Reads just like you are playing the game. ( )

More Jimmy!

Honestly, I just find this fun. Fluffy fun. We get a little side-story lead-up to the big war with GODS a few decades later and it all fits like a straight line from Arutha to Demon War.

Was this or the other two novels strictly necessary?

Ehhhh... no. They WERE, however, necessary for the pure fun of it. Jimmy carries the tale with Pug's grandson and a Keshian court wizard. Getting into trouble is the name of the game for this ex-thief spymaster Jimmy. And he does... getting caught up with necromancers and dead gods and mad pirates. Alongside an angry dwarf. :)

More of a traditional fantasy than anything else, but it is still FUN.
It's fleshing out the early Krondorian days in a very big way. ( )

This is the 3rd book in the Riftwar Legacy, a subseries in the middle of the very large Riftwar Cycle. This also marks the last of the books from this series that I had previously read 20 years ago; the rest will all be completely new to me, although I remembered many of the past books so poorly that they practically felt new anyway.

This was probably my least favorite of all of them so far. Even though it features a lot of Jimmy, one of my favorite characters, it felt very formulaic. This book was also based on a video game, Return to Krondor, and the novelization felt much more formulaic to me than did the earlier novelization of the first game. The characters encounter enemies at predictable intervals, much like in a video game, and there are the occasional “side quests” although most of those do tie into the main story.

I don’t know, I didn’t think it was bad, and there were times when I enjoyed it more than others, but sometimes it felt tedious and a little flat. I did enjoy the banter between the characters, and Kendaric particularly made me laugh. It’s been a long time since I’ve played the game so I don’t remember it very well, but this novelization seemed to follow the story of the game far more closely and without much extra meat. Even a lot of the dialogue brought back echoes (possibly imaginary, but they sounded pretty convincing in my head!) of the video game characters saying the same things. ( )

Disappointing. ( )

A rather lacklustre ending to the series... ( )