When the game first launched, I was very confused by this tip on the loading screen.
Wait, did I somehow lose this season's special card? And, if I win 5 Ranked games, I get it back? How do I find out what the special card is?
It took me a while to realize that this is about Card Backs, not special cards.
...last night, I stayed up past my bedtime to finish Assassin's Quest. Here are some initial thoughts:
>!I was totally enthralled for the first half of the book; part of this, I think, was due to some changes I made in my reading environment that allowed me to focus better and really immerse myself in the fiction, and partly due to Hobb's frictionless prose.!<
>!Once the party reached the Skill road, however, I felt like things started to drag, which wasn't helped by Fitz being in sort of a fugue state most of the time. Then after they found Verity, the time spent waiting for him to finish carving felt interminable as well. By the time he finally woke his dragon and set up the novel's climax, I felt nearly as exhausted and drained as Verity. Maybe that was Hobb's intention.!<
>!And then, the plot wrapped up so quickly I almost got whiplash from it. In particular, the scene where Fitz and Nighteyes wake up all the Elderlings felt like a cartoon, everything was happening so fast and so effortlessly, in contrast to all the effort and sacrifice we'd just seen Verity struggle with so painstakingly. Maybe I missed something, but this felt unearned to me.!<
>!Which brings me to the Skill. Normally I strongly prefer soft magic systems; treating magic like a science kind of takes the wonder out of magic IMO. But the plot of this novel revolves so heavily on aspects of the Skill and Skill-users that I found myself wishing for some better defined boundaries on it, or at least some understanding of why Fitz suddenly could accomplish so many things that everyone told him were impossible. ("The Wit" is not a satisfactory answer to this question on its own.)!<
>!Fitz himself is pretty dense throughout, which seems intentional, and I didn't mind this as much as some readers seem to; I don't need my protagonists to always make the right decisions, and in fact it was satisfying to figure out some things shortly before (or in some cases long before) Fitz did. He is, however, frustratingly passive a lot of the time, and tends to wallow in his misery. (I dislike the "misery porn" label that some have put on Hobb, but Fitz kind of earns it here.)!<
>!I think my favorite scene of the whole trilogy was Molly's "Wit-bees" moment.!<
>!I also liked that we finally got some explanation for the Red Ships and what Forging was all about. My only quibble here is that five generations seems like a long time for the OutIslanders to wait before launching their revenge campaign.!<
>!I do think that Regal got off too easy, but I understand the choice Fitz made. Not so much Verity and Kettricken allowing him to remain unpunished.!<
Overall, I give the Farseer Trilogy a B/B+; my favorite of the three novels was Royal Assassin. I have too many other things on my TBR pile to continue with Liveship Traders right now, but I don't rule out coming back to it at some point. I'm also curious to see what Fitz gets up to later on in life.