 Hello there. Today I'm here to do probably a pretty short review on a Patreon request. This book is The Battle of Fiji by Deanna Dayhem, or it was repressed by Deanna Dayhem. And I'm not gonna lie, this one's not very good. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Now when I say it's not very good, I don't mean that in the sense that it does anything phenomenally bad, because it really doesn't do anything phenomenally bad. It's just not set up in a way that lets it succeed. You know, it just... it does a few things competently, and other than that it does things in a very boring way. And I know that might not make much sense, but let's get into it. So this book, The Battle of Fiji, is actually very simple to understand. It's in a world where people have invented technology that allows them to basically jack into your brain and you can play video games that way. You know, like Sardart Online, or hell, a lot of other things that have used that same idea. Only in this, it's not like people who die in the game die in real life. You know, it is just a video game. And there's this Hunger Games-esque competition where they just take a whole bunch of people, put them in a world map, drop them off, and then they go off and kill each other until there's one man standing and our main character, Eric, is going in there to win money to pay for his mother's medical treatments. Now that sounds fine on its own. The problem is that that's kind of all this book is. You know, it just starts off immediately, Eric is dropped in, and he starts fighting, and then he meets some allies, and then they fight people, and that's basically the whole book. Like, ironically, pretty much the only time they ever really get a few moments to sit down and breathe is near the end. Like, at the climax, which is the exact opposite of what it normally is, and the exact opposite of what it should be, I think. And, uh, well, yeah, like, there's just nothing but action here, and because of that, we don't really have a reason to care. Like, you know, we learn that Eric is looking after his mother, and we learn that his teammates have their own reasons for being here, and those are all fine reasons and all. It's just that, well, they don't spend nearly enough time on it, and they don't spend time on it before all the action and everything starts, so how are we supposed to care? You know, like, the thing about the Hunger Games is that while the bulk of it was, yes, Katniss in the arena, going around doing stuff, being in danger, it was structured a lot more smartly than just action, action, action, because the first, like, 25 to 30% of the book is before the arena. Like, that's just Katniss and Peta and all them learning, or that's us learning about Katniss, I should say, and learning about this world and learning about why she's there and getting us to like her and empathize with her and want to see her succeed, but also know, oh, if she succeeds, then she'll be killing Peta as well, and how's that gonna work out? And so, because of that, when shit goes down in the arena, you're actually interested and you're actually sad when people die and you're, you feel the intensity, the action scenes and stuff like that, if it had just dropped Katniss off in the middle and then at one point she was talking to Rue or something and she's like, yeah, I have a younger sister and I volunteered here to take her place, like, that's basically what the Battle for Fiji does, and so because of that, it really sets itself up for failure. Like, it's basically impossible to come back from that, I think. Like, unless you spend, like, a lot of downtime in the middle of the story going over this, like, that maybe could have worked, but the book really doesn't do that. It has a few brief moments of downtime, but none of them last nearly long enough. And, well, beyond that, I think the biggest issue that prevented me from even really getting into the action just as action is, well, one, it's written, you know, you can't really do that with books. Like, if this was just a movie or an anime or something, and I still didn't give a shit about the story or the characters or anything, I could probably still enjoy some of this action that's going on, that could still be fun, but it doesn't really work that way in books, unfortunately. And the other one being that we don't learn that much about the rules of this game right up front, which, again, if this, the thing I liked about this setup is that it's not you die in the game, you die in your life. It's pretty simple, and, well, I don't want to say low stakes, but yeah, it is kind of low stakes, but you can still make us care about that if you make us make some characters that we want to see win. You know, at that point, it's basically a sports story, which, if you remember, I did a review several years ago on a book called Warcross, which was kind of similar, but a little bit different. I don't want to get too off track with that, but, you know, I also said in that one, man, this would have been cool if they had just treated it like a sports story and had these professional video game players go up against impossible odds and then we get to see them succeed. That would, that would have been a lot of fun. And that could have worked here too, but again, you would have had to spend the first chunk of the story getting us invested in these characters and also just showing us the rules of the game and how it works, because, you know, in the Hunger Games, it's real life, so we already understand how all that stuff works and we can pick up any shenanigans that the game makers throw in there later on, but in this, for example, you can have negative HP in the game and I genuinely didn't understand how that worked until partway through and they, I think they may have thrown in an explanation there, but it's not until like halfway through the book or something. I don't remember, but that's part of the problem is it's not explained super well, so it kind of just falls out of my head immediately, whereas if we had had the first, let's say, 20% of the book was like this team of people who already know each other and already are familiar with the game and their training and the narration or whatever could explain how some of these rules work, then I would understand how the rules work and I would be less confused and all that when the game actually starts, but we don't have that and so the game is confusing and the action is confusing, not too bad, like after a while I got the gist of it, but still it was really, really obnoxious and I feel kind of mean talking about it all that, talking about all that in such a negative manner, so I will bring up one or two positives real quick. I think that some of the world building that's brought in is neat because this apparently takes place way, way far in the future, so there's like space colonization and stuff and they make a few references to that and make a few references to their world being kind of dystopic and full of poverty and stuff, which I thought was kind of neat, so I don't know if there had been more of that, it would have been cooler, but I did like that bit. The actual prose, the writing itself, like the dialogue and everything is competent, you know, it's not like Patrick Rothfuss where it like blows my mind and I'm just immediately drawn in even if I don't really like the events of the story that much, but it is competently written, you know, I didn't find any grammatical errors or anything and I was never really confused about what was going on or rather I was never confused in the sense that the writing was weird and I wasn't sure what it was trying to say and well there is one other weird thing and that's that they have a couple thousand people playing this game, right, and they just drop them in this arena which is, I did the calculations because they mention it's a square that's 320 miles by 320 miles, which is 102,400 square miles, which is this many kilometers, that is larger than the country of the United Kingdom, that's larger than the United Kingdom, almost the size of New Zealand actually and you only have a couple thousand people there and granted a lot of it is water because they're on islands and stuff but you're gonna have a lot of people just wandering through empty space having difficulty finding each other in something that large, like after a certain point video game maps need to be detailed rather than big, like from my research that I did while I was reading this the largest, largest largest video game map ever made was Lord of the Rings Online which was 48,280 square miles which is less than half the size of this and that one was an MMO so that one was thousands of people playing but they aren't necessarily trying to kill each other you know they're all off doing their own quests and everything and occasionally they will fight but it's you know it's not a hungry game situation and man that's just a weird design decision and sometimes I feel like a lot of people just think bigger is better and like maybe just think it through a little more before you do stuff like that but honestly that was a really small thing that just bugged me in the back of my head until I went through did calculations and research and all that and then came back to it and I was like yeah that's kind of weird overall though Battle of Fiji you know I'm kind of reminded of my the first patreon review I ever did which was like right after my channel started to grow that one was Tongue of Silver and that one I came away from it and I said to the author you know what man I can tell you had passion for this I can tell you had some good ideas there I can tell you have some genuine skill as an author but this was not ready for publication and yeah I kind of feel the same way about the Battle of Fiji you know there's some cool ideas here there's definitely an interesting setup there but this needed one or two more drafts before it could have worked and well that's about it you know I try not to sound mean but I got to be honest here this was just not a very entertaining book for me but if it sounds like something interest you you know just nothing but action action action from beginning to end then check out the link below and buy it on Amazon all right this is the part where I have to read off patron names so thanks to all of you guys and thanks especially to Aposavalanan Olivia Rayan Eva Tumor brother Santotis Christopher Quinten Deanna Dayhem Ambus Emily Miller Joel Karkat Kitsune Liza Rudikova Madison Lewis Bennett microphone sad martigan tobacco crow Tom Beanie vacuous Silas they victims and of course Yakov Merkin all of you guys you you are all seriously just the best just just the bestest best people ever without you I would not be able to do this and if you want to get your name on here then donate to my patreon page why not anything helps a dollar a month that's that's more than most of you will ever give me but you know it's more than my father ever gave me certainly so you know if if you want to help then you know get your name on here and you know do do stuff thanks bye