Reviews for Dangerous Games

The average rating for Dangerous Games based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-12-27 00:00:00 Nina Kotwica So, This book was just as bad as the first one....but perhaps this one had a little bit of the history I was looking for in the first book, but didn't find...however disapointing.. Sunbright now lives in the flying city with fat wizard and Polaris. He has set his mind on reclaiming his chick's soul from the Hellish prison he lost her in. Fat wizard has promised to help him, but he is often too busy to devote much time to Sunbright's plight. The barbarian soon becomes restless in the flying city and decides that he will return to the ground. For some reason, the fat wizard comes too. When they get down there, they investigate a fallen star. Just as they get close to the star, they are wooshed away by some powerful magic. Turns out they are taken 400 years into the future by a wizard named Karsus (later dubed Karsus the mad). Karsus is the youngest wizard to ever become an archmage of Nethril. He is ruler of the largest of all the flying cities and he is quite crazy. Unfortunatly, its not in a cool way, but in a real speedy and annoying way (in fact, I have yet to read about a crazy wizard in Forgotten Realms that was crazy in a good way...I'm still looking). So, Karsus stole the fallen star from the past to work on a new kind of magic he calls "Heavy Magic", sounds groovy. Fat wizard becomes interested in learning what Karsus has to teach and quickly becomes one of the Acrhmage's lackies. He also has a stupid trist with Karsus's aunt, and she eventually shows him that there is more to life than studies and magic, but then she chooses to die with her nephew instead of going back in time to be with Fatty...pretty lame plot twist. Somehow Sunbright gets summoned by Polaris, the ruler of the flying city he left 400 years in the past. She no lives on Karsus (he named the city after himself) and has grown into a monsterous, overly paranoid, fatty that only eats and makes plans to defend aganinst imaginary enemies. She wants Sunbright to do something for her, and when he refuses, she has him chased by her guards. He ends up hiding from the entirly over zelous gaurds who have turned him into a criminal 'cause he was in a market when a bunch of theives raided for food....it only gets worse... Sunbright hooks up with the group of beggar/theives, but he doesn't understand all the magics of the city (apparently, everything is infused with magic), so he is constantly making mistakes and alerting the athourities to their whereabouts. He has a sorta love hate relationship with the leader of the band, a one-eyed chick with no shoes named, get this, knucklebones (she choose that name 'cause knucklebones are so hard that wild dogs can't eat them ....seriously...) A bunch of stupid, unimportant stuff happens...like Karsus goes to war with another flying city because they are board. He developed his heavy magic into powerful weapons (it basically turns any spell 100 times more powerful, or something really creative like that), and they have a big battle that is pointless, because there is literally no point to it...they are just fighting 'cause they have the new magic...talk about anticlimactic. Then, while the war is wageing all around them, Karsus decides to cast a spell that will turn him into the god of magic. I think he says, "Mystra, I'll have your power." Wow. But Karsus can't handle the awsome power of the Weave (the magic in Forgotten Realms), and suddenly all magic in the realms stops. All the flying cities fall to the ground, and Nethril is no more...dun dun duuuuun.... Sunbright, Knucklebones, and fat wizard escape to the past...and we're back were we started and nothing is better...what a waste. While there is a famous scene that is talked about in alot of the books, the scene was ruined by the stupid chatacter....I'm so depressed.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-07-16 00:00:00 Amanda Smith It took me a while to get through the second, equally brief entry in Clayton Emery's Netheril trilogy. You know the phenomenon where the middle entry in a trilogy travels in a circle and ends up accomplishing nothing? That's more or less what Dangerous Games ends up feeling like. I very much appreciated a few things about this book. It does a fairly apt job of detailing the decline and eventual end of the Netherese Empire, has some interesting magical effects and descriptions, and Emery is as good as always with his fight scenes. Also on the upside, the fighting is not so overboard as in Sword Play. Sunbright's discovery of his shamanistic abilities was a good plot point, and I enjoyed the resulting encounter with the undead wizard lord who had taken him prisoner. Candlemas also develops nicely as a character throughout this book. However, I have a pool of complaints as well. First of all, Karsus, the "greatest of the Neth", just seemed phenomenally silly. I understand that he's selfish, manic, sociopathic to some degree and all, but he was just quite uninteresting. Even though I'd say that I actually enjoyed the end of the book pretty well, his final attempt to ascend to godhood and seize Mystryl's power was just hokey and not well played-out. Secondly, Knucklebones bothers me. Not her character so much as the sudden but inevitable romance with Sunbright (who seems to have the juvenile trait of falling in love with any woman he spends much time around...even while he's in the process of searching for his first love). I don't get it, and this whole plot line frustrated me, as if it was thought that the book couldn't be interesting without some kind of sexual tension. Other random or silly things happen that seemed to have no bearing on the story and didn't make sense, like Polaris being around, but fat and slovenly, the complete vapidity of, apparently, every Netherese wizard and noble, and more. In all honesty, the world in this book is even less believable than in the prior.