u/CooftheZoof

I tagged this as a spoiler, I’m going to reiterate that this reflection is chalked FULL of spoilers, don’t read if you haven’t read, ya know.

Just finished book 8 moments ago, and I’m going to take some time to digest and reflect on the story, but my immediate instinct was that I loved the book… only upon finishing it.

Up until that final act on floor 11, and really only the second half of floor 11, I was fully convinced that this was the weakest entry in the series.

The race concept was compelling, I was actually disappointed that the skipped 7th floor had seemed like it was going to be something similar to this concept, but in execution I was extremely underwhelmed.

In my opinion (I am not a writer, only a fan of this universe so take this all with a grain of salt), the lack of key character involvement and key character progression would be my primary complaints with the race concept. And as far as the races themselves are concerned, there seemed to be such an opportunity for a Fury Road-esque long-haul challenge in which my above complaints about involvement and progression, I think, could have been incorporated.

Key Character Involvement: My biggest gripe was the blatant nerfing and lack of involvement that Mordecai had in this arc. I get that the crawlers are rapidly outgrowing their need for dungeon knowledge and his skillset, but I at least thought that he should have been able to scale or at least morally support the characters to a greater extent than he did. I also understand that this entry made it a point to flesh out the storyline and background of characters who had previously taken a backseat in the story like the mercenaries and NPCs from the previous floor, that’s fair. And to be completely honest, I missed Katia’s presence, of which Imani seems to have filled that space. And, while I think that was well done, the implications of Katia’s decision and her specific involvement on the previous floor only came up on a couple of occasions. I did, though, appreciate Preponte’s increased prevalence and emotion in the story along with a number of other characters deserving of being expanded upon.

Key Character Progression: This is probably just my selfish monkey brain going to town, but the lack of achievements, loot boxes, and crawler-specific upgrades on this floor was really disappointing. ALL of the previous entries had at least a dozen moments per book that fed my brain that wonderful, dopaminergic feeling equivalent to finding a legendary weapon in a video game - that was one of the most addicting part of the story to me, and yet I felt like weapon, power, skill, and spell upgrades were severely lacking and were replaced by upgrades to vehicles that for all intents and purposes, according to the end of the 11th floor, seem as though they will be temporary. This is physical dungeon progression I am talking about, not moral or psychological progression, of which there was plenty. But even discussing that, Carl and in turn Matt, seemed very self-aware of the gross lack of agency that the floor itself provided, which I interpreted as either a beat to the story that was intended to feel that way, or Matt realizing halfway through writing the story that things weren’t shaking out in a similar path to previous entries. I’m going to go with the former, because I believe the next entry is setting itself up to be quite the event, but my that is my observation nonetheless.

The Races: I’m not going to deep-dive each heat or anything like that, I think the heats were a necessary break in the action, but I can’t help but feel like there was a missed opportunity for a really raunchy Mad Max, Cannonball style long-haul race across a vast dungeon interstate. This is just my own pop culture fanboy opinion on the whole thing and I think that the heat structure fit the dungeon well and accomplishes what it needed to, but I think the style of race that I implied above would have been more conducive to easing the other pain points in involvement and progression that I mentioned above. Like imagine some of the vehicles that could have been involved if entire parties were allowed to build whatever sort of machine they wanted, Destroy Build Destroy style (if anyone remembers that show). I don’t know, just getting my thoughts on that out there.

All in all the final 10% of the book made it all worth it for me, the final arena battle and the plan that Carl put together felt like cherry-on-top-french-kiss-the-chef quintessential DCC stuff and I was clapping my hands like an actual child seeing it all come together. That horrible feeling of finishing a book and not knowing how long you’ll have to wait to experience the next one hit hard, and that’s how you know it was a good one.

Excitedly awaiting Matt’s next masterpiece and who knows, as I sit on this story some more maybe I’ll come around and change my opinions on some of what I had mentioned above. Just wanted to get my thoughts out there and hear what others potentially thought in return.

Happy hunting crawlers!