 Way back in the faraway land of the 90s through the late aughts, there were a ton of fantasy series aimed at kids that were all structured the exact same way. A main character has to go on some sort of quest, usually gathering magical items, to save the world, or at least a measurable fraction of it. Sometimes the conflict would be a bit different, but many of the other tropes stayed the same. Individual books were short, episodic, and easy to consume, but there would be around 12 trillion in each series. Things like Del Torre Quest, The Magic Treehouse, Warrior Cats, even Ranger's Apprentice was only a slight deviation from this formula. I don't count Animorphs here because that's more sci-fi than fantasy, and because of all the war crimes. These varied somewhat in terms of length, how dark the story got, how much fantasy was involved, and how much of an overarching plot existed. Del Torre Quest is very focused on assembling the belts of Del Torre so the heroes can defeat the Shadow Lord, and every book moves that quest further along. Ranger's Apprentice is a series of largely disconnected adventures following the same characters that features exactly zero magical items. These hold a lot of nostalgic value for many, including me, and in some cases, kids still read them today. Beast Quest was… well, it was another one of these. It doesn't do anything particularly unusual with the formula. A young boy named Tom goes off to fight dragons and sea serpents and stuff to save the kingdom of Avantia. He comes from a small village, he's helped by some companions he meets along the way, a wizard gives him cool magic items to fight with, there isn't much new here, but something about it has made it stick in my mind. At the same time, no one has ever brought it up to me, in real life or online. I remember it, and a few others do too, but no one ever talks about it, and it's not like this is an unknown series, it's sold over 20 million copies so far. When I first read them, there were only six books. I knew they made more later, I just didn't read any of them. While doing research for this video, I learned that by the end of 2022, there will be 142 entries in the main series. There are also multiple spin-offs, including the three-book-long Master Your Destiny series, which is Choose Your Own Adventure, four books in The Chronicles of Avantia, three books in The Battle of the Beasts, which is a copyright evading Pokémon clone, 16 Team Hero books, four books in The Beast Quest New Blood, and 32 entries in the Sci-Fi Sea Quest series. There's even a Beast Quest video game that, despite being released in 2018, looks like it came out on the PS2. Jesus, man. So this series is a bit of a cash cow, yet no one ever seems to look back on it with fond nostalgia the way they do with Goosebumps or Warrior Cats or Deltora Quest or anything of that type. Hell, half the people my age never fucking heard of it. I thought about why this might be for a bit, then re-read a few of the early books, then I came to the conclusion that it's really bad. What's Beast Quest about? In short, it's about a young boy named Tom going on a quest to stop some rampaging beast that threatened the kingdom of Avantia. These beasts include things like Fern of the Fire Dragon, Tagus the Horseman, Ark to the Mountain Giant, and many more. Along the way, he meets a girl named Elena that helps him go off to save the day. At least, that's what the first series is about. The sequels, prequels, and spin-offs all change it up a little while still retaining the Fight 1 Beast per book formula. At the beginning of the series, Tom's hometown has been subject to a bunch of wildfires as well as the river they use for water drying up, so they send him off to the capital to request help from King Hugo. When he arrives, he realizes that the entire kingdom is falling into chaos. Refugees are pouring into the capital, food prices are soaring, and people from other areas tell Tom about all the disasters unfolding in their homes. Eventually, he gets to speak with the king and his court wizard, Aduro. It turns out that many of the mythical beasts he'd grown up hearing stories about were real, but they're not malicious. They're called the Good Beasts of Avantia. However, all the beasts have been enslaved by an evil wizard who placed magical collars around their necks and now they're in the process of destroying their own corners of the kingdom. Tom's town is currently being attacked by Furno the Fire Dragon. It's now up to Tom to travel to each region of Avantia and free the rampaging beast so that they can get back to helping people. He agrees to this quest without much thought, and thus the adventure begins. Aduro gives Tom a few magical items that will help him. These include a shield that can absorb magic from other items, a map that projects a hologram of Aduro so they can communicate long distance, and a key that will unlock the collars enslaving the beasts. Apparently, the Good Beasts are also kept a secret from the general populace. How and why is unclear? I'm unsure how you'd hide a dragon the size of a mountain for very long. Because of this, Tom has to keep his quest a secret from everybody he crosses paths with. I guess this was supposed to be similar to when superheroes have to keep their identity secret, I'm just not sure why they bothered adding it. All of this sounds fine as the setup for a children's adventure series, and most of it is, but the devil is in the details. After all, if a good idea was all it took to be enjoyable, then 80% of isekai harem anime wouldn't suck. In reality, 100% of isekai harem anime suck. I broke no argument here. Before I complain about Beast Quest, I want to point out some of the positives. I enjoy how Tom has to go to a bunch of different biomes when fighting the beasts. He explores the coast, high mountains, grasslands, even the arctic, and when he goes to each location, the people there have unique cultures and ways of living that reflect their surroundings. It makes the world feel much bigger and richer than if all the beasts were hanging out in European forests. I also enjoyed how short the books were. While they could have spent a little more time developing the characters, they don't overstay their welcome like some fantasy series do. They're quick reads. Some of the covers are neat. They evoke a feeling of going on an adventure against overwhelming odds. The beasts all look very intimidating and monstrous. It makes you wonder how Tom can possibly defeat them. And that's about it. Not a very long list of positives, admittedly. Now let's get to complaining. For starters, why the hell does the king send Tom off on this quest? Are there no knights that he could call upon for this? Tom isn't even someone who's proven himself as being resourceful or a good fighter. He's just a kid that King Hugo and his court wizard trusted with magical artifacts and a very important task. Wouldn't you want to hedge your bets here? Maybe send an assassin after the evil wizard or blame your problems on minorities. That works for real politicians. They give the excuse that Tom's father was some sort of important famous dude. The details aren't important, trust me. It's not like Tom is some sort of chosen one or has any crazy magical abilities that make him a unique fit for saving the kingdom. He's just given the quest because he's the main character. And he's the main character because he's given the quest. And that's the biggest thing I can say about Tom. He's the main character. There's very little else to him. He's the regular kid who becomes a hero, not through any sort of determination or intelligence or skill, but because the story says so. He doesn't have any strong personality traits to speak of, positive or negative. He's defined entirely by the powers and abilities he gains. The first ability Tom gains is giving his shield the ability to resist fire. After he defeats Furno, he puts one of his teeth in it and boom, now it's magically fireproof. Makes sense. He can use it to block the flames. Later, he can hold the shield over his head and use it to slow his fall like a parachute, which is a little odd, but okay. But other powers he gets include resisting the cold, being able to breathe underwater, running faster, and healing from wounds. While there's nothing inherently wrong with any of that, it's really weird for it to be on a shield. Shields are simple things. You hold them up and they prevent sharp things from hitting you. If you make the magic, they usually just improve their capability to block sharp things. A shield letting you breathe underwater is just strange to me. When you create magic items in fantasy, the form they take has to match up with their magical abilities. A shield that heals things you cut with it is odd, as is a pair of shoes that lets you see farther or a crystal ball that can turn into a pop-tarp. You can mix this up for the sake of comedy or irony, but then you need to acknowledge that's what you're doing. Beast Quest never does this. It creates an odd environment where the magic seems silly, but it's treated with deadly seriousness. It's just kind of weird. And I felt that way as a kid, too. The other, much bigger problem is that by constantly giving Tom more powers and abilities, the writers allow him to steamroll most of his obstacles without much effort. I don't think I need to explain why that's a bad thing in an adventure story. All the fun and tension comes from wondering if and how the hero will defeat the bad guys. If they can brute force their way through obstacles, then the fun isn't there. Now, to be fair, Tom is still handicapped in some instances. He doesn't just go around killing civilians willy-nilly, so when he's arrested at one point he has to escape jail without any of his magic. It's still too easy for him, since he gets help from his friends, but at least he had to try. On a similar note, he doesn't just fight the beasts. He has to get their collars off so he can unlock them with his magic key, which is more difficult for him. At least until the sixth book when he's able to cut off one of the collars with his sword, which I guess he could have done at any point before this. But for the vast majority of the obstacles he faces, Tom just powers through. It gets even worse later when he gains the ability to summon beasts he already defeated to help him in battle. Like Pokemon. Except it's dumber because at least with Pokemon it takes some degree of skill and luck. You have to get them weak without killing them, then carefully choose from a limited number of different types of Pokeballs. You don't get infinite chances and it's not as simple as just hitting them until they go down. Which brings me to my next point. Tom is kind of an idiot. On several occasions he gets himself into trouble through sheer incompetence. Not by trying to be a hero and getting in over his head, or by trusting the wrong people or anything else understandable, he just says and does stupid things. A great example of this is when he goes after Togus the Horseman. He finds a fire burning in a grass field. He cuts down a wide swath of grass keeping the fire from spreading and saving a nearby town. But when the towns people see him they immediately think he started the fire and drag him off. Tom professes his innocence to which they ask if you didn't start it what are you doing out here? What brilliant comeback does Tom use to get himself out of trouble while avoiding giving away the secret of his quest? He says I can't tell you. Dude just lie. You've been traveling for weeks by now you should have come up with a cover story. Tell people your father is a merchant and you're heading off to find new business partners. Or maybe your town was destroyed by one of the many rampaging monsters all over Avantia and you're searching for a new home. I came up with both of those in about 30 seconds all you're doing is making it clear you have something to hide. Step up your game. Or better yet point out how you stopped the fire from spreading. You wouldn't have done that if you started it. I can only imagine Aduro watched all this and started wondering why he'd given such valuable magical items to such a dipshit. Tom's companion Elena is... there. He runs into her when she's being chased down by some soldiers who think she's a poacher. When he saves her she claims that she's not a poacher. She wasn't going after the local lords deer she was just hunting rabbits on his land which is still poaching but okay. There was a rule in place for most of the 90s and aughts that every episodic children series had to focus on two main characters. One would be the protagonist and one would be their best friend or partner that got dragged into their misadventures through circumstance. If the protagonist was a boy then his companion would be a girl and vice versa. This rule remained in place whether the genre was fantasy, mystery or fantasy mystery because those were the only genres that existed for a while. The only time this rule was broken is when there were three main characters, then there would be two boys and one girl. Elena is just one more example of this rule in effect. She's a girl who shoots arrows at stuff and she demands to come along to fight the beast when she learns what's going on and Tom is reliant on her help at several points. There isn't anything else to say about her. You might have noticed that I haven't mentioned the evil wizard who enslaved the beasts much. That's because he barely features in this series. While he's mentioned once or twice in the early books he doesn't appear in the story until the last book in the original series. When I first read these I kept forgetting that there was even a greater threat behind the beast rampaging until Tom found their collars and released them. The wizard's name is Malvel, by the way. Here's the thing. You can have villains who don't appear until later in the story as long as their presence is felt before then. An example of this would be the Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion. Mayroon's Dagon is the one behind all the chaos. He's an evil god who wants to enter the world and destroy everything. And while we don't see him until the climax, he's the reason all of the Oblivion Gates have opened and we've been fighting his minions the whole game, so it works. Another example is Sauron from Lord of the Rings. Maybe the writers were attempting to do something similar with Malvel and if that's the case they failed. They failed hardcore. Even when Malvel finally meets Tom face to face, all he does is toy with him. He has many chances to kill this kid who has already freed five of the six beasts that Malvel needs to take over Avantia and instead he just tries to demoralize him like a dumbass. It's not even that he thinks Tom is under his power and he's taunting him. That's a common trope among all sorts of villains and it kind of makes sense, holding power over people is a great feeling. Malvel doesn't disarm Tom or take him hostage. He literally taunts him in an attempt to make him give up his quest. Just... why? I don't get it. You might have noticed I've been a little sparse on the specific details of the books and that's because there simply isn't much to say. Tom and Elena run into a few trials while they travel to the next beast. They meet some helpful locals, they meet some suspicious locals, they find the beast, then Tom fights it until he finds an opening to remove its collar. It's a very basic formula, which isn't inherently bad, just lazy in this case. And you know what? I want to complain about the video game for a second too. In addition to the graphics being hot dog shit, look at Furno. He's not the mountain-sized monster he was in the books, he's just a blue, slightly big lizard with wings. Ark to the Mountain Giant isn't very big either, all the beasts look kind of pathetic. Tom doesn't go off to help his village and wind up saving the kingdom, he just comes across a duro's magical key and the wizard sends him off on his quest, which is somehow stupider than how it went down in the books. He doesn't even get the basic characterization of, wants to help his family. I'm not even going to cover how basic the gameplay is because every time I think back on it my vision goes dark and I wake up covered in blood. And the game doesn't even include all the beasts from the original series, there's only four of them. If they had put all of them in they could have conceivably cast in on the nostalgia of my generation, but they couldn't even be bothered to do that. It's so half-assed I'm a little impressed. Now all of this is just me talking about the original book series, the first six out of 142 books. Maybe things improve when Tom goes after the Golden Armor or when he heads to the Kingdom of Dragons, but probably not. Maybe I'm in the minority here. Maybe most kids who read this series loved the hell out of it. I've always been something of an anti-social pedant after all. I don't think that's the case though. I've never met anyone my age who talks about how they liked these when they were kids, nor have I ever seen or heard about any younger people reading them. Obviously there's some sort of audience here, otherwise they would have stopped making them. It doesn't seem like a small cadre of hardcore fans that keep it afloat though. It seems like a group of kids who are reading the books because they've got nothing better to do. Kind of like how the average person watches storage wars. They just see it's on and think, well I've got nothing better to watch. It's not all that good, but it'll occupy your mind for a bit. It doesn't mean the people watching it are stupid, just that they're looking for a basic piece of entertainment and they don't much care if it's dumb. That's the only reason I can find for why Beast Quest has reached such a level of success. Yet it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Why is that? Why can't it just be a crappy book series I read as a child? While writing this script I thought about this some more and wound up doing more research which brought me to a conclusion. The books are written under the name Adam Blade, which is actually a bunch of ghost writers that all work simultaneously so they can crank these things out as fast as possible. The most I can say for them is that they all keep their narrative voice consistent, so it's not easy to tell they were written by different people. That's a difficult task to pull off, so kudos to them. It's just so painfully corporate from start to finish. This isn't a passion project that someone poured their heart into. It's a product, and a cynical product at that. It wasn't written so much as produced. A company called Working Partners Limited, which has also created a bunch of other series for kids and young adults, came up with the story idea. Then they hired a committee of editors to put together an outline, hired some ghost writers to do the legwork, hired some artists to make the covers, and so on. It's a process called book packaging and it's more of a factory production line than anything else. There's no passion anywhere here. It's a money-making product envisioned by a committee of cynical corporate suits and put together to their specifications by some of their employees. That's not to say books written by passionate people can't be bad, many of them are, but at least then there's a vision. There's some effort put in. It's the same reason people love laughing at the room and get bored by space jam too. While they're both bad, one has a soul. Tommy Wiseau is a horrible actor, but at least he's trying. And hey, I'm not even angry at the people who put all this together. It's not like they're hurting anyone, they're just trying to make a living, same as the rest of us. And sometimes making a living means slapping together something that some kids will spend a few dollars on at book fairs so a few adults can pay their rent. I get it, but that doesn't make Beast Quest any better. In an age when many very talented writers struggle to get published by big companies and others languish in obscurity on the Amazon Kindle Store, seeing so much success go to something like this is disheartening. I guess the one lesson to be gleaned from this is that marketing is the ultimate key to success. You need to be able to find your target audience and get their attention better than your competition. If you're someone who is or was a big fan of Beast Quest, please let me know about it in the comments. I need to know if I'm the truly crazy one or not. And to know, I've never read Warrior Cats. I've heard it's insane though. If you watched this far, thank you so much. 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