Pedro Garcia's Reviews > Lightblade

Firstly, I'd like to say that the blurb for this book is quite misleading. It is technically true, in the sense that at the start of the book the situation is pretty much that, but then the story moves on quite far from that quite quickly. If you liked the idea of the blurb, I recommend you read The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter. If you want to know what this book is actually about, keep reading this review. I will not spoil anything, but will explain a bit of the themes and setting.

As this book was promoted in r/ProgressionFantasy, I went in expecting your average week to strong story, but in a world with bootleg lightsabers. And if you squint really hard, maybe you can see that. The problem is, the scope of the world quickly becomes unreasonably big. The scale of thigs is ridiculous (I mean, how much is even a million billions anyway?).

All that is due to how the world works, which I'm not sure I understand. People have compared it to The Matrix and Inception, and it is a reasonable analogy. Lightblade imported a mixture of both, with some magic thrown in. But the thing is, the philosophical questions of both those movies are also imported. You get questions about what is reality, what is free will, what is love... In the end, everything is quite confusing, and although there are moments of explanation, I still don't understand.

In my opinion, the book is trying to do too much at the same time. You could take each of the ideas here and make a story about that alone. A problem every fiction suffers is that the bigger it becomes, the more apparent the seams are. If you have a simple magical system, say telekinesis, you have relatively few issues. But when you have a super complex magic system, the seams start to show up: "why doesn't this work that way?", "why didn't he do x instead of y?". It's a lot more things to come up with a reasonable explanation, and so, naturally, more flaws slip through.

The effect this has in Lightblade is that the story is constantly straining my suspension of disbelief. Every time I'm getting immersed, some new absurdity shows up and I have to readjust to that. It's like, "I get what the author is going for, but it doesn't make sense. But I'll go along with it for now".

Another issue I have, and this one is more related to the execution rather than the idea, is that character motivation and personalities are a bit inconsistent. One minute they are angry and the next instant they crack a joke. When they have something important to tell, they wait until the very last moment, and naturally are interrupted. Or they meet the person with the answers to their questions, but don't ask them.

There is a romance plot, but I didn't like it very much. It stomps all over the aforementioned philosophical questions, but even if it didn't, it still has some problems. For starters, the characters fall in love almost instantly (hate that trope). They get ridiculously, hopelessly in love. You could say that is the primary motivation for their characters, to get back to each other. And yet, there is a moment where one of them is about to cheat on the other. That inconsistency is particularly annoying.

But enough criticisms. There's some good here too. Although I would say the book is light on action (at least in fights), what we have is good. The lightblades are cool, when they get their moment to shine. The chemistry between the main trio is pretty good. And even though I complained about the strange and complicated world, it's interesting enough to make me curious to know more about it.

Despite the problems I listed, I'll very likely check out the sequel. I think that if if narrows the scope of the story a bit and leaves most of the nonsensical world in the background, to be revealed gradually and with better explanations, it could find it's stride and start a great story.