Krondor the Betrayal: : Book One of the Riftwar Legacy

Rating:
Summary: Quite Horrific
Review: Only reason I gave it 2 stars instead of one is because it's based on the best crpg ever. The book sucked tho... I've read the rest of the Riftwar series and Feist's writing and imagination seem to be be headed downhill. I think it's the money that keeps him going... if you flip to the epilogue he speaks of when he was called by the makers of Betrayal at Krondor to see if he wanted to work on the game and he said something like "you can't afford me" Well, I guess we now see what drives Mr. Feist, as he himself admits :) Anyhow his first 4 or 5 or 6 books are well worth reading but only read this one if you are having a mental breakdown because you need to read more about Gorath.

Rating:
Summary: The Wonderful World of Feist
Review: A Review by Trevor

Owyn, Gorath, and a duo of the princes' personal squires are in a desperate struggle to save the world. A Moredhel chieftain claimed that Murmandamus, the only Moredhel to successfully unite the Dark Elves clans, was alive and entombed in Sethenon, an ancient city in the Kingdom. The Moredhel were being used as pawns by the Tsurani Great Ones to find and destroy Midkemia's "ultimate weapon".

Feist has once more created a wonderful book full of action and tragedy. An award-winning computer game based on this book and two sequels were made to please his fans after the book came out. Raymond E. Feist is a wonderfully talented writer and entertainer. I would recommend this book to anyone who has read any of Feist's books before and to anyone who likes good books.

Rating:
Summary: Satisfying But I Want More!!!
Review: This book was not so bad as so many thought it was. If you expect gold all the time then you'll know disappointment. However for those of us who keep an open mind and understand that this book was based on a game AND enjoy the fact that we are blessed to get to see Jimmy and his best friend Locklear, it is just good enough. Those two joker's alone are worth the book. I hate to ruin things for any newbies, but all I can say is cherish them as long as you can. And they explain so much in the foreshadow of Prince of the Blood.

Now I'd like to say I want more! Who the heck is the Crawler? Why is he so powerful to have Keshian allies? Maybe he or she is Keshian. Or a mage? Maybe a Keshian Mage? And poor William...*sigh*. I did pre-order my Talon Part 2 book but PLEASE finish this series. I wanna know!

Thank you, a fan who cannot get enough.

Rating:
Summary: Not up to the standard Feist set...
Review: Book 1 of the Riftwar Legacy

Originally this book was a computer game, but Raymond Feist decided that he wanted to make a novel about it. He took the core story, eliminated some of the sillier side quests that RPGs are known for and wrote the book. The book has turned out to be the weakest in the world of the Riftwar. The characters, including those that were favorites and well known from the Riftwar Saga, just feel to be flat and not nearly as interesting as they were in the earlier novels. The time frame of this book comes about ten years after A Darkness at Sethanon (Princess Anita is pregnant with Nicholas) and several years before A Prince of the Blood.

Krondor: The Betrayal introduces two new characters that will serve as the protagonists: Owyn, a magician and Gorath, a Dark Elf. We also get to revisit Locklear, Jimmy, Pug, and Arutha and other minor characters who appear in the Riftwar Saga. Locklear is on patrol in the Northern lands of the Kingdom and comes across a band of moredhel chasing someone. Upon being rescued, that someone turns out to be Gorath, a moredhel himself. He has an urgent message for Prince Arutha: Murmandamus lives! Murmandamus was the big bad in A Darkness at Sethanon and was killed at that city. The threat, rumor, risk that he might be alive, or that the moredhel could believe that, is cause for alarm and Arutha immediately sends Jimmy and Locklear (with Owyn and Gorath) to investigate while Arutha marshals the armies.

This is a book filled with action and not so much with character development or even much characterization. I can imagine that this book would only appeal to fans of the Riftwar Saga as we get to see favorite characters in the prime of their lives (and still alive, for some of them). The book still reads like a video game and you are going from place to place with lots of small battles and several bigger ones and as a whole, this was a much weaker offering by Raymond Feist. I blame this on the fact that he is converting a game to a book and it just didn't work extremely well. I enjoyed getting to see my favorite characters again, but they didn't feel as real or as well drawn as they are in other novels.

Rating:
Summary: What is this-Diablo II?
Review: The worst thing that ever happened to Raymond Feist was when he made a bunch of money writing the screenplay for a role-playing game. His last several books are nothing but plots for computer games. Go to this location, find this item, take it to this individual. Go find a certain cave, kill the monster, take his stuff. Blech.
Forget his Legacy Series-it is not worth your time. Now the Riftwar Saga and Serpentwar Saga, that is Fantasy at its best!

Rating:
Summary: Betrayed ...
Review: at the cash register.

I've read some of the other reviews, and it sounds like Feist is usually well regarded. Well, I guess I'll never find out, not after reading this awful book.

Formulaic, cliche, and mind numbingly convenient. In the end, I pressed on out of some morbid curiosity. This is a great example of how not to write a book.

The characters are all flat. I really got the sense that the author threw this together in a couple of weeks.

Rating:
Summary: Oh my god ,Feist is well thought of ?
Review: This was truly awful.To be frank,it was junk.There was nothing in his chapters but action .Action action action.Too much action.No character detail ,no good plot ,just fight fight fight.It seemed to me like Feist could think of nothing to put in but fighting.Is Feist as weak minded as that ?Well,it seems so.Feist is one of the top fantasy authors .I've never seen this before.

Rating:
Summary: Pathetic, lazy, what the heck was Feist thinking?
Review: Word for word, this book was taken from the video game. Yes, Feist wrote for the video game, but way this book was transcribed from the game was lame, and down right lazy. I can understand wanting to write a book based on a video game that did very well - but since I loved the Riftwar Saga so much, the Legacy really hurt. The only real Betrayal here is to the fans of Feist.
However, Krondor: The Assasins, the only part of the Legacy not transfered from a game was very enjoyable, and a an image of what the other two books could have been.

Rating:
Summary: what was he thinking
Review: Betrayal at Krondor was a great game. I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing it when i was a kid. It was great because it not only captured feist's vision, but let you reshape that world as you saw fit. In Shards of A Broken Crown, Feist incorporated some of the background of the game (Makala, Gorath, and Lysle Riggers) into the 'official' history of his Midkemia (as well as Sidi, a character from the later and not as good (but by no means bad) game Return to Krondor, which failed to in any way capture the feel of the books in the way BAK did. I appreciate Feist's desire to work other people's visions of midkemia into his work, and i enjoyed seeing people from the game pop up unexpectedly in SOABK. Also, it's good to have some stories about Locklear and James - two of Feist's best characters in between the ages of sixteen and thirty-six. Still, this book was a mistake. It does justice to neither the books nor the game, and i wish he'd write the conclave of shadows book ... and not bank a whole series on computer games.

Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: I have come to expect great things from Raymond Feist.

I've lost track of the number of times I've read the Riftwar series. The Empire series written with Janny Wurtz was outstanding. I loved Faire Tale. The Serpentwar Saga, while presenting a protagonist I dispised, was at least as well written as any of his other books. Then I picked up Krondor the Betrayal.

I usually try not to think of my favorite artists doing so, but it seems to me that Feist cranked this out to make a quick buck.

This book was conceived as a video game before being turned into a novel, and it shows. Anyone who's ever played a computer role playing game will immediately recgonize the format of this book. The "story" consists of the main characters following the traditional RPG script of meeting someone at Point A, delivering something to or retrieving something from Point B, then going to Point C to repeat the process.

Feist's richly detailed descriptions, which allowed me to clearly see Castle Crydee or the Great Ones at their Academy, is absent. What's left are bland two-dimensional cutouts, even (and especially) of people and places that leapt off the pages of his other books.

Plot contrivences which allow the (game's) main characters to succeed where the novels' most powerful individuals fail abound. This is to be expected in the original context, but lacks more than a little something when converted to the written word.

The only thing that kept me from giving this one star, not to mention what kept me reading it, is the hope that the following two books are actually novels, not re-hashed video game scripting.