d_s_t_e's Wattpad Reviews

Tempestatem by aSaltyWriter

Gale Storm meets with an unexpected and untimely demise, but, to his astonishment, instead of all the normal death stuff, he finds himself swept up into the fantastical world of Mioverold. It's a place where magic reigns and creatures of myth and legend roam, but it's also a place where competing armies wage war, and they want Gale to join them. Especially after they find out that he has some very unique abilities.

Hands down, the best thing about this story are the action scenes. The magic-based combat is fresh and interesting, unlike any other that I know of. The two opposing sides often seem evenly matched, which makes for some great tension, and there are a lot of moments where one side pulls off an awesome move or trick that's basically the equivalent of a big cinematic moment. I really got impressed over and over again with a lot of the characters in terms of their fighting skills, and there were also many times when I got the impression that a particular opponent would be a tough one even before the fight, which created a fantastic sense of anticipation and made the victory (if there was one) feel all the more sweet at the end. I particularly liked the assassin character who shows up for a while. He had some crazy skills that were just perfect for his job. Honestly it would scare me if people like that were real. Another stand out character for me was the undead dragon, who makes a very intimidating appearance.

The unfortunate thing was that I didn't enjoy these scenes as much as I probably should have because most of the time I found myself not caring who would win and who would lose. At first I was rooting for Gale because obviously you're meant to root for the main character, but that fell away pretty quickly because of the one biggest issue I had with the book.

None of the characters had any discernible motivations. Unless you count the motivation to not die, which didn't even make much sense to me (I'll get to that later). What I mean is that I had no idea what Gale wanted. He just seemed like a character that things were happening to, not a character who was fighting for something. He gets killed in the beginning of the book, gets sucked into a magical land, and then just... goes along with it? He sets off on a path because the man who's with him tells him to. He fights some enemies who appear on that path because they're clearly going to kill him otherwise. Chapter after chapter he just keeps doing things with no real reason ever given.

How does he feel about having been dragged into all of this? Why does he decide to support the Godvildians in their war? For that matter, why are the Godvildians even fighting their war? I don't have answers for any of it, and these really should be major points that are guiding the plot of the book. Without answers like these, I can't even tell what the plot of the book is. It's just an endless series of things happening. True, most of the things happening are really cool battles, but I can't enjoy even the coolest of battles if I don't understand what's being fought over.

The one time I actually felt as though I cared about the outcome of a fight was when there was a brother who was trying to protect his sister. There was a sentence or two about that, and I latched onto it because it was finally something understandable and relatable to me. But the brother and the sister were actually on the side of the bad guys. And the brother ends up (Spoiler alert) being eaten alive thanks to one of the "good guys". I was probably not supposed to be cheering for the sister to escape, much less be upset by the brother's gruesome death. But I felt no emotional connection whatsoever to the supposed "good guy".

Actually, I question if the good guys even have a right to be called the good guys. Admittedly I'm a pacifist, but I understand how a standard war plot is supposed to go, and the Godvildians didn't seem any better than their adversaries. In fact they ended up doing a lot of things that I didn't agree with at all. I got the feeling that a majority of people, even those with differing ethical standards than my own, would feel the same. A book doesn't need to have good guys and bad guys, sure, but this is just an indication of how incredibly confused I was. The more chapters there were the more confused I got, with seemingly endless supplies of new characters, each with a name that I at first payed attention to before promptly forgetting and then later just ignored altogether because I'd learned it didn't matter. I didn't get attached to any of the characters, and yes, that includes Gale.