Video Game Review: Pokémon Legends: Z-A & Mega Dimensions DLC

Old dog finally learns the trick it should have years ago.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A

Pokémon is undoubtedly the biggest juggernaut in entertainment history. It’s bigger than Star Wars, bigger than Mickey Mouse, bigger than Harry Potter, bigger than the entire MCU. And while I respect a publisher’s fear of altering too much of a known formula for an established IP, no single entry will derail this franchise. When Pokémon Legends: Arceus released, it temporarily assuaged my exhaustion with Pokémon’s turn-based combat. The game, while still turn-based, took some liberties with catching and including the player character in the world, blurring the lines between the trainer’s gameplay and their Pokémon’s. The follow-up games, mainline entries (Scarlet and Violet) reverted to norms with undesirable results. But finally, the toe Game Freak dipped in that pool of live action Pokémon gameplay with Legends: Arceus has become a full dive. Pokémon Legends: Z-A is the step I’ve wanted the franchise to take for the longest time. And while there are still some kinks to work out, there’s a lot to be excited about.

This is the first full action Pokémon game (and no, I’m not counting fighting games with Pokémon characters or Pokémon Unite). That’s right, no more PP. Instead, the game gives each attack a cast time and a cooldown to ensure a balance between the strongest and weakest. Traditionally, a move like Fire Blast would only come with 5 PP before needing to be recharged; now, it simply has a longer cooldown time and a slightly longer cast time than weaker moves. This creates a new dynamic within the gameplay. You could use Fire Blast, but it might not be ready even after your next attack. Do you wait it out, reposition, and use it again, or do you try to get another two attacks during its cool down? (Fire Blast has a higher chance to miss, so I’m not suggesting you use it—just an example). When fighting wild Pokémon, you’ll find that you draw aggro before your mons do. It’s completely possible to get knocked out this way, and adds an extra layer of immersion to the gameplay, especially early on when facing down a powerful alpha Pokémon or rogue mega-evolved mon. Dodging wild Pokémon attacks while commanding your own to unleash on an opponent can be incredibly satisfying and kept me entertained throughout the entirety of my run.

That said, the combat still needs work. The pathfinding system can sometimes be egregious (which rears its head particularly in the Mega Dimensions DLC that I’ll get to later). Sometimes your Pokémon will line itself up behind a wall or a fence before firing off its move (only to hit into the building instead), sometimes the Pokémon will take a weird path to get to another part of the map before unleashing their attack, wasting your precious speed advantage over an enemy while they pelt your Pokémon in the back. Sometimes they’ll fall off a roof mid-attack. Heck, sometimes a Pokémon just won’t attack. I think what happens is they take so long to follow a path that the system just cancels out the attack you selected initially. When you choose to attack again, it works fine, but it wastes time. This mostly occurs when fighting in the city environment; arenas aren’t problematic.

Another issue I have with the battle system is entering my inventory. Most of the time it works well, but sometimes the game simply won’t let you access it when you need to (and this happens in a lot of the intense mega fights). The game essentially puts a freeze on your inventory access if a Pokémon is mega-evolving. I don’t know if it’s because they may or may not show a mega evolution cut scene (which becomes annoying after the first time you see it). Sometimes there is no mega evolving, and I still can’t enter my inventory. I just have to shrug my shoulders and swap my Pokémon out instead of using a potion and heal them later when it works again.

Legends: Z-A takes place in Lumiose City, and while not as large as a traditional Pokémon game world with all its regions, it makes up for that by expanding the city, incorporating rooftop exploration and placing wild Pokémon zones throughout the map. The world is bright and welcoming, even if some environments are underwhelming. Considering that Pokémon games always sell millions upon millions of copies, it’s a shame they won’t put more effort into hiring more people to help make the games look better. Some buildings are simple boxes with textures on them. Look at the screenshot above. I mean come on, Game Freak, you can do better than that. You’re charging full price for these games, so don’t give us a budget effort. Luckily, the Pokémon animations look good, as do the models themselves. It’s fun to watch my hulking alpha Dragonite float around behind me on the map.

One of the main gameplay mechanics of Legends: Z-A is an oldie they introduced over a decade ago with X and Y: Mega Evolution. Most of the Pokémon you’ll find throughout Z-A can mega evolve, which is necessary to help quell the rage of rogue mega evolved Pokémon. At night, you try to climb the Z-A Royale list. You start and rank Z and climb your way up to; you guessed it, rank A! You do this by entering battle zones at night and challenging other NPC trainers. You can pick up cards that give you mini quests to fulfill that fill your challenger ticket bar faster (for instance, land five psychic-type attacks on unaware opponents). Sneaking up on an opponent and landing a critical move is fun, though sometimes the game randomly makes you get caught unaware by an opponent and stuns you momentarily. This would only make sense if you were sneaking, and they caught you, but sometimes I’m running full at them for a battle and I get the de-buff anyway. Once you have a challenger’s ticket, you can face your next ranked opponent. This is the closest thing the game has to gym leaders, and many of the higher-ranked characters get used throughout the narrative and into the DLC.

For those of you worried about EVs and IVs, worry not. They’ve included it all. There are some specific Pokémon moves that have been altered to work in an action-paced setting, so you may find one of your favorite moves isn’t what it used to be. It’s also wonderful to have access to your Pokémon boxes anywhere you go.

There isn’t much going on in the story. It’s a typical “save the city” trope, but with a Pokémon skin. It’s not abysmal by any means, and I thank the heavens there isn’t anything so terrible as Team Star from Scarlet and Violet, but there isn’t too much here that will stick with me in the coming years. The characters are fine; some deliver some well-timed zingers, but mostly just serve the narrative. One thing I find bizarre is that there is absolutely no voice work. Why? This is 2025 (well, 2026 now, but the game released last year), so there is no reason for there not to be. It works in some games, but when characters are moving their mouths and no dialogue comes out, it’s odd.

The side quests are a mixed bag. Some are clever and genuinely made me laugh, while others are quite simple and boring. You never know which one you’ll end up with, unfortunately. A few were long and tedious, while others were engaging and well thought out. I particularly enjoyed engaging in the wild zones and catching everything available; it reminded me of the mainline games, and I always jumped over to a new spot whenever it was introduced.

The game ran smoothly (though I was on Switch 2, so I had a little extra processing power to back me up). Minus the in-game issues, I had no performance problems or stutters like I had with the last few entries in the series. Collecting Pokémon was a breeze, and battling was fun and intense. While there are still many things Game Freak should address with the Pokémon pathfinding, this is a massive step toward creating a more immersive experience with this series. I hope we get more advances in this direction instead of the uninspired Terastallization they introduced in the last games. With the power of the Switch 2, I also hope to see better effort from the developers to make the world look like it’s part of the number one entertainment IP in the world. There is a lot of good here, and I’m hoping it becomes great. If you want to see what a live-action Pokémon game plays like, it’s right here; it’s fun, and it runs well. If you remember wishing you could be more like Ash from the anime, controlling your mons around a battlefield, give this game your support.

--

The Math

Objective Assessment: 7.5/10
Bonus: +1 for full-action gameplay. +1 for Pokémon designs and animations.
Penalties: -1 for poor Pokémon pathfinding. -1 for having to watch mega evolution a million times.
Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10

------

Maybe save your money.

Mega Dimensions Review

I purchased Mega Dimensions for two reasons. One; because of my desire for mega evolutions that weren’t in the main game (that I thought were going to be, but I’d been misled by the advertisements), and two; because I had just about finished the main game when the DLC came out and was still enjoying the experience. Plus, I know myself; if I didn’t play it immediately after I finished the game, I would never have gotten to it. And to be honest, I wish I had saved my money.

That’s not to say that this DLC is broken or unplayable. It’s fine if you want something to do, but it is an expensive something to do that feels like a cash grab. At the price of thirty steep dollars (which is the most I’ve ever paid for a piece of DLC) I was hoping for something really neat, maybe an expansion to the map or a completely new zone. Instead, you get to enter the hyperspace Lumiose, which is essentially just recycled pieces of Lumiose with a different skin that you have to visit repeatedly. At first, exploration was interesting, but once I discovered it was simply a grind, it felt more and more like a chore.

They introduce two new characters with the content, one to help you with mega battles, and another that makes donuts to feed Hoopa, which allows the player to traverse hyperspace. The gameplay loop here comprises finding berries to craft donuts, which allows you to enter hyperspace, which allows you to research the other dimension (through minor tasks like catching Pokémon, battling, destroying floating Pokéballs) which allows you to find better berries. Once you progress through the story, you can create better donuts. All the Pokémon in hyperspace Lumiose start out at over level 100, so using your donuts will give you a level buff. You want to be at level 100 to maximize their effects; this content isn’t really feasible without having high-level mons.

The problem is the story is not enticing, and after a while, I simply wandered hyperspace Lumiose for better and better berries, but the whole thing is RNG. You’re not guaranteed the good berries. Worse yet, the donuts you make get random abilities, so if you want a specific ability (which is more important at higher levels) you lose out if you don’t get lucky (unless you save scum it by loading a backup save).

Besides increasing your level a certain amount, the donuts have other perks as well; calories being paramount. The more carbs a donut has, the longer you can stay in hyperspace. That’s right; the player is timed each time they go into hyperspace. The better the donut, the longer you can stay. But the higher the difficulty of the zone, the quicker your calories drain before getting ejected from the other dimension. This wouldn’t normally be a problem, and on the lower levels it isn’t. But on the higher levels, when my energy was draining incredibly fast and every single move counted and I saw my Pokémon take a random, unnecessary path around some area to come to do its move, or worse, whiff the move completely, I lost my mind a bit.

I finished the main part of the Mega Dimensions DLC. There was, as to be expected, a powerful Pokémon at the end of the trail, but the thing is, there’s even a bit more beyond the main DLC storyline. Rayquaza is teased early on, and I know Groudon and Kyogre come first, but I just can’t get myself to care. The donut system is bad, the story isn’t great, the flaws in the gameplay are exacerbated in the timed segments, and it’s expensive. It works mostly, which is fine, but it’s a grind. If you decide to pick this up, do yourself a favor and use Mewtwo and have it use psychic on all the floating Pokéballs in hyperspace. You’ll thank me for it.

--

The Math

Objective Assessment: 5/10
Bonus: +1 for cool new mega evolutions.
Penalties: -1 for RNG/Grind. -.5 for high price, repetitive content.
Nerd Coefficient: 4.5/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Book Review: Self-Portrait with Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka

Of all the versions of you in all universes, can you live with being this one?

College teacher Pepper Rafferty has a reasonably satisfying life: a loving duo of adoptive mothers, a kind husband with a sophisticated sense of humor, an important job cataloging bones as a forensic anthropologist. The only piece missing from her happiness is the unknown reasons her biological mother could have had for leaving her. Over the years, that old wound has receded from her attention. But it hasn’t closed. And all the messy feelings Pepper has spent her life ignoring jump back to the surface when she receives the news that her biological mother, who happens to be the world-famous artist Ula Frost, has been reported missing, and now there’s a big tangle of legal questions concerning who will become the owner of her paintings.

It’s not just that Ula’s paintings are worth a fortune: urban legend has it that Ula developed a form of magic in her art, a secret technique that opened links to other universes. According to the rumors, every time she made a portrait of someone, the version of that person represented on the image was dragged into existence in this universe. It goes without saying that that kind of power would draw the attention of a certain secret elite organization with plans about the improvement of reality. All that stands in its way is poor clueless Pepper.

There’s a symbolic level at which the novel Self-Portrait with Nothing succeeds at expressing the disquieting mix of emotions associated with lifelong grief. Pepper tells herself that she’s made peace with Ula’s unexplained choices, but the truth is she’s been living in unresolved grief about the family life she never knew. Now, to be fair, her adoptive mothers couldn’t be more perfect; she has nothing to complain about on that front. But still, that unanswered what if remains. Other possible lives were closed off to her. She never met Ula face to face, so she’s imagined her in many different ways, without knowing which one was true in this universe. Pepper’s search for answers after learning of Ula’s disappearance is told with a profound empathy for the feeling of a truth that eludes definition. Later in the plot, when we discover that Ula made a series of self-portraits that summoned alternate versions of herself, Pepper’s interaction with those other Ulas mirrors the confusing real-life experience of an adoptee figuring out which of the imagined profiles of their biological mother matches the real one.

While the novel does a good job at this purely symbolic level, the nuts and bolts of the narrative craft are handled less well. The omniscient narrator takes too long to reveal to the reader that Pepper already knew who her biological mother is, which diminishes the impact of this news when other characters are surprised by it. The second half of the plot, where Pepper travels to Ula’s hometown to find more clues, is held together by an unbroken succession of bad luck incidents that strain credulity to ridiculous extremes.

In particular there’s a writerly tic that reoccurs dozens of times throughout the text and gets tiresome quickly. Whenever Pepper is pushed into a corner by circumstances, she tends to imagine herself in other universes, dealing with her problem more competently, or having avoided it due to wiser choices, or utterly unaffected by it. So the reader has to endure interminable repetitions of “In a different universe, Pepper was…” Yes, we get it, this is a story about multiverse variants of the same person; we don’t need to be reminded of the book’s gimmick every five minutes. These asides have no consequence on the actual events we follow and make Pepper come off, at best, as an indecisive person habituated to maladaptive daydreaming, and at worst, as a mediocre substitute for more interesting Peppers we could be reading about instead. This Pepper ends the novel having realized that she rather likes the universe she happens to inhabit, but the inner process that led to that key moment of growth is obscured from the reader.

A big reason why Pepper can make it through her investigation with her sanity in one piece is her strong bond with her husband. Even in the second half, where their communication is limited to text messages, she gets invaluable support from his gentle words and his unwavering optimism. This was a consistently enjoyable character to read. Under a barrage of revelations that shake Pepper’s entire understanding of reality, her husband’s love provides an anchor to an aspect of the universe she wouldn’t want to change.

The sinister organization that is pursuing Pepper to get its hands on the paintings is not so successfully written. Those scenes try to give the vibe of a spy thriller, but the prose is firmly stuck in personal psychodrama mode, and the mismatch is too evident. The story in general works better when Pepper is processing her emotional turmoil than when she tries to be an international woman of mystery. A specially cringeworthy scene has Pepper list all the ways she’s unqualified to pull off a museum heist, right at the moment she’s attempting said heist.

Self-Portrait with Nothing is an uneven mix of, on one hand, complex emotions that would have been better served by a more detailed exploration, and on the other hand, dangerous adventures in spy land that often run in circles and get nowhere. How effectively you find it allegorizes the disorientation of a motherless child will depend on how much tolerance you have for vaguely mentioned conspiracies that add to the story less than the extensive space they fill on the page.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Pokwatka, Aimee. Self-Portrait with Nothing [Tor, 2022].

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: The Copenhagen Test

A deadly game of stories inside stories, masks behind masks

You probably don’t need to be told about the less than cordial relationship that US society has with its immigrant members. Real life provides daily reminders. Even though the country itself is a plurinational entity built of and by immigrants, the prevailing attitude among the white people in power is that the rest of ethnicities are on permanent probation. In the new spy TV series The Copenhagen Test, that seemingly incurable paranoia in the American psyche is the shadow hanging over our protagonist Alexander, a son of Chinese immigrants who has done more than should be asked of anyone to demonstrate his patriotic loyalty to the US, but who somehow keeps having to earn the country’s trust again and again. This is the story of a good man begging for some basic respect from a system that doesn’t deserve him.

At some point in the past, Alexander was in the US Army. Because immigrants are never done proving their allegiance, during an overseas rescue mission he was subjected to a secret test: there was only one available seat left in a helicopter, and he had to choose between saving a foreign child or an American adult. He had received explicit orders to prefer the American, but he took the correct option (it’s not the option the test prefers, but it’s indisputably the correct one): he saved the child. This moment has cascading consequences for his career. Because he was falsely led to believe he left someone to die, he lives with PTSD and repeated panic attacks, which he hides from his superiors. Because he supposedly didn’t show enough loyalty to the US, he’s been removed from field missions and assigned to an office job. And because his Chinese parents anxiously raised him to be more American than baseball and hot dogs, he feels like an impostor.

So we have a protagonist with more than enough inner complexity to lead the show. And that’s only the backstory; we still haven’t gotten to the part where an enemy faction puts nanobots in his head to turn him into a live streaming camera. That doesn’t help his chances now that he’s applying for a spy job.

Against all odds, he gets the job, at a super-extra-ultra-secret agency that watches the other US agencies (we’re told it was created during the Bush Sr. presidency, which means the immediate context for the project must have been the fallout of the Iran-Contra scandal). Alexander’s bosses are aware of the nanobots in his head, because he’s a walking radio emitter, and instead of kicking him out, which would alert the enemy, they decide to use him as a triple agent: he’s working for the US, but everything he sees and hears is still being broadcast 24/7 at the enemy, but he’s going to broadcast an edited version of his life in order to lure and catch the enemy. He’s not 100% sure his bosses aren’t planning to eliminate him in the end, and his bosses aren’t 100% sure he wasn’t complicit in hacking his own head, but they’re going to need to act like they trust each other if they want to reach any solution.

What follows is a fascinating pantomime, meticulously designed between Alexander and his bosses to give misleading information to the enemy without alerting either the enemy or the rest of the spies at the agency. And the architect of this believable fiction is a brilliant character: Samantha, an English lit graduate who was previously hired by the agency to concoct cover stories and predict threat scenarios. If you’re wondering why spies would need the services of a dramaturge, consider this: when you’re a spy, your entire life is a performance, and you need to be alert to subtextual clues in everyone else’s performance. You need to prepare against the most outlandish villain plans and push the right buttons to influence others’ behavior. Spycraft is about controlling information delivery and ascertaining human motivations, and that’s exactly where a creative writer excels.

So The Copenhagen Test isn’t the type of spy story that boasts shiny gadgets, cocktail suits, or acrobatic stunts. Its plot is more contained, less reliant on spectacle and more demanding of the viewer’s attention. Under Samantha’s direction, Alexander becomes a decoy of himself, letting his eyes and ears perceive only what his bosses curate, while being careful not to let the enemy notice that he knows he’s been hacked, or that his bosses know. As the story progresses, he starts suspecting that even his bosses are hiding stuff from him, so he adds another layer of pretense: he has to do all of the above plus conduct his own investigation without letting his bosses notice that he’s doing it.

With me so far? Great, because that’s only half of the complications.

The other half is another brilliant character: Michelle, an infiltration specialist who was originally hired by the agency to play the role of love interest for Alexander. But she has her own agenda in this whole mess, and she has ways of communicating with Alexander outside of either faction’s notice, so the visible faces of their relationship multiply thusly: the corny romance story they enact for the enemy’s eyes, the simultaneous digging into his loyalty that she does for the agency, the private messages they exchange when they’re in a place that blocks his head’s signal, and the extra level of subterfuge that she deploys in those moments, when she believes that he believes that she’s really on his side.

The result of this kabuki-grade dance of innuendo and misdirection is that Alexander, Samantha and Michelle play at all times the parallel roles of scriptwriter and actor and spectator. As I often say on this blog, the best stories are those about stories. And The Copenhagen Test uses this example of a man’s loyalty being under constant test to suggest a uncomfortable idea: if there’s no difference between being a patriot and acting like one, then patriotism is simply a performance, and our identities as citizens and as political subjects are stories we continually tell each other. The whole edifice of society and its reciprocal responsibilities rests on a sustained belief reenacted daily.

The show gives us a dark parallel of this idea in the figure of the villain, whom we meet rather early in the season. He was a spy from the communist bloc in the ’80s, who betrayed his country for the promise of immigration to the US, but was discarded once he was no longer useful. Once again we see the theme of a society that weaponizes its membership: whereas the American government has failed Alexander by refusing to believe he’s American enough, it also failed the villain by luring him into believing he could be. This self-sabotaging pattern on the part of the US is also related to the loyalty test in Alexander’s backstory: the rules of the test are based on the unquestioned assumption that American citizenship endows a human life with greater inherent worth.

That, in a nutshell, is the conceptual trap that makes American exceptionalism possible: the belief that people’s worth can be given and removed, instead of just acknowledged. It’s the lie that Alexander still accepts, the motivation that drives all of his mistakes: the promise of a society where people don’t aspire to be respected, but to be usable. Alexander’s parents are perpetually stressed about not coming off as true Americans, so they overcorrect to the point of self-negation. His bosses don’t care if he behaves morally or if he hates himself for the choice they forced on him years ago; they only care about how much use can be made of him. And as long as he agrees that that’s the proper way for the land of the free to frame his personhood, he won’t be free.

Even in a healthy society, there’s a degree to which each of us must play a public role to convince the rest that we’re good and reliable. But in the uniquely spectacle-poisoned US, the show must go on. People like Alexander (or like Samantha and Michelle, who also are nonwhite) aren’t allowed to truly experience their lives, only to perform them—look American, sound American, seem American. Because the test doesn’t end; because in a society built on suspicion, the tools of spycraft become necessities of survival; because if you can be certain of one thing in these uncertain times, it’s that there’s always someone watching.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Interview with K.V. Johansen

K. V. Johansen was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where she developed her lifelong fascination with fantasy literature after reading The Lord of the Rings at the age of eight. Her interest in the history and languages of the Middle Ages led her to take a Master’s Degree in Medieval Studies at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and a second M.A. in English Literature at McMaster University, where she wrote her thesis on Layamon’s Brut, an Early Middle English epic poem. While spending most of her time writing, she retains her interest in medieval history and languages and is a member of the SFWA and the Writers’ Union of Canada. In 2014, she was an instructor at the Science Fiction Foundation’s Masterclass in Literary Criticism held in London. She is also the author of two works on the history of children’s fantasy literature, two short story collections, and a number of books for children and teens. Various of her books have been translated into French, Macedonian, and Danish.

Today she talks to Paul about her forthcoming sword and sorcery book, Breath and Bone.

NoaF: For readers unfamiliar with you, can you briefly tell us about yourself and your work?

KVJ: I’m Canadian, living in New Brunswick on the east coast. I have Master’s degrees in English and in Medieval Studies. My first book, long ago in 1997, was a children’s secondary-world fantasy, very sword and sorcery, a quest to slay a dragon. Since then I’ve written something like 26 books for children, teens, and adults, including two non-fiction works on the history of children’s fantasy and, under the name Kris Jamison, a contemporary novel, Love/Rock/Compost, which no one has heard of but of which I’m very proud. Prior to Breath and Bone, my fantasy for adults has been the five-book epic fantasy series Gods of the Caravan Road, beginning with Blackdog and ending with The Last Road, and the high fantasy duology that begins with The Wolf and the Wild King and will be concluded in The Raven and the Harper.

NoaF: Can you give us a brief précis on Breath and Bone?

KVJ: The very short version is: two women (Hedge the swordswoman and Pony, a shapeshifting godling), who’ve been partners through long, long years and figure they’ve served their time in the suffering and heroing and changing the world department (what with leading a civil war, destroying the empire, and cutting off the emperor’s head), are pulled out of peaceful retirement when a girl recruits them to help rescue her twin brother, who’s gotten himself ensnared by a life-draining witch, an old enemy of theirs. And there’s a ghost.

NoaF: You've tackled epic fantasy, and fantasy similar to sword and sorcery, but what drew you to make this a sword and sorcery novel?

KVJ: I’d had the character of Hedge—the wandering warrior with a sort of trickster partner—kicking around for a while; she’s someone who was cut from an earlier and rather different version of The Wolf and the Wild King, actually. Her partner then was male, and a fox—he became quite a lot younger, and a child, and turned into the fox-girl Sage, so there was Hedge, all ready to wander into adventures, with no partner and no story. I was working on part two of The Wolf and the Wild King when a discussion about sword and sorcery gave me this sudden hunger for an old-fashioned adventure, lighter on politics and gods and dark grim torments of the soul.

“What I feel like reading,” I said to myself, “is something like Torrie, but for grown-ups.” Torrie is the oldest of the Old Things of the Wild Forest and the narrator of my several Torrie books, which are old-fashioned fantasy adventures for younger readers. (A lot of adults like them too!) Pony, the narrator of Breath and Bone, sprang more or less fully formed from that desire, and the plot of Breath and Bone just flowed out once Pony started talking, becoming a fresh adventure rooted in things she and Hedge thought long in the past. She’s old and wise and sometimes snarky, a bit of a trickster, not entirely reliable, a musician, a storyteller, a shapeshifter, and has a dark, damaged streak through her heart that breaks out from time to time. She and Hedge are both carrying a lot of scars, emotionally and psychologically, from the days of the empire. Their past, if you like, was epic fantasy—wars and politics, gods and horrors, victory achieved at great cost. Sword and sorcery is their retirement. They’re figures of legend in their world. People don’t expect to find them living in a cottage keeping ducks, with a sword buried under the floor.

NoaF: Geography and landscape are important in your books, and Breath and Bone is no exception. What inspired you for the landscapes we see in the book, from the lake all the way to the Under-Ice?

KVJ: I was thinking mostly of western Europe as the inspiration for this one, with Hedge and Pony living off in the northwestern corner of that, on the shores of a small lake, so I had in mind a sort of impressionistic sketch of a landscape that was inspired by Swallows and Amazons combined with Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (about the Cairngorms in Scotland) along with various of Rosemary Sutcliff’s books set in the Lake District of England after Rome left Britain. Hedge and Pony’s travels take them down through lowlands and forests, along the valley of a great north-flowing river, to a suspiciously Alps-like mountain range and the ruins of Under-Ice, so you can picture that landscape as journeying south and east across something not utterly unlike a much more sparsely populated western Europe with more woodland, where primeval forest and megafauna can still be found. The marshes, Arrany’s homeland, came from the idea of Doggerland being above water, and part of that being a vast low-lying area at the mouth of a great river. It’s a place I’d like to explore and develop further.

NoaF: Rosemary Sutcliff—now there's a name drop. I read The Eagle of the Ninth after the movie came out. How did Sutcliff influence your development of this world?

KVJ: Rosemary Sutcliff was an author I read repeatedly as a child, someone who had a big influence on my style and on my fascination with history. Some of her books set in Britain after the withdrawal of Rome are among my favourites, The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind in particular. It’s natural that, with Breath and Bone being set in a world after the fall of a great empire, I found a Sutcliff sort of flavour creeping into how I thought about it. Dawn Wind, especially, contributed a mood to the world; it’s a book about two orphaned young people after the Anglo-Saxon invasions have begun and their communities have been destroyed. Searching for a place they can be safe, they wander through the ruins of Roman towns long abandoned and come across small isolated farms still surviving. Pony’s world took on that sort of colour, though hers is a more peaceful time with no Germanic invasions. In Pony’s world, there are old imperial ruins that have been taken over and given new purpose; the imperial highways still exist, though no one is maintaining them and they are slowly being overgrown by moss and engulfed in forest; and there are a variety of small, mostly human tribal territories and kingdoms, towns run by hereditary chieftains or councils of clan elders, a few surviving cities or towns that have become new centres of trade and are growing into independent cities run by councils or guildmasters or powerful families, and in a couple of cases, by universities that survived. Pony’s is a world that has lost a lot of its population, too, which is the feeling you get in Dawn Wind (though that’s not necessarily the actual historical situation), that the whole of the characters’ known world is in ruins.

I wanted, with Hedge’s and Pony’s travels, to show that their world was recovering, that something new for both humans and vhalgods was growing out of the ruins of the old—a ruin caused in part by their own actions, though the tyranny of the vhalgod emperor was itself a cause of ruin and misery and needed to be ended. Hedge and her brother were among the great captains in the civil war. There’s a background of places run by warlords or terrorized by bandits, of towns and villages that were destroyed in the civil war or have fallen into ruin after in all the chaos—there’s been a long period of lawlessness, banditry, disease, famine, the changing of trade routes. Set against that, however, are places like their own Smithsford, a village that’s grown up around them, because of them; there are also places run by universities that have survived the fall, settlements and single farms where people are making new lives and new communities for themselves, tribes and kingdoms and village councils weaving new networks of trade and mutual support.

Sutcliff created a post-Roman world that hits with a great emotional impact, and that emotion—it’s captured in the Old English poem The Ruin, actually, which is ironic as of course that was written by the people who were the invaders in Dawn Wind—is what coloured my thinking about Pony’s world: a landscape holding the bones of the past, something new growing out of that while the faint memories of the old still wrap around you. Ghedhaynor isn’t meant to be Rome, and Pony’s world isn’t meant to be post-Roman Britain, but if you want to put it in wine-tasting terms, there are underlying hints of Sutcliff’s interpretation of that world in its flavour.

NoaF: Information control and what the characters tell us, or each other, is unusually prominent in this book. What prompted you to make the characters, especially Arrany, so… twisty in that regard?

KVJ: Blame Pony—she’s the twisty one!

Writing a story told in the first person is always a challenge, and for one where it’s being told after the fact and not as a stream of consciousness unfolding as it happens (which can feel a bit artificial because how are you the reader then privy to this flow of thought?), the writer always has to choose what to have the narrator tell and when to have them tell it, and there has to be some justification within the story for what’s revealed and what’s for a time withheld or outright concealed. In Breath and Bone, there’s a framing narrative, an implied audience within the book, the “you” whom Pony is addressing.

You have to remember that everything you learn about Arrany, twisty though she may be, or even Hedge, is coming through Pony. She’s a minstrel, an entertainer. This is very much a story told by a storyteller, so even though she’s casting it into the first person, it’s not some window into her mind; it’s a very carefully controlled narrative shaped to keep her audience listening (and throwing a few coins into that awful squashy hat or buying her another mug of heather beer). She’s creating herself as a character within her own story, which every first-person narrator does, but she’s being very deliberate and open about it, as when she tells you about a very terrible and traumatic thing in her past, “Oh, I didn’t tell you this before because I didn’t want to talk about it, but now you need to know so you can understand why I reacted to such-and-such the way I did.” She tells you what she wants you to know when she wants you to know it, and, when telling other people’s parts of the story, she could be telling you what she believed she knew at that time, or what that person wanted at that point to present to the world as their own story, rather than what she may have found out later—unless she has decided it’s important to do otherwise, to give you a forewarning of something because that’s the more dramatic choice. You’re being made a part of the story, a participating part of the audience at that fireside, by her way of telling it; you-that-audience are startled or shocked at an action of hers, so she reveals more about herself than maybe she meant to, in trying to explain it; your anticipation delights her, shapes what she withholds or reveals next. Pony loves a good tale and she loves to tell one. She’s going to keep utter control of her narrative to set you up for the best journey she can give you.

NoaF: The vhalgods and vhalbairns (such wonderful use of language in this book) promise a whole possible host of stories in this landscape. And this novel really does feel thorny in the sense that there are others stories seemingly lurking everywhere in the landscape. Have any other stories niggled at you as you wrote this one?

KVJ: There are definitely more stories in this world. Just thinking of one seems to make others grow out of it, like branches from a vine, climbing and wandering over the map. Of course there are stories in the past, darker stories from the days of Pony’s captivity and the civil war, which she might allude to, but in this time, generations later, just this one story of Pony and Hedge and Jinn travelling south to the mountains with Arrany spun off at least two more in my mind. My Torrie books for children were like that: each was a standalone, but writing each one gave me an idea for another. Pony is very like Torrie in that regard: she goes wandering and tells stories; every story reminds her of another. It’s a format for a series that I think works really well for adult sword and sorcery. There’s so much past in this world and a big map to explore, so many things left mysterious, or broken and only roughly healed, or completely unfinished, after the fall of the empire, that Hedge and Pony can go on wandering through it and tangling themselves up in adventures for some time to come. And of course, as a vhalgod and a wild godling, they have a more than human lifespan to do that in. Breath and Bone is a standalone, but at the end, they're not heading home despite having finished the story off nicely and dealt with all the problems they set out to deal with; they've decided there's something they need to look into south of the mountains. Goodbrother Bessamy back home in Smithsford will have to go on looking after Hedge's flock of laying-ducks for another season.

NoaF: Thank you so much for answering these questions. Where can readers find you and find out more about you? (might as well get this question out of the way now)

KVJ: My website is at https://www.kvj.ca and I’m on Bluesky as @kvjohansen.bsky.social.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Interview with Erin M. Evans

I was delighted to catch up with Erin M. Evans, whose book Relics of Ruin won the 2025 Endeavour Award for distinguished science fiction/fantasy books written by Pacific Northwest authors.

Erin M. Evans is the author of the Books of the Usurper series, beginning with Empire of Exiles, and the award-winning Brimstone Angels saga, set in the Forgotten Realms. She is a co-host of the podcast Writing about Dragons & Shit, and a cast member of the actual play series Dungeon Scrawlers. Erin lives in the Seattle area with her husband and sons. She can be found online at her website and on Bluesky.

NoaF: Congratulations on winning the Endeavor Award! Where were you when you found out you'd been shortlisted, and what was your reaction?

Erin M. Evans: I think I was in the middle of texting with a friend about Worldcon plans when I got the email telling me that Relics of Ruin was a finalist for the Endeavour Award, and I was absolutely shocked. My publisher had submitted it, and I’d pretty much assumed that as a sequel it wasn’t likely to get far (which was my mistake—this isn’t the first time a mid-series book has won). Plus, when I went to look at the list of submitted works, there were so many really amazing books on there—it really was an honor to be nominated. But it’s a book I’m really proud of and I’m grateful the judges saw its strengths.

NoaF: What do you enjoy most about writing the Books of the Usurper series?

Erin M. Evans: I went into these books deciding to do everything I loved as much as I could. So I didn’t skimp on the setting: the empire in the first book’s title is a collection of ten protectorates in a kingdom sealed behind a wall of salt, iron, and dead sorcerers after a catastrophe involving shape-changing colonizers; fast-forward a hundred years (and one failed coup that wasn’t cleaned up as well as everyone thought) and now we have a murder. I put in a bunch of characters I loved—very smart people geeking out about things they love, while also having mental health issues, while solving murders. And mystery plots! Because I love making problems for myself. Relics of Ruin in particular centers on a misplaced skeleton in the archives, which meant for the first time ever, I got to put the bone facts part of my degree to work in a book.

NoaF: In addition to the Books of the Usurper series, you're also writing for RuneScape, and previously you've written Forgotten Realms novels. What are the different challenges with tie-in writing vs. writing “creator-owned” novels?

Erin M. Evans: With tie-in, I’ve always described it as “working around immovable pillars.” When it’s entirely your own creation, you get to change whatever you want, and while you develop a sense of what’s got to stay—what is “load-bearing,” so to speak—you really can tear the whole thing down and start again if it’s not right. When you’re working in an established setting, there are going to be things you’re allowed or even asked to change or contribute, but there are also these immovable pillars—pieces that you have to work with or around. 

This is especially evident when you’re working with an IP that wasn’t made primarily to tell a linear story. With very high-level monsters in D&D, they can have “legendary resistances” where if an effect should hit them, it just doesn’t. They have a limited number of these, and so finding out a monster has this means you know you have to get it to spend them. In a novel, this would be immensely unsatisfying—I would look at that and go, “Okay, in this fight scene, it’s going to avoid getting hit in some clever ways.”

That’s what that’s there to represent—a monster so tough and wily it doesn’t just take the beating. Immersion is better than clarity. But, on the other hand, when I’ve run games and tried to weave those legendary resistances in as a narrative element, my players didn’t understand what was happening until I told them flat out—they need clarity more than immersion there.

There are also things that are the way they are in D&D or RuneScape, because they are fun in a game or provide necessary clarity for players, but they feel odd and flat if you try to port them straight over to a novel. So you have to find a balance between not breaking the rules so badly it doesn’t feel like the same setting, and tweaking things so it feels like a plausible version of what the rules are meant to represent. RuneScape has a very simple one: the map is sized so you can feasibly run around it. But if you said, “Yes, you can sprint across the world in fifteen minutes,” that would feel very weird! So, okay, we don’t look at how far it actually is between these places; we look at how long it feels like it should take, and go from there.

NoaF: You're currently cohosting a podcast. Tell us a little about that.

Erin M. Evans:  Writing About Dragons & Shit is the podcast I co-host with B. Dave Walters and Treavor Bettis. We used to host a Twitch show called Champions of Lore, for Codename Entertainment, where we would talk about lore from Dungeons & Dragons, which was a ton of fun, and Treavor pitched us on the idea of having a writing podcast on the side. I always describe it to people as “the really fun conversation you have after a great panel.” I love talking about writing and I love hanging out with these guys, and it’s a ton of fun to have guests join in. Because we work in a bunch of different fields, we’ve had all sorts of people come on, from novelists like Patrick Rothfuss and Melissa Caruso, to game designers like Shanna Germain and Keith Baker, to comic book writers like Jim Zub and even psychologists like Ben Searle to talk about writing and burnout.

NoaF: I hear fans of the podcast have their own special nickname?

Erin M. Evans: So, when we did Champions of Lore, we would occasionally get notes from our producer that we needed to stop going on so many tangents. Stick to the source material! When we started WADS, we realized—literally in the middle of recording—that no one was going to stop us going on whatever tangent we thought was good for elucidating the topic and entertaining the audience. Or we just wanted to talk about! And early on, we had a listener question, and B. Dave said, “It’s gonna spawn a whole lot of tangerinos,” meaning tangents. But then we started getting letters from people declaring themselves to be “Tangerinos”—and that’s super caught on. So it did indeed spawn a lot of Tangerinos, I guess! (They’ve also developed this custom of opening their letters with more and more elaborate titles for us, which never fails to delight me.)

NoaF: How did you get started in publishing? Did you always see yourself becoming a writer?

Erin M. Evans: I started out interning at a small press called Per Aspera Press. I learned a lot about what goes into publishing a book. Then with that experience, I went to work for Wizards of the Coast as a novels editor. But I have to admit, I always wanted to write more than I wanted to do anything else—I just loved books and I wanted to do anything I could to work with them. So while I was working on my craft by writing, I was also learning a lot by editing. I wasn’t at it very long in the scheme of things, but I think it was good practice.

NoaF: For the last question, I’d like to give you a chance to plug your favorite authors. Who should Nerds of a Feather readers have on their radar?

Erin M. Evans: Some of my long-time favorites include people who are definitely on readers’ radars: Martha Wells, Susanna Clarke, Connie Willis. But some of my recent favorite reads have been Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove, The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan O’Keefe, the Echo Archives series by Melissa Caruso, The West Passage by Jared Pechaček, and Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan.

Gabrielle Harbowy is an editor, writer, and literary agent based in Southern California. She can be found at gabrielle-h.bsky.social or gabrielleharbowy.com

Review: Stranger Things Season 5 Volume II & Finale

The Duffer brothers stick the landing, bringing a close to nine years of epic storytelling

Volume II of the Stranger Things final season dropped on Christmas day, and when we last left our heroes, we discovered that Will could tap into the hive mind and hijack its powers—Will the sorcerer, indeed! I've now watched these episodes twice,  and simultaneously so much and so little happens in them. The vibe is a little different from Volume I, as somehow there's even more exposition to get through. Rather than go through the plot, I thought I'd go through what really works, and why the epilogue to episode 8 was fantastic.

What works

Discovering what the Upside Down really is

After discovering some of Dr. Brenner's notebooks in the Upside Down version of Hawkins Lab, Dustin pieces together that everything they thought was wrong. The Upside Down is actually a wormhole to  Dimension X, the place Vecna was transported to by El. It was sort of a Chekhov's Wormhole, though, as the crew had discussed wormholes in Mr. Clarke's science class years before. We still don't learn exactly why the Upside Down is the way it is, all decaying matter and dark skies, but ultimately that's less important than just knowing it was never the ultimate bad place. It's just a tunnel to another dimension. On the other side of the gooey, fleshy wall surrounding the Upside Down is sheer space, as noted by Steve's BMW getting sucked into it and vanishing into the galaxy.

Bringing Mr. Clarke into the crew

Everyone's favorite science teacher is recruited to help build a telemetry device so they can locate Dustin and company, and watching him finally join was absolutely heartwarming. Without him, the kids never would have succeeded in the prior seasons, and his reward is getting to witness all the insane things that have led to this point. It's a very sweet payoff, and he adds a lot to the team. Also, I love that Mr. Clarke is always sleeping with a different member of the Hawkins High School staff. 

Karen "Walk 'Em Down" Wheeler proves she's a badass once again

Still recovering from vicious demogorgon slash wounds in the hospital, Karen saves the day yet again when Lucas, Robyn, and Vicki are cornered by demodogs. After ripping her IV out, she deftly places oxygen tanks into huge commercial dryers, triggering an explosion that takes them all out. Moms in '80s movies are rarely given such agency, and watching her stagger down to the basement to take care of the kids is truly epic. In the epilogue, we see a fully recovered Karen at the kids' graduation, her huge scars visible but worn proudly on display in a V-neck dress.

The epic Mindflayer kaiju battle

When the team finally makes it to Dimension X, they're set to face off against the corporeal forms of the Mindflayer and Vecna. A lot of folks online complained that the battle was too short, but the team literally spent 5 seasons getting to this point. I thought it was awesome, as it actually felt like watching a D&D game in real time, from Steve and Dustin stabbing the Mindflayer's belly to Nancy leading them into the trap where Robin and Lucas and Will could rain down fire from above. Also, Joyce getting to hack off Vecna's head with an axe was a gift she truly deserved. I don't think anyone suffered more than her throughout every season, given her constant panic and stress.

Being the first TV show to license Prince's music

The two needle drops of "When Doves Cry" and "Purple Rain" were not only incredibly appropriate, the Duffer brothers somehow managed to convince Prince's estate that their show was worth granting the green light—no doubt because of the viral success that seemed all but promised. Having the record literally be the detonation devices for the destruction of the Upside Down is a fantastic choice, and El and Mike's final conversation set to "Purple Rain" is absolutely heartbreaking.

Why I choose to believe El is alive

A lot has been said about El's fate, but I think the Duffer brothers did it exactly right. By leaving El's death open to a different interpretation—namely, that she survived thanks to one final illusion by Kali—it gives everybody what they need. Some people are fine with a final sacrifice by a hero, while others (like myself) can choose to believe Mike's ending, that she escaped and is living far away, safe. I choose to believe she's still alive because it's what her character deserves, and at heart, I'm an optimist. But more importantly, I like that we, as the audience, get to choose our ending. It's like D&D itself! I personally don't need a ton of deaths to make a finale more meaningful.

What didn't work for me

There are too many characters

By season 5, we're dealing with upwards of a dozen folks that we have to check in on (somewhat) equally, and that starts to make things cumbersome. I wouldn't trade Robin and Steve for the world, but the subplot of Nancy and Jonathan's relationship was given way too much screen time for a duo that most folks couldn't care less about. (There's a reason no one was buying the Jonathan Byers Funko-Pop.) Will's coming out scene, meant to be a vulnerable and tender moment for his immediate family and ride-or-ride friends, ends up giving his speech to a room full of people, including his science teacher, his friend's girlfriend he's never met, and Murray, everyone's favorite mean weirdo.

The Marvelification of Stranger Things

Season 1 of Stranger Things was the little show that could, made by an unknown duo of brothers with a super small budget. As the fame of the show grew, so did its budget, and by season 5, we had something that felt visually and thematically more like X-Men or The Avengers. Superpowers, excessive CGI, different dimensions—it all feels a little too much. The grandiose nature of the final season, for the most part, felt light on the nostalgia (the show's bread and butter) and heavy on the special effects. To put it another way: light on the bowl cuts and heavy on the white-out eyes of Will Byers. Vecna is the big bad in Stranger Things, but his motivations aren't entirely clear to me. He was abused, clearly, but he feels more like a Thanos than anything else, unfortunately. By giving him such a broad impetus, I think the show really missed out on a meaningful villain.

Too much plot, too little room to breathe

A product of both the extraneous characters and the Marvelification is the fact that the plot was fairly thudding. In Volume II, nearly every other scene sees characters grabbing objects and telling us the plot, "Imagine this record is Will, and this one's Holly." Everything felt jam-packed, with no room for characters to just be. It's more than just a sense of urgency, though, because it felt like something was missing. I read that most of the episodes went through some pretty extensive scene-cutting, and I think it's definitely apparent. The only time characters really have heart-to-hearts is when they're on the way to a battle. Maybe it's because the show finally lost a bit of the childlike wonder that made it so special, because the kids are all in their 20s now.

Overall

Season 5 is definitely worth watching, and I think it's a fitting conclusion to the near-decade-long run of the show. It suffers from the issues I mentioned (and more), but if you really loved the characters and the story, I think the ending pays off. When I looked up after the epic battle in the finale and saw that there were still 45 minutes left, I wondered if there was going to be another stand-off with Dr. Kay and her army.

Instead, I thoroughly enjoyed the slow, thoughtful ending and watching our kids graduate. The scene of everyone putting up their D&D books on the shelf was heart-wrenching as they literally were closing the book on their childhoods.

Show endings are hard, because not every show knows at the outset how long it's going to last. While not perfect, the Stranger Things finale sticks the landing and leaves the viewer with a tale well told and a happy ending. And that's all we can really ask for.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Film Microreview: Anaconda (2025)

The Ouroboros of sequelitis eats its tail

Because every last bit of IP must be undusted for quick profit, this time we have a movie that just doesn’t bother pretending it’s about something more than squeezing another IP, and in the process successfully denounces itself. This “spiritual sequel” to 1997’s Anaconda both acknowledges that the original was ridiculously over the top and strives to beat it by being a hundred times more ridiculously over the top. It’s an impossible beast: a remake that is about how absurd it would be to film that remake. But it doesn’t have a commentary to make on its premise; this is no Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. Its gimmick consists in pointing at itself and smirking at the audience: Hey, isn’t it silly that Hollywood keeps remaking everything? Ha ha. Joke’s on all of us for buying the tickets.

Anaconda doesn’t try to comment on the tension inherent in its assignment, on the dual task of telling a story that is about its own inadequacy for telling that story. It doesn’t take the example of its worthier predecessors, like 2005’s Bewitched, a metafictional comedy about rebooting Bewitched, or 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, a neat rebuke to the executives who forced it into existence and simultaneously a beautiful case for its own existence. The whole point of the new Anaconda is that there would be no point in a new Anaconda, and when it goes ahead and does it anyway, it doesn’t know how to justify itself.

The in-universe excuse for the reboot is that two childhood friends who always dreamed of making horror movies have a midlife crisis and suddenly decide to fly to the Amazon jungle and film a new Anaconda before they get too old to try things. Not the worst of premises, but it feels strange to watch Jack Black, of all people, play the responsible, mature half of the duo, while the magically ageless Paul Rudd is simply impossible to believe as an unemployable D-lister. These two characters have been stung by the nostalgia bug, and constantly reminisce about their school days, when they made zero-budget films for the pure love of the craft. But their inclination for artistic purity doesn’t extend beyond their lines; the actual plot devotes a lot of attention to who owns the legal rights to remake Anaconda.

(Curiously, the new Anaconda is so disconnected from the plot of the original that you wouldn’t need those rights in order to film this one. It’s the kind of mildly tangential allusion The Asylum gets away with selling all the time.)

Much like the self-serving abomination that was Space Jam 2, the new Anaconda takes care to remind viewers again and again that it’s a Sony property. Accordingly, the defining ethical question that propels the plot is whether you respect Sony’s property. The other themes alluded to in the script (illegal gold mining, cruelty toward animals, substance abuse disorders, the pursuit of happiness) are secondary to the sacred status of corporate ownership rights.

Barely tolerable as a buddy comedy, toothless as a horror thriller, self-defeating as a metafictional exercise, the movie we get feels like something captured by its titular monster: a regurgitated, half-digested lump that is hard to ignore but much harder to look at.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.