With video games, it’s more than the story you have to think about.

Then again, not all poorly received movies do badly at the box office nor is a poor opinion of anything completely objective. Making a movie requires a lot of money, therefore, to invest it into a sequel to an underperforming movie would be a bad investment. What if “Prometheus 2” fixes everything about the first one? What if “Alice Through The Looking Glass” takes the taste of disappointment of Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” out of our mouths? What if another Indiana Jones could make “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” worth watching? Most movies don’t get that chance and for good reason. What if, though, you disliked the original but loved the sequel as the case with myself and the Shattered Sea series. A poor sequel can run the enjoyment of the first. A poor sequel can make an opinion of the first stronger. Sequels tend to be less than or equal to the original.

My point is, “Half The World” changed my opinion of “Half A King.” That usually doesn’t happen with sequels from my experience. His meeting with Mother Gundring at the end set up the continuing conflict for the rest of the series and I felt like I completely missed it the first time. However, there are details that I missed the first time around that made Yarvi’s fate at the end seem less disappointing and more foreshadowed. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel that way anymore because it was overhyped and the plot was predictable. I don’t have Patrick Rothfuss’s hype for the book clouding my opinion anymore nor does the predictability of the plot bother me because obviously having read it before I already know what happen. Now that the third book in the series has been released I decided to reread “Half A King” and see if my opinion has changed. Earlier this year, I wrote a post about how bewildered I was over Joe Abercrombie’s “Half the World” being such an improvement over the first book in the Shattered Sea series, “Half A King”.

Joe abercrombie shattered sea series