Retrospective: Five Years With the Nintendo Switch

Five and a half now, actually. But who’s counting? I’m back for a good old longform article, it’s been a while. 

The reason I’m writing this now is that tomorrow, the Nintendo Switch 2 will finally be unveiled to the world. It was announced in February and looks tantalizing, sleek and elegant and sexy, but still mysterious. Soon we’ll know all the juicy details like how much power the system is packing and what brand-new Switch 2 games will be kicking things off. How much will this new console cost? Is mouse mode for real? And when will it actually launch? Just around the corner in June, if the rumours are to be believed. But we’ll see.

Last week, what will probably be the last Nintendo Direct presentation aimed solely at the original Nintendo Switch was showcased. The Switch has been around for eight years now. For all that it’s underpowered and can’t keep up with the big boy consoles in terms of raw processing capacity, being the portable, family-friendly option has been more than good enough. The Nintendo Switch is currently the third-best-selling video game console in history. It’s had a very, very successful run, but now the twilight fast approaches in these last days before the successor comes to the fore. Now is the end of an era. 

So I thought I’d join the crowd and whip up my own little retrospective on what being one of those millions of Switch owners has meant for me ever since I bought my first one more than five years ago. What my favourite games have been, how the system has been around through the changing seasons of my life, and what I’m looking forward to next. Let’s-a go!

2019 - Year One

Way back in September 2019, Nintendo released the Switch Lite: a lightweight, budget version of the Switch which was portable only. A giant GameBoy basically. I grew up glued to my GameBoy Advance, so that was fine by me. I already had a PS4 and couldn’t justify buying a whole second console in the original Switch, portable or not. But a smaller handheld to bring to work and around the house? That was fine.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was the selling point, actually. I loved Skyrim on the Xbox 360 (one of the earliest articles on this blog is fanfiction about my very first character) and the idea of having such a vast open world in the palms of my hands was downright novel. Nowadays we take such things for granted. Forget consoles; there are vast open world games on phones. Back in the day though, that seemed like a miracle. I also liked the fact that the Switch version included all of the DLC expansions which I never tried the first time around, vampires and werewolves and cultists, oh my.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I also bought Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age not long afterwards. Likewise, I loved the original game on the Playstation 2 in my teens, and this new Zodiac Age version changed things up by dividing everyone into Job classes instead of the original freeform levelling system that tended to make each character seem the same. I remember teaching every character healing magic because it was more efficient that way, for example. Now only specific Jobs like White Mage can patch you up. Not everyone is a fan of changes like these, but me? I live for this stuff. Class systems, baby. They’re the best thing about RPGs, whether Japanese or Western. 

And then there was Pokemon Sword & Shield, which came out not long after the Lite’s launch in November. I hadn’t played a Pokemon game since those glory days of Pokemon on the GameBoy Advance as a kid. My cousin and I have been fans ever since and bought them at the same time, mine Sword and hers Shield. We both got busy exploring the British-inspired Galar countryside, trying to be the best and catch ‘em all. 

Pokemon Sword

All this to say that nostalgia and experiencing new versions of old games and franchises was a major draw. It was also a nice distraction from the fact that my mom’s cancer was coming back.

2020 - The Pandemic

Yeah, so I was going to split this up by years at first. The COVID-19 pandemic defies such arbitrary definitions of time, however. The World Health Organization defines the pandemic as having begun in March 2020 and having ended in May 2023. For all intents and purposes, though, life started getting back to normal in 2022. So let’s set that as the endpoint before the next section.

Anyway, the pandemic threw a wrench into just about everything as industries, economies, and travel worldwide either slowed or ground to a halt. Governments all but shut down; working from home became a thing; and all of us were affected in some way or another by this new illness and the world’s attempts to contain it. But this is a games article, and one game dominated lockdown life: Animal Crossing. 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released into a world where venturing outside was risky and social interaction severely limited. A game about living on your own sunny island together with anthropomorphic animal villagers, where friends and family could drop in and visit any time, was therefore destined for success. Animal Crossing was huge. Celebrities were playing it. Of course I gave it a shot too, and found island life to be cozy and relaxing, but also lacking in progression and adventure. I want games to be exciting, you know? Animal Crossing was a whole lot of people’s pandemic game, but that wasn’t it for me.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

I’ll tell you what was my pandemic game: Hades. Releasing on the Switch in September 2020, I took note of this Greek mythology-inspired game about the son of Hades fighting his way up through the underworld in violent defiance of his father as he sought to find his long-lost mother, Persephone. My mom had just passed away in August, obviously this spoke to me. And I noticed something interesting: every reviewer and gaming website on the planet, or so it seemed, had nothing but glowing praise. Hades could do no wrong. So I bought it and joined the chorus. 

Hades (obviously)

I adored Hades. This indie darling became one of my top five games of all time, which is still the only modern title to have achieved that dubious honour. (I’ve played a lot of games over the years.) I loved it enough to write my own review. Struggling against insurmountable odds as you fight the same battles over and over, becoming stronger and wiser and more capable over time, pushing further and farther than you ever could before, as your efforts affect not just yourself but the people around you for the better: now that’s a story I could get behind. Hades truly was one of the best games of the pandemic.

And finally a sadder tale of a game that never reached the lofty heights of either of those two previous titles: Spellbreak. 

The conversation around the rise of live service, ‘forever’ games is much too large to be had here. They’re a high-risk, high-reward business plan. Successes like PUBG and Fortnite have a dedicated audience which sticks with them for years, a steady stream of money coming in for the developers and publishers as they produce more and more content for that game alone. Failures, however, die due to lack of interest. In recent years, the gaming landscape has been littered with the corpses of so many of these trend-chasing free-to-play titles which couldn’t find or retain enough of an audience to sustain them. 

Spellbreak

Spellbreak released simultaneously on Switch, the other consoles, and PC in late 2020. I was already experienced with the business model by then. I’d played PUBG Mobile with friends and colleagues when it was all the rage. I’ve stuck with Hearthstone to this very day, a span of nearly ten years now. Spellbreak was something different. Another battle royale, sure. But this was about fighting with magic, not guns. Flying and teleporting and ghosting invisibly around a post-apocalyptic fantasy environment which would change over time as the story evolved. 

Spellbreak gameplay (captured on Nintendo Switch)

Or that was what was supposed to happen. Sadly, Spellbreak just couldn’t break into an already crowded market. Though I was a devoted player throughout 2021, following pro streamers on YouTube and engaging in gameplay discussions on online forums like Reddit, matches soon became a ghost town of bots and a few other real players, if that. I finally gave up on the game in 2022. The servers shut down in 2023; the developer was bought out by Blizzard to work on World of Warcraft. As a last gesture of goodwill, they released a free Community Version of the game on PC that could be run by the few remaining players themselves. Spellbreak lives on there, if nowhere else.

Interlude - A Second Switch

In 2022, my turquoise Switch Lite’s screen abruptly flickered and started displaying a mix of horizontal and vertical lines while turned on. This was unexpected; I’d never heard of such a thing. I had seen a great deal of talk about stick drift, when the Switch’s control sticks became worn down internally and started to move by themselves during gameplay due to faulty input. It was one of the main complaints of naysayers when the Lite was released. People were saying that sending in a detachable Joy-Con controller for repairs was bad enough. If you got drift on a Lite, you’d have to send in the entire system. 

I’ve been lucky enough that this has never happened to me. I’ve long suspected that rough usage is a factor here, but there are a plethora of accounts of people getting drift on their Switches within a few months or years of play, so I guess it just comes down to luck. 

Anyway, I could have gotten it repaired. This seemed like a case of diminishing returns, however. I’d already had the device for three years, and what was to say that I wouldn’t get drift or some other additional problem later on? I opened up Mudah, which I used every now and then to both buy and sell games and consoles, and lo and behold, some dude was selling his purple Switch Lite for a significant discount. The purple model was only released in 2022; I knew the thing could only have a few months of usage on it at most. So I snapped it up and had a new, secondhand Lite the next day. 

My second Lite, which is still working fine today

2022 - Year Three Onwards

In the wake of the pandemic and its restrictions, 2022 was a year of changes. I changed jobs not once, but twice, even if the second change was simply going back to my old workplace under new leadership and with new responsibilities. I also started traveling more. I’d barely been anywhere ever since I was a kid, even within Malaysia, and I guess that was when I started making up for lost time. Since then, I’ve gone on various trips to Singapore, Thailand, Kuala Lumpur, and other parts of Malaysia such as Penang, Melaka, and Pulau Tioman. My Switch went with me every time, even if I mostly just played during flights.

The theme of old things made new again continued. I picked up the Switch version of Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning (yes, it’s a dumb name) which is a port of a fantasy action RPG that I briefly played on the Xbox 360 several years ago. It ended up being one of my most-played games on the Switch. Amalur is refreshingly outdated, a single-player World of Warcraft with hack-and-slash combat that’s straight out of other games from the 2000s like Darksiders and God of War (back when Kratos was still young and angry). You play as the chosen one in a colourful, Tolkienesque world at war with a Dark Lord and his invading army, embarking on an epic journey to save the world, all of which was downright comforting in its familiarity.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning (captured on Nintendo Switch)

Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Metroid Dread, meanwhile, are two modern entries in long-running Nintendo franchises that successfully carry their respective series forwards into the future. One is a strategy JRPG where you move units around in chess-like battles against a backdrop of politics and pathos that could be described as a blend of Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, where the Gryffindor, Slytherin, and Hufflepuff kids grow up and go to war with one another. The other is a sidescrolling exploratory adventure (they’re called Metroidvanias nowadays; the original Metroid started the genre way back in 1986) that follows a solitary sci-fi heroine, intergalactic bounty hunter Samus Aran, as she navigates a labyrinthine planet using fluid action and movement abilities, fighting off alien creatures and killer robots at every turn. I loved them both, and I should really go back and play as the other two Houses in Fire Emblem. Black Eagles for the win.

And then there are games that took older graphics and modernized those too. Octopath Traveler is a love letter to classic turn-based JRPGs like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy which featured an absolutely gorgeous blend of pixelated characters against detailed landscapes and backgrounds. The game was so successful that the company which produced them, Square Enix, took the ball and ran with it. The HD-2D style is here to stay, both in new original games and also remakes of older ones. 

Octopath Traveler (captured on Nintendo Switch)

Some Negatives

So here’s where, in the interest of fairness, I should explain why I associate the Switch with three main types of games: first-party Nintendo games which were custom-made for the Switch; indies like Hades which don’t require a lot of processing power; and older games like Skyrim and Amalur which run well on the Switch for the same reason. This is because modern games that are ported to the Switch tend to suck.

 Ahem; major compromises are required. At the end of the day, the Switch just isn’t very strong. It was already considered underpowered during the last generation compared to the PS4 and Xbox One. Now we’re well into the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S generation and the Switch is an aging grandparent in comparison. At one point, I bought The Witcher III: Wild Hunt on sale since the reviews called it a miracle port. And yes, I suppose it was a miracle that they were able to get such a massive game running on the Switch. But it sure was blurry. More recently, I got Hogwarts Legacy on sale and was similarly unimpressed. It is playable, I’ll give it that.

Pokemon Scarlet (captured on Nintendo Switch)

And the crowning example is Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, a particularly damning one since Pokemon is a Nintendo first-party franchise and the House of Mario is known for requiring a certain level of quality and polish. Not this time though. Sword and Shield in 2019 were fine, not pushing any boundaries but certainly not bad either. Scarlet/Violet in 2022 were not fine, launching with bugs and glitches galore and graphics that looked worse than the PS2 games I was playing fifteen years ago. This is at least partly down to issues with development; these games were definitely rushed and Game Freak, the company which makes them, is surprisingly small with just 200+ employees. But the Switch’s capabilities are also a factor here.

2025 - Present Day

And that brings us to the conclusion of this long and rambling reminiscence. After buying a bunch of games on sale over the years and being gifted others, including several of those listed above (thanks again, you know who you are!) I still have a sizable library* to get through. That's not even counting other games like Hearthstone, other activities like reading and watching anime, and the constant lure of social media. I've got more than enough to keep me busy for quite a while.

At the same time, I do feel like it’s time for an upgrade. Hades II is already out on PC. Now that Microsoft seems to be going the way of Sega, there are rumours that Halo, of all things, will be coming to Sony and Nintendo platforms. And there have been so many cool big-budget games that have come out in recent years such as Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 that would never work on the Switch. But the Switch 2? Now we’re talking. 

Technology is marching ever forwards. I don’t intend on buying a Switch 2 at launch, it’ll almost certainly be too expensive and sold out everywhere. But a year or two down the line, perhaps. We shall see. It’s been a long and interesting road with the OG Switch, and I’m confident that things will only get better with the successor. Nintendo’s next generation is about to begin.

* I dislike the term ‘backlog’, which implies some sort of productivity issue at play for what is supposed to be a leisure activity, like I didn’t hit my gaming quota for the month or something. What I have is a library of games that I can dip in and out of whenever I want.

Travels and Timeframes

Hi there. I haven’t written a lot over the last couple of years and thought I should check in, you know? Let everyone know how I’m doing. The last few years have brought about a great deal of change for me. Some of those changes are positive, others not so much.

In the wake of the pandemic, I’ve been travelling more than I ever did before. By now, I've seen quite a bit more of Malaysia, whether it's the big city of Kuala Lumpur, the idyllic Pulau Tioman, or my own state of Sabah. Six or seven states, now that I think about it, even if for some I was only passing through. How about that. I’ve also been to Singapore a few times and have been impressed with the city-state’s cosmopolitan cleanliness. Expanding horizons, that’s what travel does for you. I wonder where I'll go next.

Pulau Tioman, Pahang

Back home, I’m still working at the same job I’ve always had had for more than a decade. Somehow that's led to me becoming senior and experienced. I still live in the same village I grew up in with nieces and nephews running around now, the next generation shooting up like weeds. My generation have become mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles, getting married and having kids and doting on others. Where did the time go? We're still young, but not as young as we used to be. 

On that note, I’m more forgetful nowadays. It's quite timely that 'brain rot' was named as the Oxford Word of the Year 2024. I can relate. I'll bet a lot of us can, and it's all because we're always on our phones.

I read an excellent book a few months ago called The Shallows which lays out the scientific evidence that yes, the Internet is indeed affecting our brains, with smartphones being the primary vector. We’re all being subconsciously trained to sift through vast quantities of information, to flit our attention here and there and focus on something new at a moment’s notice, which has deleterious effects on memory consolidation. Are we getting better at multitasking? Perhaps. Are we losing our ability to do deep work, to focus for long periods when myriad distractions are available on the little screens we carry around everywhere? Absolutely. It is frightening how modern technology is changing us. I haven’t even wrapped my head around the possibilities of AI yet, which isn’t just some dumb internet bubble like NFTs were. AI is truly world-changing. I have been duly impressed by the answers I've gotten from ChatGPT. I've also been intimidated to find that computers can write almost as well as people now, to say nothing about voice and image generation. How will we know what's real?

I’m writing all this while listening to ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues’. My Spotify playlist is a blend of rock bands, anime and video game soundtracks, meme culture songs that I found on YouTube, and sentimental ballads. I guess it's no surprise that I've become a fan of Elton John. His dramatized big-screen musical biography, Rocketman, spoke to me like few movies have, which led to picking up his actual biography, simply titled Me. Sir Elton’s story of escaping into addictions in the face of the pressures and depression of his seemingly charmed life before finally getting sober speaks to me. Humans are the same no matter their culture or background. We all just want to escape our problems. One of my favorite authors, Mark Manson, talks about upgrading ourselves to problems that are better than what we faced before, and I have to wonder about my own: are they?

I’m a few years into my thirties, and I've been thinking about how this decade is different compared to my twenties. There's more pressure now. I’ve gone from having the future stretching out before me in an unknown expanse to living life on a timer. Six months, three months, one month. Always counting down, and then I need to find a way to push it forwards one way or another. Is this sustainable? I don't think that it is. One way or another, something has to change.

 

C'est La Vie

Hi. It’s been a while.

No, I’m not dead or in jail or dropped off the face of the earth. I’ve just been busy living my life. I’m pretty sure 2022 was one of the best years of my life so far. Things changed, I travelled, I pushed some boundaries. But I’m not here to talk about all that. Today I’m talking about how I haven’t been writing for a while.

Oh, I’ll spend ages on Reddit forums commenting about video games. Heck, I spend hours a day on my phone in general. But the kind of long-form, introspective writing that I do on this blog; I haven’t written like that in a while. Every now and then that bothers me. Then a new morning comes around. I get up at dawn to start the day, and before I know it another week passes. Another month, soon another year. A little more distance from the person I was when I was younger, who buried himself in books and dreamed of writing his own. God, that was a long time ago.

It’s something I wonder about now and then, in those moments when I look up from all my duties and distractions: how much do you owe your younger self? If the dreams of your youth no longer appeal to you, are they still worth pursuing? How do you tell the difference between giving up and moving on?

Perhaps the answer to that is obvious. But then every now and then the mood strikes me, like tonight, and I’ll put on some Falling in Reverse* on full blast and give it another go. And guess what: I still like writing out my inner musings like this. Who’d have thought?

The thing is that my life is full now, certainly fuller than it used to be. Which is a good thing, of course. I have more responsibilities. In some ways I’m moving forwards, in others I’m still stuck in place. Such is life. I have a better class of problems, that’s what Mark Manson would say. Problems are a fact of life; what matters is that your problems are getting better. I used to follow that guy religiously, now I barely ever check his stuff anymore. Change is the only constant and all that. I’ve got to go to bed soon, another morning is calling. But I wonder.

*I was just going to post a lyric video, but the official MV is some of the most over-the-top action movie shit I've seen in ages, it's hilarious.

All Things Change

So I’m thirty-one now. What is there to say about that?

You might have noticed that time speeding up has been a recent theme of mine. And I swear, last year’s birthday was just a little while ago. I wrote a tribute to my twenties. We had a party. This year we didn’t, which was just as well: it didn’t feel like much of an occasion. Today is the anniversary of the day I was born? Great, fantastic. Then I blink and it’s a week later. One of my cousins mentioned telling her students why she didn’t want to celebrate her birthdays either: they were growing up, while she was just getting older. That’s pretty relatable if you ask me. 

I always used to look forwards in life. The past only interested me in terms of lessons gleaned from bittersweet memories. It was something to get away from. Now, though, I have this nagging feeling that I’ve lost some innate piece of myself along the way and don’t know how to get it back. I used to read every book on the shelf and dream of being a fantasy author. Now I barely read or write at all anymore. Well, I barely read books; I spend plenty of time on the internet following the news and video game reviews and so on. But that’s a subject for another post.

It’s going on two years now since my mom died. Our lives together weren’t the best. There were so many times that I wish I’d had more empathy or been a better son. But we had some good times too, after the chemo did its poisonous work and cleared the cancer out of her system for a reprieve. We went out for pizza every month for years before that, long before the first tumour began to grow. Those were the good old days. If only I hadn’t taken them for granted.

I’ve been working at the same place for over nine years now, and I’ve seen it slowly decline over time. Vehicles wore out and could no longer be repaired. More and more people retired. Sections were closed off, damaged by landslides, reclaimed by nature. There was a gentle old uncle I used to take the bus with; he died in his early fifties before even reaching retirement. People I knew have had strokes, heart problems, kidney failure. Someone who’d been a little girl when I first joined grew up and had cancer in her teens. She passed away last year.

Entropy is the natural order of the universe, as they say. Change is the only constant.

I’ve been at the same place for nine years, but maybe 2022 will be the last. On Monday I start working somewhere else; temporarily, perhaps. Or maybe this will be the start of something new. I don’t know, and that bothers me, the not knowing. It’s at times like these that I feel unsettled, unsure, lacking in some vague and insidious way. There are things I should have done, that I should have more experience with, at age thirty-one. What does it mean that I don’t? Does it make me less of a person? There’s plenty more life to live, and yet I don’t feel like I’m growing up anymore. I’m just getting older.

I’m thirty-one years old, and if I live as long as my mom, that puts me squarely at the halfway point. Other people my age have gotten married, had kids, built stable careers, travelled to far-off places. What have I done, exactly? Written half-finished novels before losing interest? Carried pythons and handfed hornbills? Memorized animal facts, acted like a frightened tourist, gotten comfortable talking to strangers? I’ve got a lot of stories, to be sure. That just doesn’t feel like enough.

When I was a kid, the land our house sits on now was all paddy fields. My grandparents worked in them before I was born. Then the times changed, and the land was filled in for our different family members’ houses to be built. There are kids running around here now who’ve never known anything different, my nieces and nephew shooting up like weeds. Someday they’ll grow up and find that the world has changed for them as well. I wonder where I’ll be in life by then.

I don’t have a tidy lesson or ending to all this, because, well, there isn’t one. Life keeps moving on until it doesn’t, until an ending which is rarely painless or peaceful in any sense of the word. Normally I’d try to make this into some kind of inspirational bullshit like not thinking the neighbour’s grass is greener when they probably feel the same way about yours. Not today though.

Perhaps this is the human condition; to be constantly dissatisfied, uncertain, wanting just that little bit more out of life. To feel adrift in the ennui of it all. Perhaps tomorrow will be better, or it might be worse than today. We never know, do we.

All things change eventually.

Time Flies Forwards

 

At the end of last year, both my glasses and my smartphone needed replacing. The lenses of one were getting blurry, scratched, and yellow; the other one could no long hold a signal and the battery was draining faster than ever. Both of these items were almost four years old, incidentally. I bought them with my mom. That seems so long ago now.

Anyway, before this I always used basic lenses which corrected my myopia and nothing else. My eyesight there has remained unchanged for the last ten years. Heck, the optician said it might actually have improved a little. That’s something to be grateful for. But my astigmatism has only gotten worse over time, no doubt due to all these screens I’m always looking at. To that end, in December I finally bit the bullet and got Kodak City Lenses. These bad boys filter out UV light, blue light from screens, and improve night vision. They were, ahem, a bit expensive. But I feel like I’m seeing clearer than ever.

One thing stood out when I first put them on: even colours looked brighter, sharper. It was both incredible and mildly concerning to take them off and feel like the world grew faded, not just blurry. The view through my new glasses wasn’t just clearer, it was more colourful too.

For the new phone, I got an Oppo A74, which is a decent midrange entry that will no doubt be outdated in a year or two. A phone with 6GB RAM and 128GB internal storage used to be a huge deal; now I’m just glad it runs smoothly with a dozen apps open. I no longer need to be constantly clearing out my photo album to make space. The camera’s not bad either.

So I ended the year kitted out with new and improved ways of seeing the world. They’re an improvement on their predecessors in every way, and I’m already taking them for granted. It’s making me think about filters. We all see the world through viewpoints molded by experience and personality and perspective, which grow and change as life goes on. The one filter which we all have in common is time.

***

It’s 2022 already, huh. I swear the years are going by faster and faster.

So this is the point when I write something reflective about 2021. It was a year of natural disasters, multiple floods and landslides in Sabah and across Malaysia. Climate change is happening, people.

2021 was the second year of the pandemic, and just like 2020, it was marked by recurring lockdowns. Unlike 2020, it was the year that vaccines became widely available. Though a minority of people remain anti-vax for various reasons, ranging from perceived infringement of personal freedoms to concern over potential long-term side effects to outright conspiracy theories about microchips being planted in our bodies (newsflash people, our smartphones already track us and harvest our personal data); the vast majority of Malaysians are now vaccinated. I’m sorry that that isn’t the case in other parts of the world.

It also saw the rise of multiple COVID variants: Alpha and Beta and Delta and now Omicron, these increasingly mutated strains with alternate symptoms and increased infectiousness. Will there be more? Probably. Booster shots are recommended to defend against these new and improved viruses, I’ll be getting mine soon. But by now it’s clear that COVID isn’t going to go away. Wearing face masks isn’t just required by law, it’s become normal social etiquette. We’re all carrying around little bottles of hand sanitizer and scanning QR codes everywhere we go. This is the world we live in now. You can go with the flow, or you can go against it and reap the consequences.

It seems like 2022 will mark the end of the pandemic. Not a sudden ending, but a gradual fading into the background, the latest addition to our rogue’s gallery of familiar illnesses. Only time will tell.

***

It’s funny how when I was a kid, a single year took forever. Now at age 30, I blink and it’s Christmas again. Me and my generation aren’t kids anymore. We’re uncles and aunts and parents. I look at my nieces and nephews and they seem bigger every time I see them. That line about kids growing up before your eyes; it’s all true. But you have to be there to believe it.

In many ways, I like who I am at 30. I’m more confident now, more articulate in person, not just in print. I still get depressed; life gets me down sometimes. But you know what? I’m alive to experience it all. That doesn’t mean I don’t look back in sorrow. I still miss my mom. I wish I could turn back the clock and spend more time with her, knowing now that she’ll die when she’s barely into her sixties. Pardon my language; but fuck cancer.

Life is always bittersweet, isn’t it? You can’t have the good without the bad.

At the same time, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of living life on autopilot, forgetting the dreams you used to have because the day-to-day is all that matters. We have so many distractions nowadays. I still love video games and fully intend to write more about them; but then I haven’t been writing much at all, have I. Too much time spent on social media and not enough on healthier habits. We always believe in the fantasy of tomorrow. Time flies forwards, and none of us have as much left as we think.

So here I am, getting back to writing and spinning just a little bit of order out of chaos. Just trying to do better*. Here’s hoping that 2022 will be better to us all, eh?

 

*Yeah, that was totally a Spiderman reference. Have you seen No Way Home? You need to watch No Way Home.

Rhythm of War Review - A Slow Burn Towards Book Five

A brief refresher: the Stormlight Archive is set to be Brandon Sanderson’s magnum opus, the grandest and most ambitious of his many, many books within a shared universe called the Cosmere. Against an ancient threat supposedly defeated long ago, the Knights Radiant must rise again to protect the world of Roshar and its inhabitants. There are sentient ideas come to life called spren. There are giant swords that cut stone and sever people’s souls. And of course, there is Stormlight, the magical power source held in gemstones that are renewed by a massive hurricane which has ravaged the world for millennia. It’s a series planned to have ten books, and Rhythm of War is the fourth.

I’ll avoid specific Rhythm of War plot spoilers for this review, but there will be plenty about the series so far. SPOILER WARNING from this point on. There, you’ve been warned.

***

Anyway, there used to be only one hurricane. Now there’s two; an opposing storm has arisen which empowers the enemy with the dark magic of Voidlight. It’s complicated. The nature of these different forms of Light lies at the heart of Rhythm of War’s storyline, but more time is spent ruminating with the series’ many broken characters.

THE STORY SO FAR

These books have never had the most consistent pacing. The Way of Kings was a slow beginning which set the stage for conflicts to come. A big part of what kept me reading was the sheer uniqueness of the setting. A war playing out over a vast plain of fissures and chasms which require slave-carried bridges to cross, and the former soldier Kaladin’s struggle to save himself and his fellow slaves against impossible odds. There were legendary heroes now revered as deities for fighting an ancient enemy that no one even remembers; once-heroic Knights who betrayed humanity yet formed the basis for a culture in which eye colour determines social status; motile plants and giant crustaceans which evolved to survive the storms. This world was different.

While still largely set on the Shattered Plains, Words of Radiance pushed the plot forwards in oh-so-satisfying ways. All the main characters were actually gathered in one place instead of faffing around on separate quests and only briefly running into each other. (Looking at you, latter Wheel of Time books.) People grow and change. Shocking twists occur. Shallan became a much better heroine compared to the first book. Words of Radiance was truly brilliant.

Then Oathbringer took us on a whirlwind tour of very different locales: the grim darkness of the long-abandoned tower city, Urithiru; the wartorn cities of Kholinar and Thaylenah; and the strange and fantastical realm of spren, Shadesmar. The third book zoomed out in scope in order to pack so much into those pages, sometimes to its detriment. But Dalinar’s backstory tied it all together, the bittersweet tale of a man in the process of changing. The Blackthorn is absolutely one of the best characters Sanderson has ever written, apparently the first he ever wrote. I teared up when he saw the light during the final battle, man. That doesn’t happen often.

And that brings us to Rhythm of War, which returns to the slower pacing of The Way of Kings.

BROKEN HEROES

The Stormlight Archive stands out in how the main characters struggle with trauma and mental illness. Kaladin is crippled by depression. Shallan has split personalities which allow her to escape her horrific past. Dalinar must confront the harsh truth that he was a murderous monster for most of his life, responsible for the death of someone he loved. Watching these broken people overcome their pasts and become better, truly worthy of being Knights Radiant, is inspiring. But it’s also frustrating when they continue to struggle with mental health despite their change in circumstances, even though this is entirely realistic.

This makes up the bulk of Rhythm of War’s core conflicts. Kaladin and Shallan are both increasingly lost in their own minds and must confront the traumas that made them who they are. Navani is raised to a central character as she delves into the mysteries of Stormlight and Voidlight while fighting her own imposter syndrome. I was certain this fourth book would focus on Jasnah after she was crowned queen at the end of Oathbringer. But nope, this time it’s Venli who gets the flashbacks. Through her we take a closer look at how the war with the Parshendi first began, even as she walks the dangerous path of serving the Fused as a Radiant singer.

The book’s more adventurous plotline follows Shallan and Adolin as they return to Shadesmar on a mission to convince the honorspren to join the war effort, even though the long-ago betrayal of the Knights Radiant struck them the hardest and reduced the vast majority of their numbers to ‘deadeyes’, the spren version of the walking dead. I liked the growing bond between Adolin and his Shardblade, Maya, a deadeye herself, along with the increasingly complex interplay between Shallan and her alternate personas. On the other hand, it feels like the author gave her and Adolin short shrift with the husband-and-wife aspect of things. Their wedding happened offscreen, for crying out loud! I don’t know, they’re still sweet and loving towards one another, and he’s remarkably accepting of her split-second personality changes. I guess I was expecting their relationship to evolve once they were married.

Meanwhile, for all his battle prowess as a Radiant, Kaladin has grown increasingly beaten down and internally scarred. Rhythm of War puts him situations where he’s forced to face his past, his depression, and the truth about what holds him back from achieving the Fourth Ideal. Darkness and the struggle to keep fighting were major themes for him in The Way of Kings and Rhythm of War brings them back in spades.

There’s a strong focus on character development in these pages. It's nice to slow down with the characters as they go about the routines of their lives, treating wounds and sketching spren and brushing horses. But what stood out for me was the lack of worldbuilding. Compared to all the unique and interesting locales of earlier books, the settings in this one felt too familiar. Urithiru, Shadesmar, the Shattered Plains, Kholinar, Azir. These are all places we’ve been to before (with some exceptions). Though it is interesting seeing how they’ve changed over time, the settings just don’t feel as groundbreaking as they used to. What happens to our heroes and heroines and yes, villains too, is groundbreaking! Stuff happens, make no mistake. Rhythm of War just takes its sweet time getting there.

It would be remiss of me to leave out the outstanding endpaper portraits of the Heralds and the detailed illustrations throughout the book. The artwork of the Stormlight Archive has always been excellent and it remains so here.

CONCLUSION

Rhythm of War sets up some much larger and more exciting conflicts down the line. Seriously, Book Five is going to be crazy. But Book Four, well. This might just be my least favorite Stormlight title so far. That doesn’t mean it’s bad; none of these books are bad. It’s just outshined by earlier titles.

Rhythm of War was fine. But I have a feeling that the fifth book will be a lot better.

 

A Whole New World

So recently my family discovered the HGTV channel. In the evenings after dinner, we’ll watch shows about fixing, renovating, and discovering new homes. One in particular is called Perfect Home Asia, about American couples, families, and individuals looking for the ideal house or apartment as they move to an Asian country for the first time. They often get work as English teachers, amusingly.

I’m sure that Western audiences find the participants relatable and the differences in culture and design exotic. I do too when the setting is somewhere far away like Japan or India. And sometimes the show will be set in a Southeast Asian country like Thailand, Singapore, or Malaysia. It interests me, seeing how people from the United States react to local fixtures like squatting toilets and dragon fruit. Things that are outside their comfort zone.

Because twenty-one years ago, I was one of these people. I was born in the US and moved to Malaysia at age eight. Most of my teens were spent adjusting to a very different climate and culture. Most of my twenties were taken up with forming a new identity as someone of mixed heritage and coming to appreciate my Sabahan roots. And now here I am entering my thirties, having lived most of my life on this culturally and ecologically diverse island called Borneo.

Isn’t that curious? I was born on the other side of the world, and now I call this one home. Life is strange sometimes.

The other reason I like the show is that it awakens a bit of wanderlust in me. For all that I moved across the world as a child, I’ve stayed in one place since. For one reason or another, I was always at home, guarding the fort while others have traveled to other countries and continents. Heck, I’ve barely even gone anywhere within Malaysia.

The jungles of Borneo are among the oldest in the world.

I talk about books and video games because that’s where I’ve spent a lot of my time over the years: with my nose in a book or my hands on keys and controls. I’ve also talked about psychology, self-improvement, and addiction. These are topics that interest me; the ways we think, grow, and become hooked on things. And of course, I value imagination and creativity. Whether it’s fantasy and science fiction, words and bright colours, or emotion and thought, I’ve spent much of my life thus far exploring other worlds.

The irony is that I’ve hardly explored at all in real life.

And over the past two years especially, with the pandemic keeping borders closed and all of us hunkered down, wary of even going to the mall, I’ve come to realize that I don’t want to just stay in one place when this is over. When my mom was my age, she’d left home on her own adventures a long time ago, flown across the world and back again. My life has been pretty localized by comparison – although growing up in Malaysia has been an adventure all its own.

But don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not a bad thing that I’ve always been home. I got to spend these years with my mom.

Because we were together, we made so many memories throughout the years. Going out for pizza, movies, all the quiet dinners at home together. Struggling with her illnesses, her cancer diagnosis, sleeping on the hospital floor at her bedside during chemo. Through the good times and the bad, my mom and I were together until the end of my twenties. I’ll always be grateful that we had this time together. Not everyone is so lucky.

I can’t believe it’s been over a year now since she passed away. Time speeds up as we get older, and it sure as heck isn’t slowing down.

My mom is gone now, and I know she wanted me to spread my wings, so to speak. I’m entering a new phase of life. Everything that’s happened over these last few years – my mom’s illness and passing, the pandemic keeping us all locked in place – makes me realize that I want to experience life. To see new horizons, storms, and sunsets in other parts of the globe. There’s so much out there that I haven’t seen or done. Not yet, anyway.

I’ll still be talking about fantasy worlds, to be sure. But nowadays…

I want to explore the real world too.