It’s a pleasure to say that, on the whole, Volume 5 of the murder-chest’s story is an entertaining romp from start to finish. The focus upon our characters is balanced out and allows them all to have at least one ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ throughout the nearly 15hrs of runtime. Whether it be fun little interludes for a mini-mimic’s misadventures, or allowing a the pig-tailed paladin of potentiality room to shine (figuratively and literally), it serves well to let listeners indulge a little or learn more of the world. It isn’t free from faults, though they are thankfully all minor.
The performances are all topnotch, with Jeff Hays and Annie Ellicott’s now well-established voices given ample space to flex their range and performative muscles. Justin Thomas James’s performance, whilst relegated to a single role, leaves his character with a distinct and strong first impression… though unfortunately it isn’t for long as his character is relegated to something of a side-plot in the grand scheme of the book’s plot. Hopefully, however, he’ll see a repeat performance in the next book as his character’s role–minor as it might be here–has some likely major implications and repercussions that could come up later. There is some audio effects added into the voicework near the end that are intentionally distorted, something that wasn’t exactly to my taste and dulls the deliveries of some of the lines… But neither that or the prior complaint impact it enough to pull the performances as a whole down.
As for the story, it moves well and as mentioned before gives characters all room to breathe a little. Fizzy is given a foil to play off her colder, more caustic personality, Morgana is allowed to show a greater range and depth, and even smaller characters like Rowana are given a little extra to flush things out. However the story does feel as though it’s two halves pressed together without quite meshing as perfectly as one might want. Some characters are introduced and then allowed to fade away into the background, and others feeling as though they were introduced solely to be killed before we know who they were or to simply trigger a bit of handy exposition or a ‘plot point’ that may come up later before disappearing. Again, nothing major though I feel it dings the scores for it a little bit… Honestly for what this is a 4 is too low, but 5 too high, which puts the story between the two numbers for me.
That leaves me feeling overall rather strongly positive. Though the unique tease at the very end definitely helps. Be sure to listen past the epilogue for the credits, as while not critical to the story it is sure to bring at the very least a smile and a laugh with it.
Shiny things are… shiny, after all, even if that takes time.