Rob's Spoiler-Free Dark Souls Tutorial

A friend of mine recently started playing Dark Souls, which has a beautiful design but a grudging reluctance to explain any of it to the player, and an interface with some bizarre features. So here's my guide to what the manual should have told you. I'll try to explain it as quickly as possible.

Game Concepts

1. This game is designed to provide a sense of accomplishment through effort, not a power fantasy.
2. You cannot pause the game, but you can walk around while using the menu. Press Start to close it.
3. Always read the item descriptions. They replace the standard audio logs as both in-game hints and story content. For instance, reading a key will usually tell you which door it unlocks.
4. Don't stress out over your "class", as any class can do anything if you spend enough levels on it. All stats are useful up to at least 40 points, except for "Resistance" which is worthless.
5. Resist the temptation to grind for souls. Exploring new areas is far more profitable.
6. "Humanity" is an overloaded term in Dark Souls, since it's a major theme of the game. Using the Humanity consumable item or winning a multiplayer session will give you 1 humanity point (the top left number in the UI), which you can keep around for a stat boost or spend at a bonfire to become human ("Reverse Hollowing") and kindle bonfires.
7. Most multiplayer features are restricted to human players, except for joining a co-op game. As you progress, you will discover the nine "Covenants," factions which have both online and offline effects.
8. Stealth doesn't have any on-screen indicators, but enemies will be less likely to notice you if you walk slowly, wear light armor, don't hit walls, etc.

Interacting with NPCs (Non-Player Characters)

1. Your decisions are permanent. NPCs can be attacked and killed, but will never be friendly again. If you leave without helping someone, they might die while you are away.
2. NPCs will usually have additional dialogue each time you visit, but shops never update their inventory.
3. If you are human, most areas have an NPC who will either invade you or offer to help.
4. Some very important people are hiding from the world. You'll need to prove your worth before they reveal themselves. If you side with their enemies, you may not even be aware they exist.

Weapons, Armor and Equipment

1. In the Equipment menu, you can assign two weapons to each hand and wear up to 4 pieces of armor. The total weight of those 8 items is your "Equip Weight", which you can see on the Status menu. Your running and rolling ability changes dramatically at 25%, 50% and 100% of maximum Equip Weight.
2. Your character is right-handed, so put your shield or off-hand weapon in the left hand and your main weapon in the right hand. Magic and bows work equally well in either hand.
3.  Wielding your weapon two-handed raises your Strength by 50%, which also counts towards stat requirements. For instance, a Halberd can be used 2-handed at 11 strength instead of the normal 16.
4. Try out a lot of different weapons in the beginning of the game; virtually everything has a unique move set, and upgrades are expensive early on so find something you like before investing in a +5 weapon.
5. Heavy armor has a "Poise" stat which allows you to take damage without being staggered. Heavy weapons and 2-handed attacks deal more damage to poise.
6. Shields have a "Stability" stat which allow you to block without losing stamina, and "Damage Reduction" stats which allow you to block without taking damage. These are percentage-based, so keep your eye out for a shield with 100% physical reduction and good stability.
7. Most weapons scale with your character's stats. Different upgrade paths can emphasize different stats.

Controls

1. To jump, hold B to run, then release B and tap B again quickly.
2. To slide down a ladder quickly, press B.
3. All weapons have unique attacks after rolling (direction + B) and after backstepping (tap B).
4. To use a bow:
1. Equip a bow and arrows.
2. Press the attack button to nock an arrow
3. Lock on (R3) and press RB to fire arrows. The closer you are, the better the damage.
4. Press LB to go into first-person sniper mode, then RB to fire or RT to swap arrows.
5. Crossbows can't snipe and use bolts instead of arrows, but their upgrades are extra effective.
5. To use magic:
1. At a bonfire, "Attune Magic" and equip spells. To equip more spells, upgrade your "Attunement" stat.
2. Equip a catalyst/talisman/flame. Use the D-pad to toggle which spell you're using.
3. Press the attack button to cast the spell. To fire at a specific enemy, lock on (R3).

Ludonarrative Resonance in Dark Souls

This article contains minor spoilers for Dark Souls.

Dark Souls has been widely praised for its minimalist narrative, which eschews the traditional methods of dumping exposition on the player in favor of a slow process of discovery. There are no branching dialogue trees, no bustling towns of peasants eager for help with the rats in their cellar, and no expository cut scenes outside of the tutorial. The setting speaks for itself, with a pervasive sense of melancholy, lost opportunities and a hideously imaginative art design which stirs the primal fear of the uncanny as ably as it oozes menace. But there are many video games which allow the player to speak for themselves, whose story is pieced together through hints from obscure locations and creepy tableaux in abandoned corners of the levels. What really makes Dark Souls' story work, what allows it to capture the imagination despite offering virtually nothing to go on, is its resonance.

I'll define ludonarrative resonance here as a harmony between the gameplay mechanics and the story or narrative of a video game. The major story themes and plot twists are echoed in the game itself, and the characters' actions fit the context set by the game. This is not as easy as it sounds, because a lot of game mechanics don't lend themselves very well to a coherent and dramatic story. The more freedom and choice the player is allowed, the less likely it is that they will find themselves creating a dramatic arc that syncs up at the right moment with the emotional mood the writer expects in the next cut scene. The longer and more "epic" a game grows, the more times the player will put the game down and pick it up later, disinterested and distracted, with only a vague memory of what's going on. The more air time the player receives compared to the other characters, the less likely each one is to be memorable and the less attention will be paid to them. So for a sprawling open-world online action RPG like Dark Souls, the hurdles to jump are tall indeed.

The spiderweb of connections between areas in Dark Souls, combined with only the barest hint of an opening quest, give an almost vertiginous feeling of choice to the new player. Each of the game's first few areas offers multiple branching paths and a complex series of shortcuts back home, but the difficulty level of the enemies is carefully calibrated to offer a smooth progression in only one direction. Every new player will suffer a few nasty deaths to enemies that are virtually impossible to defeat until later in the game, creating the impression of a callous, unfeeling, futile world even though a gentle difficulty curve lies just around the next corner. The story details drip out slowly, with characters encountered in the wilderness casually mentioning they will visit the game's hub area of Firelink Shrine as a prompt for the player to return and discover the next chapter. The second act of the game is even more linear, with an ascent to the heavenly city of Anor Londo providing a suitable backdrop to the introduction of the main conflict the player will be asked to resolve, while offering some of the most difficult and tense encounters in the game. The Firelink Shrine becomes unusable at the start of the second act, and the player arrives with an inventory full of side quests to be completed at the Undead Parish which resides next door to the fortress that the player is given a quest to scale. Just as the storyline recedes in the final act, with a quest essentially to explore to the ends of the earth, the game's fast travel mechanic is unlocked. Where should we go with this new power to go anywhere? You guessed it - the last mini-boss of the second act gives you the key to reactivate Firelink Shrine upon his defeat, where everyone you rescued in the first two acts is there to greet you and offer hints on where to go next. The game's high difficulty level makes the player's journey and difficulties relatively predictable, so that each new character's sparing lines of dialogue will be treasured simply because they come at the right moment to serve as a respite from the grueling slog of gameplay. By the end of the second act, the player feels like a conquering hero; by the end of the game, which drags on for a dozen hours as the player descends deeper into the earth and encounters the more sinister supporting cast, there is only a grim determination to defeat the remaining enemies and carry this sordid encounter to its end. The rest of the characters know this, and cease their soaring speeches. The final boss, Lord Gwyn is not accompanied by the bombastic cymbal clashes and ethereal choirs of Anor Londo, but a mournful piano theme. By now, you have seen what this world has to offer, you have walked in Gwyn's shoes, and you feel only pity for this broken husk of a man even as you know your meeting was inevitable.

But you are not alone in this lonely world. The "massively single-player" nature of Dark Souls means you are surrounded on every side by messages from other players, from ghostly echoes of their presence as someone across the world battles the same enemies that just killed you for the third time. By joining a "covenant", one of the factions within the game, you can choose to help other players or invade their world as additional enemies, chosen always at random so that you can't get too comfortable with anyone. The NPCs (non-player characters) who inhabit the world with you exhibit the same behavior: they belong to covenants, they will appear either as allies or enemies - often both - according to their personality, and they are well aware that they live in a fallen world of a million aspiring heroes and a billion monsters who all come back to life every time those heroes need to rest and recover their strength. They all use the same equipment and the same attacks that the player possesses; in fact, most of the armor available to the player is found on the dead bodies of its owners, who showed it off just a few hours ago. The very first character you meet remarks, "Fate of the Undead, right? Well, you're not the first." Game mechanics are meticulously lampshaded in the style of the Assassin's Creed series to create a sense that the game world is a real, cohesive creation. Every similarity between the player's own experience and the story of someone else going along in parallel gives more confidence that the cryptic, sparse utterances of the NPCs means something to the whole, and it does.

Not only is the story of Dark Souls well aware that it is inside a game, but it offers a narrative challenge of its own for the New Game Plus mode, where the game restarts after completion on a higher difficulty level. The first time you play through the game, your "best friends" - the ones that have been by your side in the toughest fights - will come to a bad end. You can save them, but only by following very specific paths through the game and giving up precious resources. The second time you go through, you are on a mission to save these characters from their tragic fate, even though the original save-the-world plot line is by now utterly predictable. If you are more the rebellious type, you can reject the main quest line entirely the second time through, and find the true story behind Lord Gwyn lurking at the bottom of the inky blackness called The Abyss. With only a couple hundred words of additional dialogue, the player's experience can be entirely different, and the secret explanation is so well-supported that it's not at all clear that the "evil" path through the game is any worse than the "good" one.

One final, masterful example of resonance is inherited from the game's predecessor, Demon's Souls: the deep link between the loot system and the narrative itself. Dark Souls is a game that revolves around exploring the world to find loot - new weapons and armor, new magic spells, and the souls of other brave warriors that serve as currency - as opposed to finding it on the bodies of your enemies, or buying it from a series of increasingly well-equipped shops, or receiving it as a reward for making progress through the game. Paying loving attention to the world is the surest way to develop your character and acquire the wide range of equipment you'll need to tackle the challenges before you. Each item has a description, accessible via the equipment menu, which offers a short summary of what it does and a paragraph of lore about the setting and history of the game. This replaces the books, audio logs, or loquacious NPCs of other games with a completely variable amount of information, visible at the player's discretion. The game's branching, almost directionless structure means the player will be reading these descriptions often, simply to figure out what's going on. To figure out which door your new key fits into, simply read its description. As the game progresses, the items you find start revealing more and more startling things about the story, eventually dropping hints that completely change your picture of the game. Many of these are parceled out in the third act, after the story has been introduced, as a way to keep the player thinking through otherwise boring areas. This magic ring is from Gwyndolin, god of the moon, "the last remaining deity in Anor Londo." So what was Gwynevere, goddess of sunlight, doing there in the second act? Piece together a couple more clues and you can organically figure out what no one tells you explicitly. There are several instances of this kind of puzzle dynamic, so that the player feels they are uncovering the hidden story of the world as they are physically plumbing its deepest depths. Nothing is as shocking as the Talisman of Beasts in Demon's Souls, which is the most useful item in the game and simultaneously contains the game's most devastating plot twist, but that's probably for the better, since this game is more about slow revelation of deeper themes than single climactic moments.

One final ingredient is the collaboration among players themselves. It takes a very courageous game to lock its best musical track, its most awe-inspiring moment, inside one of the most deviously hidden secret areas, a secret wall behind a secret wall inside a tree trunk in the poison swamp. Yet far more players find it than this description would suggest, thanks to the voluminous fan wiki pages. The high difficulty, expansive world, malleable play style, and dozens of secrets in Dark Souls combine to make the game very friendly to guides, wikis, walkthroughs and lengthy YouTube explanations. It's a good bet that anyone who completes the game has relied heavily on other players to help them find those last few secrets. This out-of-game help doesn't feel intrusive because the game is already set up mechanically for players to help each other, via messages left on the ground, via impromptu co-op from strangers, or simply hearing the joyous ringing of the church bell tower after someone else defeats the first major boss. The game is a brutally difficult test, but it's an open-book, open-notes test.

Dark Souls

Dark Souls is built from the ground up for the "hardcore gamer": the kind of person who is always telling you they value gameplay over graphics and they don't make video games like they used to in the good old days, even if they personally were 4 years old during the good old days. The kind of person who treats gaming as a hobby, a thing you spend lots of time and money on in order to have really high-quality fun. For this audience, it surpasses expectations. If you already know what major games are coming out this year and how you feel about each of them, Dark Souls is right up your alley, and well worth your time.

Almost to a man, reviewers gush with praise over many aspects of the game. The art and sound design is fantastic, perfectly executing on the core premise of a dark fantasy world that is rich and varied yet creepy, twisted and ruined. This is good, because the music is almost nonexistent, appearing only at key moments or during boss fights where you will not be paying attention anyway. The mood is laid on thick, with heavy use of color and sound filters to convey the emotional tone in a largely isolated world. (In one enormous banquet hall, even the menu sounds boom and echo.) In a particularly oldschool turn, the story is not in the player's face whatsoever; key plot points are hidden away inside the item descriptions submenu, accessible by pressing Start, A, D-Pad right, D-Pad down ten times, X, X. The world is chock-full of secrets, hidden passageways and unique encounters, to the point where the player can be genuinely surprised after upwards of 50 hours of playing time - a rare feat for any media, not just games.

All this moodiness and inaccessibility is balanced out by a very "realistic" core gameplay system and a well-defined, voluminous set of animations to match. "Realistic" is one of those words that gamers say when they don't know how to describe an experience that is weighty, that has the ring of truth about it even if it does not match the real world in any way, that responds consistently and well to the player's desires. What they really mean about the medieval combat that is the core of Dark Souls is that it is sufficiently awkward, violent, difficult, and deep that the player has a glimpse of what it actually means to charge an enemy knight with your shield and spear. A big part of this feeling is the player's fragility: the same enemies you can dispatch with one well-timed parry and riposte can do the same to you, except that you are required to take on a half-dozen of them, each armed with a different weapon and fighting style. Even the lowliest zombie, barely clutching the broken hilt of a sword, can pose a serious threat to a reckless player who charges in headlong.

As I write, the online system is incredible in concept but broken in practice, thanks to the kind of trivial design decision that is easily overlooked in the rush to polish a voluminous work. Theoretically, other players leave you helpful messages or lie to you; you see their ghostly forms as they die, learning from their grisly demise which kind of terror awaits you in the next room; you can summon them to assist you or see them invade you in search of your hard-earned money. You can join elaborate covenants with specific goals, like "steal ten Dragon Scales from players who have killed dragons", or "enact vengeance upon the previous group," or "set traps for unwary players at the risk of being ganged up on by three irate victims". All of these provide a great sense of community, of variety, and of human interaction in a forbidding and austere world. Unfortunately, the population is inexplicably split among several servers, so the world feels extremely empty, and many of the multiplayer options require players to be fairly close together in terms of game progress and to use rare items to play, further decreasing the potential helpers. This could easily be fixed by increasing the tolerance for the game to contact other players, and hopefully developer From Software will pay attention.

Because Dark Souls is so captivating, engaging, and frankly such a long game - 50+ hours even for skilled players - it is held to a very high standard. As a result, what would normally be niggles and nitpicks are magnified to the status of full-fledged design flaws. Here are the ones I found:

• Human form (the core resource of online play) is lost when the host dies, instead of being recoverable after death like the game's other resources; this is the single largest contributor to the small pool of online players
• Enemies are too difficult to stagger or interrupt, meaning defensively-oriented weapons like spears and rapiers have an advantage over offensively-oriented weapons like clubs, arrows, swords, axes, halberds, katanas, scythes, magic wands, etc.
• It is too easy to be effective with techniques and equipment requiring no long-term commitment or specialization from your character, such as lightning or pyromancy, compared to those which require a dedicated plan to use, such as heavy armor or magic spells or longbows or chaos.
• The level designers use players' ability to leave messages as a crutch, hiding extremely important game elements in places no sane person would look, and giving the player several opportunities to accidentally miss out on content.
• The engine programming is, frankly, bad. The framerate is a mess, especially in Blighttown and the Painted World, where it feels like the artists ran over their texture budget and the game has to cycle things to and from disk all the time. This shouldn't happen, and frankly the places where it does are not the game's prettiest or most fun parts anyway.
• Several reviews note that the game sometimes drops inputs or pauses before executing inputs. I've noticed that this happens when the player is interrupted; instead of clearing the input buffer at this point, sometimes the game will just keep the buffer around while the animation plays (which could take two seconds or longer) and immediately execute afterward. This is completely wrong and very frustrating when it happens, because the game is otherwise so consistent and so demanding that the player do all their inputs correctly.
• The enemy AI is incredibly stupid, and the game is crafted around this. For example, a half-dozen bull demons will be sitting around on a flat plain looking vaguely in your direction, and when you shoot one in the eye with an arrow, only one of his fellows or maybe none at all will notice you even exist. This never breaks the game, as you are sure to die if all half-dozen see you, but it breaks the verisimilitude that the rest of the team worked so hard to create.
• Snuggly the Crow uses the same awful, tedious barter mechanic that wasted over an hour of my life looking at the loading screen in Demon's Souls. The user should never be required to quit and restart the game to progress, especially when the desired action could easily be accomplished without it.
• The late game wastes a lot of the player's time, and clearly was not as well-tested as the early game. Early merchants will move to the central hub once found; early areas unlock shortcuts from the central hub allowing you to bypass most enemies; early bosses have interesting strategies and create tense moments. Late merchants stay several minutes of running away from one another; late areas are heavily linear and very far away from each other; late bosses are either incredibly easy using techniques the previous boss just tested, or so high-level that unimaginative brute force techniques are required to succeed.

Please keep in mind that these gripes are the result of a product being subjected to intense, withering scrutiny over the course of 100 hours (see previous entry). It's like reading Lord of the Rings for the third time and realizing that Tolkien's writing style is turgid and dense, or watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and pointing out the plot holes. There are legitimate criticisms to be made, but they are simply not the reason that people enjoy it or seek it out in the first place. Similarly, Dark Souls is a remarkable achievement and creates a deep sense of fascination and satisfaction that few other things in life can match, even as it will enrage you and make you roll your eyes. It's like that one relationship you had in college, really.

Dark Souls (not a review)

I have spent an awful lot of time playing Dark Souls in the last three weeks, resulting in the following breakdown:

1. First time playing the game, largely alone and offline: 50 hours
2. Second time playing the game, after reading the wiki: 25 hours
3. Achievement hunting and grinding: Additional 5 hours each playthrough
4. Abortive third playthrough: 6 hours
5. Talking to others about Dark Souls: 6 hours, from dates to birthday parties to water cooler chatter
6. Reading the wiki, online reviews and other helpful guides: 10 hours

I think I am done for now with the game after finishing the second playthrough; I want to leave some content fallow (strength, intelligence, PvP, Black Phantoms) for a later go-round once my initial memories have had a chance to fade, rather than strip-mine it for all its fun right this instant. But it is difficult to tear myself away. So let's explore why the game is so compelling.

It is difficult to be objective about something which has its hooks so deep in me. Dark Souls is The Wire or the T.S. Eliot of video games: highbrow, moody, exacting, tedious, and meticulously crafted to appeal to the connoisseur, not least by instilling a sense of elitist satisfaction. "This game isn't hard!" you will tell yourself, after you are finished, in the same way that Richard Feynman used to call engineering problems "trivial" if they could be solved with applications of existing theory. If you play games for mastery and exploration, rather than for socialization or escapism, you will probably love this one. (If you are a fan of socialization and escapism, I hear this year's FIFA is pretty good, and doesn't require you to win 5-0 against Barcelona to unlock them.)

To a reviewer, Dark Souls is a never-ending parade of misery, practical jokes upon the player, and brief shining moments of victory and elation that makes your imminent crushing defeat to the next challenge even crueler. To a designer, the game world is carefully crafted to give paranoid, observant and informed players a leg up on the competition. Will you be crushed by a giant rolling ball from Indiana Jones while walking up an innocuous stairway? Yes. Could you have predicted this by looking at a big spherical dent in the opposite wall? Always. Are there objects of incredible power that are accessible only through arcane and finicky means? Yes. Are there game systems in place to inform the player anyway? Yes. Does the game waste untold amounts of time making you walk back and forth through a sprawling open world? Often. Do strategically placed shortcuts open up at particularly difficult areas? Usually, although there are a couple notable exceptions. In this way, exploration feeds into mastery, providing tangible reminders of your progress. The game is even more aggressively focused on gear than its predecessor Demon's Souls, so a deficiency in mastery can even be made up for with exploration, and vice versa. The game is careful not to crush your spirit, except during boss fights, with many systems that reward you for making a small amount of progress and then dying.

The final piece of the addictive puzzle is the death mechanic, the primary driver of tension and compulsive behavior in the game. Essentially, you are not given a bank account, and you drop your wallet when you die. (You will die often, especially when exploring a new area.) You only have one spare wallet, so you must venture forth immediately to the site of your demise or forfeit everything. To gamers used to a steady diet of affirmation and steady difficulty curves, having to walk away from up to an hour's worth of progress or run away with your tail between your legs is gut-wrenching. This mechanic has the qualities of greatness: easy to learn, hard to master, encouraging behavior (giving the tough spot another try) that helps push the players on to completing the game.

A proper review is forthcoming, which you can expect to follow my usual pattern of offering suggestions for improvement.

Early Bird

Over the last few weeks, I've been playing a lot of iPhone games. They largely fall into two categories: ports of console games and bite-size touch screen games. There is intense, brutal competition in both, and the cream of the crop tends to be both genuinely enjoyable, replayable, and extremely cheap, ranging from $1 to $5. But not every game is healthy fare, and that's where Early Bird comes in.

Early Bird is clearly inspired by the smash hit Angry Birds, where a swipe determines the angle and force of your projectiles as you attempt to knock down buildings for points. Early Bird similarly tasks you with carrying the bird to its destination via swipes, with various bonus points awarded for side goals like "bounce really high on this coiled spring." The cutesy art style, help-a-baby-bird and bouncy sound design are similarly echoes of Tiny Wings, but touch the ol' heart strings all the same. Like seemingly all iPhone puzzle games, there are lots of levels, each of which can be completed in 5 minutes or less, organized loosely by theme. An additional charmingly unique factor is the end-of-level report, where a surly worm (presumably, the one you just enabled the early bird to get) congratulates you in semi-ironic fashion with messages like "Yippee."

Unfortunately, this attractive package is wrapped around a vicious shell of bad design that hollows out the game in a way only veteran players will spot. It is the Hostess Cakes of bird-based puzzle games: tastes great, no filling, leaves you sick to your stomach at the end. This is a serious charge, so I'll detail my reasoning:

1. The scoring system (from 1 to 3 stars) is completely broken. There are lots of small, inventive bonuses that make you feel good about finding the right solution, or salve you for getting stuck in a bad situation, adding up to ~4000 points per level. There is a time bonus, to the tune of ~1500 points. There is a bonus of 5,000 points for a bullseye. Then each unused swipe gives you 10,000 points. It takes 20,000 points to get the maximum 3 stars, and each level is designed to be solvable with 2 unused swipes. I like to call a scoring system like this Quidditch Syndrome. Lots of things are happening, but every game is won or lost by Harry Potter. This removes the rewards they carefully built for the player in favor of a single metric that is the same for every level. In other words, it removes strategy and variety, without providing any benefits, in a system that is very easy to fix.
2. The level design is extremely linear and holds the player's hand to an astonishing degree. The ideal path for every level is marked with floating bugs in the exact arc the player should swipe, and other paths are carefully blocked off. Usually, there is a complicated series of springs, fans, bouncers, etc. that can be completed in one perfect swipe or 5 smaller ones, and the ideal path will hit every single one of them - there are no red herrings. In later levels, instant death spikes adorn areas next to your target path, removing what little leeway you have. Because of the scoring system above, there is no chance of success with anything but the fewest possible number of swipes, so you are basically riding the Early Bird train every single time for 100+ levels. This is probably a deliberate design decision, but it could also be simple incompetence.
3. The "pinball bumpers" mechanic, appearing at level 25 or so, seems designed to bring tears to the eyes of easily frustrated players - you know, the kind who would appreciate all the hand-holding and simple score system I discussed above. In a momentum-based game, tightly spaced obstacles which give you lots of negative momentum can range from a +1 swipe tax to instant death depending on the level. Only a perfect shot will get through them, and because the levels are bird-powered Rube Goldberg machines, you usually can't even see the proper shot before you make it. This trial and error instantly sapped the remaining fun of the game from me. Again, it is easily fixable simply by increasing the space between bumpers so that a shot at 40 degrees instead of 45 would still make it past.

There is room in the iPhone market for a bird-based puzzle platformer. Early Bird is not this game, and the tragedy here is how popular and acclaimed it is, largely because it is so easy. Almost every review mentions either the cute graphics or the surpassing lack of difficulty, or both. It's just empty video game calories. Hey, at least it doesn't make you grind for points!

Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee - The Rama Series

Popular Wisdom: Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is a science fiction masterwork, full of the wonder of space exploration and the humbling, mysterious presence of a superior alien race, if rather short on character development. 20 years later, Clarke teams up with co-author Gentry Lee for a followup trilogy (Rama II, Garden of Rama, Rama Revealed) which is so bad it almost retroactively ruins the original.

My Take on Rendezvous with Rama: This is a near-perfect example of "hard" sci-fi: a plausible extrapolation of current science and cosmology, a relentless celebration of the imagination, with a clear and brisk writing style that efficiently conveys the sense of exploration and unearthing secrets that makes one want to become an archaeologist. In brief, a motley spaceship crew sets out to explore a colossal, apparently deserted alien spacecraft, dubbed "Rama." The ship is a hollow cylinder, 16km wide by 50km long - a colony ship, spinning to create artificial gravity so that looking up will reveal the other side of the world overhead - and Clarke hammers home the incredible, stupefying size of such an object at every opportunity. As Rama nears the sun, the lights come on, the frozen sea begins to thaw, and the crew discovers they are in for more than they imagined - anything more would be spoilers. The mystery has been sufficiently built up by the end of this short book that it makes me immediately want to rush out and buy the other volumes, even though I knew they would not match it.

My Take on the Rama Trilogy: Like all amateur reviewers before me, I feel a strong desire to blame all the bad parts of the Rama trilogy on Gentry Lee: the awful writing which is eager to tell rather than show, the hundreds of pages spent on soap opera with one-dimensional characters, the ham-handed social messages, and a letdown at the end of the series so bad it's virtually all I remember from the first time I read this series, maybe 15 years ago. This allows us to credit Clarke with all the good parts, namely the overpowering sense of scale and the genuinely imaginative yet mostly plausible aliens. But this is too shallow a view; it is ultimately Clarke's fault as editor that the Rama sequels consistently find the least interesting angle on some genuinely marvelous content. How does a six-year-old react after having been put to sleep for 15 years and waking up as a young adult? It's difficult to tell, because no one ever asks or talks about it, except for a few offhand comments in the interior monologues of our impossibly competent heroine, Nicole. What would be different about a society where the staple food of one sentient species is the surplus eggs of another? Author-insert hero Richard barely has time to discover this great concept before both species are wiped out by the moustache-twirling human villain. Et cetera.

Ironically, while the trilogy sets up and answers a lot of big questions, and much of Rama Revealed is spent with long information dumps explaining the society, culture and technology of different advanced alien races or even the history of the universe, the actual answers that a reader of Rendezvous was looking for turn out to be pat and disappointing. There is an awful lot of character interaction, mostly several generations of one spacefaring family, but everyone talks and thinks in an incredibly logical and clinical fashion which is almost impossible to map onto human nature, meaning scenes which are intended to be tearjerkers end up as cold and distant. I felt like I was playing a Bioware video game through most of these books: detached and wondering what the implications of various life-shattering events would be for these characters I barely knew. The first time a child is born to the last remaining human couple, or a shotgun wedding is announced before some implacable alien deadline, or a daring escape is made into the arms of a mysterious alien race, it is touching and impactful. The fifth or sixth time this happens, with the exact same reaction from everybody, not so much.

The only character that breaks the spell is Benjy, the retarded child with a heart of gold, who is honest and brave enough to say what all the characters should have been saying and feeling the whole time. Lee is much better at writing children and robots than he is at writing people. Kudos should also be mentioned for having the heroine of the story be a French African doctor fond of dreams and visions, not a square-jawed skeptical space marine.

Final Verdict: Rama, like so many other nerdy franchises, has a bad case of sequelitis, for which there is only one cure. Read the original, which won virtually every award the science fiction community can give, and try to forget they ever made a sequel.

The Ender Quartet

The Verdict: There is only one ur-review of Orson Scott Card's Ender Quartet, and it goes like this: "Ender's Game is an incredible and thought-provoking sci-fi novel. Speaker for the Dead, the sequel, is confusing and totally different, but still a good book. Xenocide is long, boring and has a terrible deus ex machina cliffhanger ending. Children of the Mind is just dreadful, except for the last 100 pages where the plot threads from the previous books are finally wrapped up." Reviewers who read Card's copious introductions/afterwords will add, "Originally, Xenocide was the final volume of a trilogy, but the book ran too long, so Card split Children of the Mind off. This is a big reason why both the books are unsatisfying." There may also be a caveat that Speaker for the Dead was actually not as good as everyone says it is.

In a broad sense, this narrative is true, but I'd like to offer an alternative explanation.

Ender's Game is now an indispensable part of the school English curriculum (I remember sitting in the gifted program in elementary school listening to 3 different book reports on it), and for good reason. Card writes very simply and his omniscient viewpoint is very aggressive, so that Ender's thoughts and feelings are very intelligible to a young reader. The key plot threads all resonate with gifted kids: Ender is always younger, smarter and more vulnerable than his peers, and he is always thinking of new ways to trump the established wisdom, and all the adults consider him Very Important but they don't tell him what's really going on until it's too late. (The reader, meanwhile, is also keeping tabs on Ender from the outside via minor characters.) It's also cracking good sci-fi, with a fun futuristic game/sport and a great use of space technology without faster-than-light travel and an incredible twist ending that's foreshadowed just enough. The last chapter is clearly there to set up for book 2, but it provides a nice sense of closure to the story by letting our heroes take a breather.

Speaker for the Dead is the rare sequel that is almost completely unlike the original. It is 3000 years in the future, Ender is a 40-year-old man looking to settle down and get married, the starships-and-intrigue action is replaced by ethical dilemmas and interesting alien biology, and the book is littered with thoroughly unpleasant characters to act as a foil for Ender, who is pretty much ready for sainthood from page 1. That being said, it's still a very good book, and frankly science fiction needs more books with intense character-driven drama instead of yet another version of Top Gun or Master and Commander in space. There is still a twist ending, but there's also like 50 pages of denouement afterward to set up for book 3.

Xenocide and Children of the Mind are basically one very long sequel to Speaker, painfully separated in a way that does violence to a story that already spent way too much time mired in philosophical discussions, detailed descriptions of various Eastern cultures, and characters repeating the same things they said 500 pages ago. The core problem is Card's decision to split up the books chronologically, which means that what is by now an incredibly intricate plot with dozens of characters needs to be rehashed every so often even though Card has run out of interesting things to say about it.

The split should really leave Children of the Mind the entire main plot line, which involves a government effort to destroy the planet Lusitania, which contains a deadly super-virus as well as all the main characters from Speaker plus two different alien species, and to kill Ender's AI sidekick who is jamming their transmissions. This contains Card's pet story idea that the soul is a subatomic particle, and love is a real physical force that creates instantaneous bonds between and within people. This turns out to lead to a ridiculous deus ex machina involving faster-than-light travel and the physical manifestation of Ender's good and evil sides, but still there is eventually closure for all the long-running plot threads.

This frees up Xenocide to focus on the philosophical parts of books 3 and 4, which take place on totally different planets (Planet China, Planet Japan, Planet Samoa) with totally different characters who are frankly much more interesting than listening to Ender's family rehash their grievances and their stupid decisions again. Without several hundred pages of setup, the sudden intrusion of the impossible into the frustrating and repressed life of our heroine, Si Wang-mu, becomes lively and exotic again. With some forced mystery added, the awkward side of these novels could be an intriguing surprise, instead of being rehashed in every conversation in a vain attempt to make the books on the same reading level as Ender's Game, which is not even remotely true.

So basically, I'm proposing that Xenocide could have been a really cool book, if it were totally rewritten. That's the rundown: Flashes of brilliance and some cool ideas, overshadowed by a huge cast of generally irrelevant characters, needless lengthening of the plot, and above all the bloated expansion of the final volume of a trilogy into a convoluted mess.