Kamigawa Trilogy Review

 

 

REVIEW

So, finally, after the Outlaw, Heretic and Guardian summaries, you get to hear my opinion on the Kamigawa trilogy. Although by now have probably noticed that I pretty much agree with the general consensus in the community: these books are great!

One of the main reasons for that is the character work. A while back I was complaining about the flatness of characters on Mirrodin (at least until Cory Herndon came along with Fifth Dawn), and how I couldn’t tell you what the personality of even an important characters like Bruenna was supposed to be. On Kamigawa though, virtually everyone has personality in spades. Whether it is snarky yet conflicted Toshi, smarmy Mochi, keen and righteous Michiko, brutal yet devout Hidetsugu or even a minor character like the grizzled war-vet Toshi runs into when he visits a ruined Eiganjo  or the serene kitsune elders, Kamigawa feels like a place full of real people, all of them distinct, and most of them very interesting. Scott McGough manages to get across a lot about who these characters are very quickly, making you care about them almost instantly. Making it all the harder when he then kills off a lovable scamp (when he's not being a brutal thug) like Marrow-Gnawer, but all the sweeter when a thouroughly loathable Choryu or Mochi gets their due. Although he then give Chroryu such a horrid fate in Hidetsugu's hands that you somehow still come back to feeling sympathy for him again.

Plus, these characters are all just so much fun. Sometimes they are actually being funny, like with Toshi’s glib remarks or him bantering with Sharp-Ear or Kobo (or more accurately, bantering against the stoic monk). Sometimes the fun just comes from how the characters act naturally, like Marrow-Gnawer's speech patterns of "No, no, no. This is bad and you are stupid. Go away Toshi." Even when characters you both like but who can’t stand each other interact (Toshi and Sharp-Ear, Sharp-Ear and Nagao), it’s a pleasure to read them trading barbs.

Not these kinds of barbs.

It’s especially impressive how he gets you to care for morally grey or just outright black characters. Toshi is not a very nice man, but you love spending time with him from the get go, long before he starts developing something of a conscious, because he’s smart, resourceful, snarky and fun, and he has very understandable goals. The same goes for Kiku and Marrow-Gnawer. Not that Michiko and her band of do-gooders aren’t fun. Quite the contrary, I liked them very much and I would’ve liked to see more of them (I’ll come back to that below), but it’s clear that the nasty-yet-fascinating characters are the breakout stars here.

Perhaps most impressive is the way McGough makes it fun to read about Hidetsugu. The O-Bakemono is an utterly monstrous character, delighting in torture and willing to turn the yamabushi apprentices into dehumanized, dead-eyed minions without a second thought, yet he also has so much more personality then other sadistic villains we've seen. He's not a cackling mustache twirler, but seems to be truly devout in his worship of the All-Consuming Oni of Chaos, and genuinely upset by the death of Kobo. I mean, he comes across believable both when he is sad his partnership with Toshi is coming to an end, and when he reveals he’s been thinking up ways to murder Toshi since the very beginning. If you manage that, you’ve done some very good character work. Hidetsugu just oozes character, captivating you while he’s talking about burning down the entire world.

Aside from the characters, the plot… eh… just works? It’s an exciting action story with great fight scenes and a compelling enough mystery, although at times it seems overly complicated, and drops a ball here or there.

Now, some complication is to be expected, as the plot really is a gigantic pile up of masterplans. Konda, Mochi, O-Kagachi, Toshi, Hidetsugu, Michiko, Night's Reach... even more minor characters like Life's Web, Infinite Rage and Hisoka are all working their own individual plans, which start to interfere with each other almost immediately. Some of them, like those of Hisoka and Life’s Web crash and burn almost immediately, while others play out of the course of the entire trilogy, but none of them stay the same the whole way through, as plans have to altered when they start interacting. Add to this that characters like Toshi and Night’s Reach keep their cards very close to their chest the whole way through, making it hard for us readers to know their true intentions, and yeah… some complication is to be expected.

Let’s focus on Toshi's plans for example. He is clearly not portrayed as a chessmaster type of character who is ten steps ahead of everyone else. He is constantly improvising, occasionally too brash for his own good, and quite often just trying to salvage the remains of his previous plans. He is also secretive and doesn't divulge his ultimate goals with anyone, not even really the reader. In Outlaw his goal is to stop whatever is attacking him and he seems content to let Hidetsugu guide him. By Heretic he has figured out Hidetsugu's plan isn't working and that he's up against powerful kami, so is main goal seems to just be gathering power any way possible to even the battlefield. Then halfway Guardian, when TWWT starts talking to him, he seems to be genuinely lost as to what to do, fruitlessly heading east until Konda and O-Kagachi descend on him and he has no other recourse than teleport the thing through Night's Reach's realm anyway. Over the course of these adventures he slowly starts to become slightly more altruistic, doing things like saving Nagao and his soldiers trapped at Minamo, but this is done very gradually. There is no great revelation for him. The closest we get to that is his reaction to Uyo showing him the ghost of Marrow-Gnawer, but by then he has already changed a lot. Changing situations and character development mean his plans keep shifting, which is of course great. But it does lead to a few odd situations, like him dropping TWWT off at Minamo at the end of Heretic, only to immediately regret it, and thus the start of Guardian being dedicated to him reclaiming the thing.

The masterplan-pileup also means that some plot threads don't really go anywhere. The kitsune delegation to Minamo is really just there to get Michiko stuck at the academy when Hidetsugu attacks. Or take the Yuki-Onna looking like Michiko after Toshi captured her. You'd think the goal of this is to trick Konda thinking his daughter is in Sokenzan, but the moment Takeno tells Konda, he immediately adds that the timeline doesn't add up: the sightings of the Yuki-Onna started before Michiko disappeared. Which... well, I guess it is realistic in a way. Like I said, Toshi is not a mastermind, but constantly improvising, so logically some of his plans will simply fail. But narratively it does fell a little unfulfilling.

For the most part though, these things are hard to notice. The plot barrels along at such a pace, and the individual scenes are so enjoyable, that these bits of oddness only stand out if you really start analyzing things. There is one big, annoying loose thread though: the akki army. A big chunk of Outlaw is dedicated to building up this threat, their attack on the refugees is then one of the big cliffhangers of Heretic, and then in Guardian… we get a quick mention that they are still out there, and that is it? After that there is that one mention in the Brothers Yamazaki vignette that the attack on Eiganjo failed, and that is that. As mentioned in the Guardian summary, this was apparently the result of miscommunication that made Scott McGough think that part of the story would be wrapped up in an online vignette. Whatever the reason though, having such a large plot thread unfulfilled forces me to deduct some points.

Another thing that’s also a shame: Michiko and her crew get less and less attention as the story progresses. Her side of the story gets about half of the screen-time in Outlaw, then in Heretic she’s relegated to a sub-plot, and in Guardian she just hangs out with the kitsune until Toshi comes to her. I mean, I get it, Toshi is a great character and I certainly didn’t mind seeing him take over the story. More Toshi is always great. But when he finally gets around to bringing TWWT to Michiko and we get a few more glimpses of her, Sharp-Ear and Pearl-Ear I suddenly realized: damn, I’ve missed them! It’s especially annoying that Michiko, whose whole storyline started with her setting out to end the Kami War, in the end only succeeds because Toshi painted some kanji on her hands before she grabbed TWWT. Heck, she doesn’t even get to name her “sister”, Toshi even does that! I’m going to blame the fact that the story was restricted to just three books for the fact that we got to see less and less of the other characters, McGough only had so much space and obviously he used it to focus on the most interesting and fun characters, but at least give your discarded heroine some agency in wrapping up her own plot when she finally rejoins the story!

Any other points I can quibble about? Eh… not really. Initially I thought it was pretty weird that Hidetsugu’s initial plan was pretty much a bust (While fighting the orochi Toshi learns that the budoka they were going to see are in league with them, and that the alliance thus would never have worked) and that Mochi is kind of a bad liar (First he claims the moonfolk worship the larger moon spirit, of which he is merely an aspect, then later he says there are some moonfolk loyal to him. He also says they are "just" colonizing the nezumi and that Toshi "just" happened to interrupt, but later that "his" soratami are trying to undo what Konda did, and later still that they participated in the events "in case something went wrong"…) but these things are only weird if you go into the story expecting typical bad guy masterplans. Eventually you realize that in this story there are no infallible geniuses. Everyone is making it up as they go along and even the kami don’t have all the information. With that in mind the books makes a lot more sense.

So ultimately the worst criticisms I can level against the story are an unresolved subplot and the fact that Scott McGough let a fantastic character hog the spotlight at expense of the rest of the cast. And if that’s the worst I can manage, these books must be great! After all the badness we’ve had to deal with since the end of the Weatherlight Saga this was a breath of fresh air, and at the time desperately needed to restore some faith in WotC among the storyline community. We’ll talk a bit more about the upward trajectory of the storyline soon, when I do a wrap-up for Kamigawa blockas a whole. For now though, let’s end the review with a quick timeline discussion.

TIMELINE

Oh man, timeline discussions! Remember those? Haven’t done them in ages! And we’re covering a doozy this time, although it’s mostly a retread of what I’ve already said in the Legends II timeline discussion.

To start off, we have no clear dates given for Kamigawa in official sources, but looking outside those we have Scott McGough saying in a Phyrexia.com post that a reference in Legends II about the Umezawa Manor being 400 years old was intended as the time between Toshiro and Tetsuo. But as you might remember, the only placement we have for Tetsuo is another Phyrexia.com post by Scott saying he intended for Legends II to happen “around the time of Mirage”. Yet even that isn’t the solid base you might imagine, as Mirage is a story of which we only have a clear end-date, and which takes place over the course of years, decades or perhaps centuries, depending on what you count as part of the story and what you count as backstory. One of the weird side effects of not actually having a story, just a few overview articles. For the full blow-by-blow I’ll refer you to the timeline section of the Champion’s Trial review, but the bottomline is that Legends II happens somewhere between 4000 and 4200 AR, and Kamigawa happens 400 years earlier.

But then there is Time Spiral. Which contains this little nugget: when Ravi rang the Apocalypse Chime back in the Homelands comic this somehow echoed through the Multiverse, disrupting the barrier between the two worlds of Kamigawa, and creating a link between Kamigawa and Madara “a path for any suitably powerful and opportunistic spirit to tread.” thus explaining why Toshi was dropped of at Madara specifically, and explaining why Night's Reach could still visit those shores in Time Spiral, long after the Sisters of Flesh and Spirit restored the planar walls of Kamigawa.

Thanks to Dominaria we now have a firm date for the ringing of the Apocalypse Chime at 3200 AR. Which, the mathematically gifted among you will already have noticed, is 400 years earlier than the earliest possible date based on those Phyrexia.com posts. Does this mean there was more time between the two stories? That Legends II happened earlier? Or just that there was a lot of time between the disruption of the barrier by the Chime and Konda actually using that disruption to steal TWWT?

The 400 year gap is pretty much accepted in the community. The end of Guardian clearly states that Madara’s founding god-empress is still around, and Legends II says the Umezawa manor stood since the days of Madara’s first emperor, so that’s pretty much solid, if you ignore the apparent misgendering.

Whether we should move Kamigawa away from the ringing of the Chime or Legends II away from Mirage though is pretty much up to you to decide. On the one hand we know from the Eight-and-a-Half-Tails story that Konda needed to get a lot of research done before he could cause a war, so it clearly wasn’t a case of the Chime just opening a hole in the veil for him to use. Who knows how much time passed before someone came around who was nuts enough to try and steal a kami? On the other hand we have Nicol Bolas saying in Time Spiral that “Soon such a spirit found that path and used it to come to Madara, and once here she cursed it with the plague Umezawa." But remember this is Bolas, who once referred to killing Ugin 1280 years past as “not so long ago”.

In the Champions review I gave three options and said it was basically a question of personal preference which one you picked. The reference to Madara's first empress in Guardian pretty much invalidates option three (that there is more than 400 years between Kamigawa and Legends II) in my mind though. That still leaves the options of moving Legends II back a few centuries before Mirage or leaving a few centuries between the ringing of the Chime and the Kami War and you still get to choose which of these you prefer.

Personally I’m much more inclined to go with the gap between the Chime and the Kami War. Sure, the Mirage-era placement for Champions II doesn't come from an officially published source, but if I can keep it without contradicting anything else I prefer to do so. So that's where it is staying on my timeline, but I can't fault the Wiki for going with the other option. We'll just have to wait for more sources before we can get a definitive answer. I will put the slightly off-putting, but necessary, "contested date" qualifier after these books though.

There is some more speculation possible about this when you put the Champions and Saviors fatpack booklets next to each other, but since that is pure speculation I'll keep it out of this discussion and cover it next week when we get to that final booklet.

For now, let's move on to the vignettes and the internal Kamigawa timeline. Let's start with a little overview of all the morsels we've collected throughout the novels, online articles and booklets.

• When he follows Chiyo to Otawara/Oboro, Toshi says her attack on his home happened "months" ago, giving us a rough period of time over which the trilogy takes place.
• Kobo had been Hidetsugu’s apprentice for 5 years.
• It's been almost a decade since Toshi and Hidetsugu met, and Godo has been fighting a guerrilla war against Konda for 10 years.
• Michiko was born 20 years prior to the story, and the Reito Massacre, which properly started the war after the initial skirmishes, happened a year later.
• Konda is 70 during the story.
• Shizo became Death’s Storehouse 100 years before Konda’s rise to power.
• Kami have been worshiped for “many hundreds of years”.
• Shinka is 1000 years old, and Boseiju 2000.

None of this will make it onto the timeline by the way. Even if we do pick one of the two options for Kamigawa's placement on the timeline we're dealing with periods of multiple centuries, meaning most of these facts will simply disappear into the error margins. Only the last three could be placed on a timeline with some certainty, but I think they are too minor for mine. They are good to keep in mind when wanting to make a more detailed timeline though. What will have to be put on the timeline are all the vignettes, as I want my timeline to be a complete chronology of all Magic stories. 

Mostly this will just mean putting them all together before the novel trilogy. The majority of the stories have to happen during the Kami War and thus fit in the 20 years before the trilogy or the short period of time after it before the Sisters got all the kami under control. There's a few that don't mention any kami, like the Takeno story. These could technically take place before or after (well... only before in Takeno's case) the war, but if there are no indications as to when a story happens and there is a clear link to a specific set (which there clearly are with these vignettes) I'm going to stick them with that set. This means all these stories end up in that slightly-over-20-years period, which in turn is swallowed by the error margins of the placement of the main trilogy, so everything will just be packaged together in one entry.

There are a handful of stories about which we can say more though:

• "Bonds of Ice and Fire", the Brothers Yamazaki story, has to go after Guardian. The main portion of the story happens after the siege of Eiganjo fails, which is still in progress during that novel, and the framing sequence happens decades later, in the lifetime of the brothers' grandchildren.
• "Personal Battles" features Toshi, who is already an associate of Michiko and still in the Jukai, so it has to happen between Outlaw and Heretic.
• "The Face Behind the Mask" happens in the wake of the fall of Eiganjo, thus fits best between Heretic and Guardian.
• "The Dragon Shield" shows the start of the Battle of Silk, which we know lasts 6 years, so it has to happen 6 years before the main trilogy at the latest. Unfortunately we don't know when its sequel "The Last Visitor" happens in relation to the trilogy, but it would be fitting if "the Last Visitor" shows up near the end of the war.

All of which gives us the following timeline entry:

• ~3600 - Kamigawa takes place (contested date, may be as early as ~3200 or as last as ~3800)
• All Champions-, Betrayers- and Saviors of Kamigawa vignettes not mentioned below
• Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa
• "Personal Battles"
• Heretic: Betrayers of Kamigawa
• "The Face Behind the Mask"
• Guardian: Saviors of Kamigawa
• "Bonds of Ice and Fire"

And with that we've covered the bulk of the Kamigawa story! Next week we'll round off the coverage of the online articles and the players' guides, and then I'll do one more post reviewing the block as a whole.