samurai build at the touch of one of the triggers.

Now, I feel like this should be cool, because you can effectively run two entirely separate builds and switch between them at will, and generally flexibility is a good thing. But the metaphor, for lack of a better word, never made any sense to me. Again, I know this is a weird thing to complain about when you’re playing a game where you’re a fireball-flinging ninja fighting demons in sixteenth-century Japan, but how the hell does this work from a storytelling perspective? The samurai and the ninja are the same person. And you hit R2 and bam, your character does a little spin and your armor and weapons change. I don’t know why this is hitting my suspension of disbelief so hard but I just can’t buy it. I ended up playing most of the game as the ninja anyway— I want to be fast in these games, and tonfa goes brrrrrrrrrrrrr was really all I needed except when I wanted talons go brrrrrrrr, and luckily those are both ninja weapons. You can also respec whenever you want, so if I decide I want to go mostly samurai in NG+ and do axe and odachi or whatever, I can literally just respec my character to do that on the spot, without even any in-game items to spend for it, and go be axe-odachi guy.

This is why the game is 800/10 and not 1000/10, of course. It doesn’t make the game less fun or anything— I mostly ignored the system altogether except when I wanted to fire my rifle, which I kept as my samurai’s distance weapon— but it never really stopped feeling weird. That’s my only complaint, though, and unless I’m stupid enough to download Crimson Desert, this game is pretty likely to keep holding my attention for a while, especially since there are still 3 DLCs coming this year.