Bioshock: Rapture

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In-The-Machine's avatar
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It took me way, waaaaay longer to finish this book than it should have, one of the biggest reasons probably being that I set it aside in favor of finishing the A Song of Ice and Fire series, but I wanted to get through it so I could move on.
The book was....okay? I guess. A number of parts felt really choppy, but in a number of instances I thought certain characters were handled well enough. Although in other cases, I think certain aspects could have been done better. Sander Cohen doesn't get a POV despite being one of Bioshock's more...eccentric characters and is pretty much reduced to some one-dimensional psycho lapdog for Ryan with obvious bizarro homosexual overtones (even though in the game some audio diaries seemed to imply some later heavy regret and disillusionment with Ryan and coming to Rapture). Both Suchong and Tenenbaum's speech are "dumbed down" and sound more stereotypical and fobbish in a lot of cases (especially in the case of Suchong). And I think I became sort of bored with the narration at times, but the book definitely did have some interesting insights into Rapture and some of the characters here and there. Fontaine was probably one of the more interesting characters to read about though. However, I read the book isn't really "canon" and Ken Levine himself didn't really have much to do with it (I don't really consider it "canon" myself either, but it was an okay read overall). I didn't really get much attached to a lot of the characters though.
I don't read book video game books a lot, but I guess I'd give this one a 3/5 or something.
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BonitoShark's avatar
I'm having a hard time finishing the book because of the way it's written. I feel like more things could be elaborated on and the writing style was dumbed down for a much larger market. A lot of the characters feel one-dimensional and I was really looking forward to learning more about some of the ones we only caught glimpses of in the game--and like you mentioned Cohen, yeah, I was really disappointed with his lack of development. For published fanfiction, I was expecting a lot more, but it reads like anything you could find on the internet for free. Definitely great if you're a huge fan of the games, but otherwise, not the sort of thing I'd recommend to people aside from that reason. I guess it's one of the better video game books out there, though.