I've been waiting to do a review on World of Warcraft, because like many gamers its been a huge part of my life. I usually try to make Wednesday reviews based on things that are new to me, and I didn't want to spit out some information that's been out there for years. So I decided to make this post about the new expansion for the game, World of Warcraft: Legion. Before I continue, though, these are simply my first impressions. Since it launched at midnight on Tuesday, I've probably put a total of two hours (since Tuesday through Thursday I have almost zero free time). So, I haven't played it much, but I knew getting into it that it would be awesome, and thus far it has delivered far and away more than I had even hoped.

The game gets a lot of bad rep from the media and all that for people sinking literal days into the game, and how Blizzard simply keeps adding onto it, but while every choice can't be expected to be the best one for every situation, Legion has panned out perfectly. They aren't simply throwing more zones and levels every two years. They're changing the systems and making general improvements to the game as a whole. This expansion is also the best one for new players to get into. It does a great job teaching you how to play your class, and you can even start your first character off at level one hundred so you can play with your friends. Isn't that neat?

The game is twelve years old at this point, but if you logged on today it looks far better than it did back then. The old stuff doesn't look amazing, I'll grant (it would cost a lot of resources to go back and bump up the quality of that much content). The new continent, however, looks incredible. I want to experience everything here and now, but at the same time I want to take my time and savor how well made everything is, which is something I can't say for basically any game I've ever played. Except maybe Bioshock: Infinite and Dragon Quest VIII.

They've also overhauled the systems to work far more smoothly. Warcraft veterans complain about how much better the original game was, but I didn't love having to cast a buff every five minutes and having every conceivable item take up inventory spaces. Nostalgia is a powerful blindfold, and while I may want to go back and play "Vanilla" as its called, it would mostly be to reminisce about how things used to be, not because I wish things still were that way.

Legion also introduces the class Order Halls. I admit I was a little tentative about this before the game launched, but establishing the hall and going to hunt for your artifact weapon was way more enjoyable than I expected. The mages have a giant library of books and magic, the druids have an entire forest to explore, the warriors apparently have their class hall in Heaven! Playing with my brothers and friends last night, I was already excited to go and play all the other classes without having played my own favorite class for an entire hour. That right there is an impressive feat.

​One of the shortcomings most MMOs have is that the story, for me, is almost irrelevant. I like hearing about the wars and the assassinations that happen in the grand scheme of things, but outside of cutscenes its really hard to make your character feel like what they're doing is imperative to the world. This time around, though, since the first thing you do is go and seek this artifact of legendary power, the quests hook you right in. I actually couldn't explain what it is, but this expansion is the first time that I feel like the situation is really dire. Cataclysm shook the world, but all we had to do was kill a dragon. Mists of Pandaria only threatened a continent that, while it looked beautiful, wasn't really all that interesting to me, and Warlords of Dreanor threw me off because it introduced an alternate timeline. Legion has made it clear that if we the players don't do everything we can to stop the invasion, Azeroth is doomed. I know gameplay wise Azeroth has zero chance of losing as always, but my suspension of disbelief is the highest its ever been for any MMO so far.

So, I had high expectations for the expansion. So far, it has met or exceeded all of them. My only trouble with it is that it launched on Tuesday, literally the worst day of the week for me, because I won't be able to devote any time to it until Friday, and that means I'll be really behind!

Forbidden Desert is one of my favorite board games. I love the dynamic of all of the players fighting against the game, and this one handles that dynamic perfectly. It's the sort of table top that is always first on my list whenever somebody asks me what game I want to sit down to play, perhaps in part because I don't own it and have no access to it. Either way, this game is really well made, and once you understand the rules, I think anyone can really enjoy it. Well, anyone that is comfortable with losing and dying a horrible, dehydrated and sunburnt death in the desert over and over and over.

The game is relatively simple. You and up to four other friends are stranded on a desert, which looks like a five by five grid of sand tiles. In order to escape, you have to find and gather all of the pieces of the... airship? ...sandboat? ....magical barge of adventure? Anyways, you do this by uncovering these sand tiles and finding clues to where each piece lies. More often than not you'll end up uncovering all but a few sand tiles (should you survive that long) but if you're lucky you can find the tiles pretty early, as they are randomly placed when starting the game.

Said game, meanwhile, is trying its best to murder you in the face. There are several ways to lose in this game, and while some dangers are more pressing than others, all losing conditions make you lose just as much. You can die of dehydration, you can let the storm pick up for too long, and if you let the sand pile up you can lose simply by running out of sand to place on the board.

Experiences may vary depending on the group of people you do it with, but my experience of playing the game in a nutshell amounts to every person discussing how person X should take their turn. We decide where to move their piece, whether or not they should dig up some sand or stay near a teammate, but in the end that player has the final say. There is a lot of things one can do in this game, but mostly every character has a role and should dedicate a lot of their turn filling out that role. For example the water carrier should focus on making sure everybody has water, and wouldn't really go off on their own unless everybody was secure and there was virtually no risk of anything awful happening. Of course, awful things happen whether or not you're prepared for them (you can never be fully prepared in this game, though).

My favorite thing about this game is that even on the 'normal' difficulty set up, I lose around eighty percent of the time. It's a difficult game, to be sure, but that's the challenge of it. And if you somehow get good enough to start winning fifty percent of the time, you can turn up the storm meter one notch and go back to one hundred percent loss rates. This game is incredibly hard, but it makes winning feel like so much more of an accomplishment. It means you and your friend did something, and if you sat down and played again, more than likely you wouldn't be able to repeat your success.

Forbidden Desert: the game of the masochistic and the ignorant. Would highly recommend. Plus this game isn't so hard to learn that you need a veteran with you to get started! Always a positive note in my book, since many games require a seasoned person to join in in order to have a chance of playing it right.

Do you like Tetris? Do you hate grids? Are you constantly bombarded with the fact that your life is full of contradictions? Well, have I got the solution for your first two problems!

Tricky Towers is a fun little game that I have played probably about thirty minutes of. There's undoubtedly so much to this game that I don't even know about, but I have to write today and that thirty minutes was a lot of fun, so I'll talk about the things I do know.

The gist of it is that this game is competitive Tetris without the grid and with magic. If you place something incorrectly it could fall diagonally and guess what? Now you'll have to figure out how to build higher with that piece sitting sideways. It's crazy because this game has some fun physics to mess around with. The towers that you're making must be structurally sound, so be careful to watch your center of gravity and, if you're really masochistic, wind.

This game is up to four players, and you can play a number of different game modes like Race, Survival, and Puzzle modes. As you build your tower, your wizard will gain access to single-use spells, and can use either light or dark magic. Light magic makes building your tower easier. It can make pieces really sticky or give you another piece of land to start building off of. Dark magic makes it harder for other players. You can turn the pieces in their tower into ice, which makes everything slide around everywhere, or make the piece they're currently holding enormous, which makes it hard to place without making anything topple. There's also a single-player mode, but don't buy this game if you have no friends. The competitive party fun aspect of it is the main focus of the game.

This game is a fun local coop, and is a great casual game to play regardless of skill level. It's simple, easy fun, and each round takes about three minutes, so it's easy to switch off, too. A bunch of crazy things can happen, and every round has the potential to be really exciting and nerve racking. One time my brother got one of his pieces stuck, so the base of his tower was pretty much just a singular point. He had no horizontal space to build on. His foundation was a diagonal block. And he managed to win.

So if you're looking for a game that has a winner and loser but has no competitive feel at all, this is a great candidate. It's a lot of fun, and there's stress, sure, but it's good-natured. Nobody is going to walk away with bad blood after losing a three minute round. Nobody is going to avoid playing just because they're worse than everyone else (or at least they won't have any real reason to), and even if you do end up losing a lot, who cares? You're playing to have fun, not to win. And in the end, that's what games are all about.

Betrayal at House on the Hill has been a staple board game that everyone needs in their collection since the second edition was released in 2010. As far as party table top games go, this one is pretty complex, but it is always a load of fun. It's actually an interesting game to review, because I actually wouldn't recommend buying this game without playing it first. It's got something of a steep learning curve, so in order to play this game the course of action I would suggest is to either find your local board game nerds (or friends) and play it firsthand, or looking up a run-through of the game (I'll link one of my favorite YouTube channels' playthrough).

The game proceeds as follows. You and up to five other people are exploring a creepy abandoned house just like in a cliche, really bad horror movie. All kinds of awful things are happening as you search high and low for cool items until at some point, one of you becomes the traitor. At that point, that person must go fulfill whatever dark desires they have, usually at the violent expense of the other people at the table, which means its up to that small band of friends to fend for themselves and stop the aliens, vampires, zombies, or whatever.

The best part about this game is that when 'The Haunt' happens (which is the event that triggers the traitor to be revealed), it can be any number of fifty different scenarios. I won't go into the mechanics of why that is, but essentially because of how many possible plays of the game there are, you will never experience all of them. You may experience a scenario a second time after playing the game a dozen times or so, but even then the people will be different, the house layout will be different, and all of the preceding events will be different. So this game has an immense about of replay-ability.

This game has an unprecedented ability to make stories and nights you'll remember. I could reminisce about the story of how my brother once punched the head off a screaming child, but instead I'm pretty sure that story doesn't need any context to sound hilarious.

This game has a maximum of six players, and in my experience the game works best with that many people. In fact, it's a lot of fun when you have two or three experienced players and have the rest of the game played by new people. It's a lot of fun when half the players don't know what they're doing.

Betrayal is one of those games that I think everybody should play at least once. It's a load of fun and, depending on who you're playing with, can give you tales to talk about in the future. You'll never play the same game twice, and if you do play it often enough to find yourself in a haunt you've already played, you can add a house rule and pretend that the haunt roll failed, skipping it and waiting for the next omen card to be revealed.

It's also worth noting that this game is going to have an expansion released in October: Widow's Walk. I admit that you will start finding the same event and item cards over and over, even if the game you play it in is different, but this expansion adds a fourth floor to the house (the roof), and the cards it introduces brings in fifty new haunts. So basically even if you managed to get bored of this game and started to play other board games, when this expansion comes out we'll all be able to dust it off and crack it open and experience it all anew.

Oh, and by the way, it's just as much fun as it sounds to become the traitor and tear them limb from limb with your zombie hoard, or abduct them one by one with the help of your alien overlords. You may not win, but in this game, the fun lies not in challenge, but in the experience. Of course, the same can be said for everything we play, but with Betrayal it almost doesn't matter who wins. A lot of the scenarios aren't even very balanced to make the chance of victory equal on both sides, but when your friend/traitor the giant murder-werewolf is mauling you, you won't remember the fact that it killed you in the end, you'll remember that one time you managed to roll perfectly and uppercut it in the jaw against all odds. That's why this game is so good.

Do you have friends?! Do you enjoy spending time with them? Do you also love struggling to accomplish basic tasks?! Well, buddy, have I got a game for you! There's this incredibly new game that just released, and it is awesome.

Overcooked is a pretty simple game. You and up to three other people are running around in a kitchen preparing food and serving it. That's pretty much it. Sound boring? Well, that's because there's more. There's caveats to every level. Perhaps the kitchen is constantly being torn in two by a powerful earthquake. Maybe you have to prepare all this food inside moving trucks that are driving back and forth. Maybe there's a huge wall in the kitchen and the only way to get food from one side to the other is to put ingredients onto a conveyor belt that wraps around the building.

At it's core, though, the difficulty in this game is purely in the efficiency with which you can make food. There are a grand total of three buttons to press: 'Pick up/Put down', 'Action', and 'Dash'. To make onion soup, all you have to do is pick up an onion, place it on the cutting board, cut it, then pick it up and put it on the pot to cook. You have to repeat that three times for that specific dish, and once the soup is done you have to put it on a plate (bowl?) before its ready to be served.

There are two things that make this game great, though. The first is the fact that everything you make requires half a dozen steps to complete, and even if those steps can each only take half a second long, they all have to be completed. Making the food can take a while, but you also have to wash plates and put out fires if you burn anything. Onion soup, the simplest of meals, takes about seven different steps to complete, ignoring the fact that you have to wash the plate-bowl when the customer is done.

The second thing about this is that the level designs are interesting and require a lot of thought and especially teamwork. The game generally works best if each person has a specific 'job' to handle, like providing people with ingredients or washing dishes. But since every level is so different you have to plan out what needs to happen every single time. Some are hard enough to require playing over and over again to achieve a score of three stars, but they are all doable.

There are a bunch of chef characters to unlock, and competitive two-on-two maps to play against your friends. The game has an upbeat "Have fun but don't be bad" feel. It can be stressful, but in my experience it isn't "loud" and doesn't give me a headache (of course, experiences with friends may vary). It's a lot of fun, and even if you and your friends play it on the couch for a few hours one or two nights, I think the game would be worth the cost of $18. Not sure you'd want to buy four copies and play online when you can play together, but I suppose that's also an option.

By the way, there's also an intense, compelling story line where you and your friends are trying to save the Onion Kingdom from 'The Beast'! There's time travel and everything! Something has fractured the kingdom and it's up to you to help. If you ask me, though, I think a lot of problems could have been solved if people didn't make horribly designed kitchens. But who am I to judge?

No Man's Sky is a pretty weird game. It just released a few days ago after being hyped for years, and in general, while the game is really well made, I'm not entirely sure I actually like it.

Basically, this is a single player game that doesn't have much story. This game is an infinite sandbox of exploration. The whole point is to explore planets and moons and and catalog all of the species of fauna and flora you find there. This entire game is essentially an extremely sophisticated generator. Every animal I find is different from the next, and if you discover everything there is to find on one planet (a feat I have yet to achieve), you can hop in your spaceship and fly to the next.

It's a really interesting game because you're basically never going to experience the same thing a second time. I have yet to see anything that can come close to the vast expanse of things there are in this game.

Unfortunately, the actual gameplay is sort of monotonous. On every planet there are several structures, which can be ruins, trading post, beacons, etc. The problem with this is that these places are intended to be 'checkpoints' for your exploration, and they are all the same from one another. The only sense of novelty you get in this game is seeing things for the first time, but you'll see all of the structures and space stations several times simply because that's where the game wants you to be when you're done with your expeditions.

The story is almost nonexistent, which sounds bad, but that's actually fine. It's not the point of the game. The story is more of an arrow to guide you to getting better and better equipment and whatnot, but there are almost no repercussions if you ignore it.

One huge problem I have with this game is how restrictive it feels. It could simply be that I haven't played it enough, but your character starts off with about thirty slots of inventory space, only to have half of those slots be taken up by necessary equipment. To add salt to the wound, much of that equipment requires fuel that you absolutely need on you, meaning you have very little room to actually collect valuable minerals. A lot of the time when I was playing I would be running around with a full inventory miles away from my ship, frantically looking for a structure I can call my ship to so I can sell everything. It doesn't feel good when that frantic search means you're running into valuable things you can't afford to pick up simply because you don't have space for it.

The worst part about all of this is that its a single player game. I can't play this game with friends, not because they're hundreds of thousands of lightyears away (which, don't get me wrong, is a bit of a roadblock), but because even if you did land on the same planet, you wouldn't be able to see each other and play together. Sure, you can talk to each other over the console party system (or voice chats if you're playing on the computer), but saying "Whoa there's this huge flying manta ray on this planet!" Isn't nearly as cool as experiencing that huge flying manta ray with your friend.

As I've read somewhere, this game is a million miles wide, but only a foot deep. You can explore endlessly and never see a fraction of what this game has to offer, and yet you'll always be doing the same sorts of things.

Overall, it's a well made game. I won't deny that. I like to explore, and it is fun, but there aren't really enough mechanics in this game to make me excited to keep playing. I believe they'll be adding more content in the future, which I'm interested in. I only hope they add it in the right direction.

I've been starting to get back into watching movies and TV shows again lately, and one of the movies I saw recently with some friends was a newer film called John Wick. It's a pretty weird movie that plays on a lot of popular tropes but twists others quite a bit. I won't be spoiling it too much since this movie is relatively recent, so let me just start off by saying this movie is Keanu Reeves being Keanu Reeves. That says a lot in and of itself, but in my opinion that isn't really what made it a fun watch.

The story is about a retired assassin whose name is widely feared and respected. Nobody gets in his way, but he retired when he met his wife. After some tragic backstory, some people get in his way, so he comes out of retirement to, shall we say, get some peace of mind.

First, this movie doesn't have much of a learning curve, there are a few opening scenes where the audience won't really know much of what's going on, but once you start to get a handle on the story it flows very linearly. There aren't really any subplots, and the characters' relationships to one another are very simple. There is actually very little going on with this movie, but that doesn't mean its bad by any means.

I think the best part about this movie is the fact that basically everybody knows the name of 'John Wick', and everyone is terrified of him. You are told that John Wick is a retired assassin, but mostly you are shown how good he really was in the interactions he has with other characters. You get the sense that in his prime he was some sort of Super 007. It works very well because very few stories in mainstream media are about an invincible main character whom nobody can really hold a candle to.

The sad thing is that I think this is also the movie's downfall. I understand that the story is John Wick is retired and hasn't been 'in the business' for several years, but since this is an action movie, you're obviously going to see him in action. The problem that you run into is that in order to make the movie interesting you have to have the hero at risk, so he will sometimes have trouble fighting against hired thugs. I take issue with that because in my eyes this character would be able to walk through anyone that tried to go toe-to-toe with him, even if he was out of practice.

I would say that the character having to 'struggle' for his victory is the worst part about the movie, because that's not who we are told and shown he is. We are given a man whom all the scariest and most powerful people in the world admire and fear, and then told that some random hired guns have a chance at stopping him. I simply don't believe that.

In my opinion, this movie could have been a lot better if John Wick's struggles weren't with the action sequences. We know he's going to win, we're watching this to see him kill some guys. But there could easily have been an obstacle in this movie that was not in his area of expertise, and watch him struggle with that. I know any examples I give offhand will be easy to shoot down, so I won't try to give any. But a story can be far more interesting if you give the character a set of skills and hand them a problem outside their area of expertise.

Overall, it's a good movie, and my suspension of disbelief isn't in his ability to manage to 'beat the bad guy', but rather quite the opposite. I would recommend it because of how simple it is, but if you're looking for some compelling story with several subplots, you probably shouldn't be looking for an action movie.

Today I'm going to open up a fresh can of worms. Today will be the first time I review a tabletop game. Well, technically I've talked about Dungeons and Dragons a few times, but even then I didn't review the game itself. So today, today lets go over one of my favorite tabletops of all time: One Night: Ultimate Werewolf.

​Basically, this is a lying game. The premise is that about there are werewolves in the village, so everybody must discuss who to kill. The problem is that the werewolves are pretending to be people and trying to get the villagers to kill one of their own. There are two teams: the werewolves, and the villagers. Most cards have a unique power and perform 'night' actions to gain information, which will help them figure out who is really telling the truth.

This is a relatively short game. If everybody knows how to play, depending on the rules set you can make each game take less than ten minutes. It's a game for three to ten players, and its a lot of universal fun. I've played with strangers and gotten to know them pretty well throughout the experience. When you meet somebody over a board game like Clue or Settlers of Catan, you don't really learn about them, but with One Night, since this is all about lying and picking out details about people, this is actually a great game to meet people with.

The gameplay is very simple. Everybody sits around a table, and selects a facedown card. Whichever card you pick is that role. If you pick a 'Villager' card, your goal is to figure out who the werewolves are. If you take a 'Werewolf' card, your job is to make everybody believe that you are a villager. Once everybody takes a card and knows their role, they set their cards in front of them on the table and close their eyes. One by one (or two by two, depending on the role) most people will wake up and take an action. Werewolves will know who the other werewolves are, the Seer can look at another player's card, the Troublemaker can swap two other players' cards, etc. There are about a dozen different roles with the base game, and most of them have something that they do when everybody else has their eyes closed.

Once the 'night' is over, everybody wakes up and discusses what happened. Anything goes. The only rule after that is at the end of an agreed upon time limit, everybody must vote who to kill, and majority rules. The thing about this is that everybody goes through a process realizing that anything goes. You can be told "Yeah, do whatever you want", but it doesn't sink in until somebody pretends to be the Seer when they are really the Villager. They don't need to be lying because they're on the good side, but you can. In fact, many times I have honestly told people that I am the Werewolf, because I'm usually bad at lying and honesty is way easier. There are reasons one would want people to think you're a Werewolf, which would make being honest like that fine, but I won't get into it here.

I actually really like lying board games. I've played Resistance and Good Cop, Bad Cop, and probably a few others, but this one has led to some of the best moments I have ever experienced when playing board games with friends. It's just a blast. The biggest problem I have with it, is that after varying amounts of time, people know how you lie. For some people it only takes one or two games. If you're lucky, it can take you dozens. But once you know how people act in certain scenarios (for example, knowing that I might very well be the Werewolf if I claim to be) then it makes it easy and thus, not fun. The best part of this game is the mystery of what you are told versus what actually happened so if you cheat or have personal experience in how people act in situations, it kills a lot of the joy of the game.

​Still, I've played this game over a dozen times on more nights than I can even count. Playing with different groups of people helps a lot with the mystery, and its the sort of quick game that board game aficionados can always jump to as a fallback. Plus, expansion packs can add to how the possibilities and mystique of the game.

The Lies of Locke Lamora, which is the first in Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards series, is a fantasy book about a band of thieves that, while carrying out their own plot for stealing incredible sums of money, find themselves caught in a trap that encapsulates a huge part of the society they reside in.

Now, I haven't read many series where the main characters are the 'bad guys', but this book series actually does a really good job at making me want these characters to succeed. Yes, they are thieves, but the reasoning behind their lifestyle and their own personalities gives them credibility. They're stealing from the rich, but it isn't justified by making them out to be Robin Hood, either. I like to see these characters win not because they are good, or even because they are bad, but because their sights are set in high places, and I want to see them pull of things that seem impossible.

Let me back up a bit and say this book was a little difficult to get into. The first part of the book covers Locke's upbringing, and what his childhood was like, but the real plot is when he is in his twenties. In fact, there are three different timelines in the book, which can be difficult to follow at times, but luckily the one I like the least (when he was a child) is covered by the end of the first part. The reason that I didn't like it is because I wasn't really interested in what was happening. The only occurrence that got my attention was that the main character was shunned from the rest of his thieving brothers and sisters because he was too good at stealing. That's established pretty early on in the book, so its not quite a spoiler, but for me that was the sole thing that drove me to keep going.

In the beginning of the book, it seems to be set in medieval Italy, but it becomes apparent that this is a different universe, as the religion of this world follows a pantheon of a distinct number of gods, and magic is also not unheard of in this world. It is a sword and sorcery, but I wouldn't call it epic fantasy, because the scope of this story isn't epic. There are big things happening, of course, but the characters are lords and ladies dealing with secret plots and the like, not armies, dragons, and dark lords.

The two things that I liked most in this book (and I say this without having read anything but the first book) is the sense of kinship that the main characters have for one another, and the mastery they have for lying and cheating. The Gentlemen Bastards aren't really a band of thieves. They are a small family of one. Many of these characters grew up with each other, so Locke has known these characters for more than half of his life. They all work together seamlessly and their bonds are really strong. Even reading about actual family members in fiction, I rarely get this profound a sense of attachment between characters. Second, these people are all thieves of the elite. They can believably act the parts of a noble, or a merchant, or peasant in the span of minutes. Imagine watching a character walk into a store, use an accent to make them believe they're a foreigner, then walk in a second time minutes later with a hunched back and wicked sneer and make that person think that they are a completely different person without even having to change clothes.

This book is pretty loaded with crude language, especially in the beginning. As I said, the book was hard for me to get into, but rarely have I been so immersed into these characters. I actually believe all of those people could have existed, which is a feeling I don't get in epic fantasy. I am thoroughly impressed with how well rounded Scott Lynch was able to make each of the characters, and I can't wait to read more of the next one. So while I wouldn't want anyone under fifteen reading this book, I'd recommend it to anyone that loves to read for the immersion. To my knowledge, this universe isn't actually all that different from what the world was like centuries ago. If it wasn't for the magic, I could actually believe that all of the names were of real people and places back then. It doesn't even really take a whole lot of suspension of disbelief because the book starts off slow and eases you in to what's really going on, so go pick it up and remember the first fourth of the book is a pretty bumpy road.

​The Codex Alera was a huge point in my life because it was the series that actually got me interested in reading, and eventually my interest in it turned into writing, as well. It is a great epic fantasy series, and is definitely the series I would point to when recommending epic fantasy to a young reader.

These books, written by Jim Butcher, is a series six novels long, and every book naturally broadens the scope of the playing field. But my favorite thing about these books is how well the magic is executed, and the issues that are raised from it.

Essentially, everyone uses magic using inherent spirits within themselves and the world around them. These spirits are divided into six different elements (the conventional plus wood and metal). Every person has varying degrees of skill in 'furycrafting' each of these elements, and each element does different things. Water can heal, fire can spark emotions, etc. The main character, though, is a shepherd named Tavi, and he has none of these abilities. He is the only person anyone has ever known to not possess any sort of furies whatsoever, and thus in order to survive with such a 'disability', he has to rely on other means. I'm sure my inexperience becomes fairly evident here, but I can't think of many stories in which the main character is at such a prominent disadvantage from the rest of the world. Imagine a society that judges its inhabitants based on their skill and prowess, and think of how condescending they would be towards a person that was so ill-equipped, he could be nothing other than a freak. Remember, in this world 'normal' people are expected to grow into these powers by the time they hit puberty. Tavi isn't normal, and this world likes to remind him of that.

The Codex Alera, as I have previously mentioned, was written based on a bet. I'll link the Q&A in which he talked about it so I won't have to explain it, but basically Jim Butcher tried to prove that any good author can take old ideas and twist them into something good. With that bet, he made a society heavily inspired by the Roman era, and fleshed out a world that combines quite well with all of the things he pulled out of thin air to make it work. Even having the knowledge I have now, the Codex Alera would still be the first epic fantasy series I would recommend to anyone that wants to get into the genre. It's relatively short (for epic fantasy), it achieves the scope of the genre that usually requires several books just to establish, and is still a fresh and easy read. Sanderson writes stuff that is not only thick, but long. George R. R. Martin is incredibly descriptive and verbose. Paolini is too simple and Tolkien is too old. As for other, more culturally relevant examples, I'm not versed enough to say. They may all be good stories in their own right, but as a first epic fantasy, this will set the bar pretty high to begin with.

It could also be nostalgia talking, but many of the huge scenes in this book hit me a lot harder than most of the 'big' scenes in other series. Not just regarding plot twists, but large, emotional quotes or events, too. So if you haven't read the series yet, go give it a shot!