Fighting Fantasy #61: Bloodbones
Bloodbones lives! The dreaded pirate-lord Cinnabar, scourge of the twelve seas, plagued the seafarers of the Old World in a bloody reign of terror until a brave adventurer put an end to his evil. But now he is back from the dead, seeking revenge and with the dark powers of voodoo at his command.
YOU have your own score to settle – Cinnabar murdered your family when you were a child. Only YOU can end the horrific slaughter by destroying the pirate captain and his crew of cutthroats. Come hell or highwater Bloodbones must be stopped!
A note of numbering: In the title I have labeled Bloodbones as book 61. This is because it is the 61st unqiue book in the Fighting Fantasy series, even though it is listed as book #26 on the spine.
Ah! A quest for revenge! One of the best reasons to go on an otherwise foolhardy adventure. Bloodbones starts you off in the Port of Crabs, a notorius den of thieves and pirates. Your first mission is to find out where the pirates hideout is. Your enquiries quickly turn the attention of the pirates to you, and you start to discover clues about what is happening and where the pirates may be found.
The Port of Crabs is probably the most frustrating part of the book. It took me almost a dozen tries to finally get out of the city and discover the pirates hideout, and none of the clues you find help you in this; although they point you to things that will help later on in the book, finding the pirates hideout ultimately is about luck. This is annoying, but luckily it is one of the only annoying things about the adventure.
Once you have gotten to this point, the chase is on to stop Bloodbones himself. The adventure leads you across the high seas and an encounter with a ghost ship, then to a remote and mysterious island. A bit of exploration around here leads you to a temple of a dark and sinister voodoo god where another annoying thing happens: In order to get through, you must rely on the luck of the dice. This is something I dislike, strongly: a random dice roll, without relying on stats such as luck or skill, can end the adventure. Luckily, I beat the roll and continued.
An epic battle ensues with a high priest of voodoo and then another journey across the high seas to finally confront the pirate Bloodbones himself. I think I may have been lucky, as the first time I encountered him I managed to slay him, having somehow managed to gather all of the correct special items needed. But, just as I thought I had the book beat, the voodoo god manifests himself and manages to kill me! So close….
And that brings me to something I like about this book (and other gamebooks like it): the fact you can get so close to victory only to see it snatched away from you at the last makes me all the more keen to play it again. I was left with this feeling after (almost) finishing Bloodbones, and that gives the book extra credit in my mind. Rating the book is hard: the part in the Port of Crabs is fairly annoying and makes it hard to want to keep going when you can’t even get out of the city, and then realizing it is blind luck that gets you to the pirates’ hideout. But the adventure after that is a grand, swashbuckling story. So….
RATING: 7 out of 10
Angst (Tower of the Sun) said,
July 22, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Thanks for the Bloodbones review, EK.