Kingdoms of Amalur’s Best Quest

PC Gamer has published a new article from Jody Macgregor that goes over the House of Ballad faction questline and what makes arguably makes it the best quest in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. A snippet:

The House of Ballads is a faction tucked away in the north of Amalur’s map, and their job is to guard the legendarium of the Summer Fae, who are the nice-guy elves of the setting. (You can tell because they have terrible Irish accents.) The Fae are sort of immortal, reborn into new bodies shortly after they die, but what makes them unique is the way that’s incorporated into their culture. Their limitless lifespans leave them in no rush to achieve things for posterity and so instead they happily repeat stories from a romantic past when knights and rogues rescued kings and slew trolls.

When you arrive there’s an opening in the role of Sir Sagrell, the hero who slays a fairytale villain called Bloody Bones. While normally everything in the Ballads plays out according to the script this time something’s gone wrong, and Sagrell fell before his time. The Fae are so bewildered by this unexpected twist they’ll even allow a mortal like you to step into the role, so long as you promise to play it by the book. But Bloody Bones isn’t following the Cliffs Notes and refuses to give up and die on the end of your sword (or those Omniblade daggers you unlocked by having Mass Effect 3 registered to the same account). Bloody Bones has become convinced his ending’s not written in stone.

Behind this rewriting is the Maid of Windermere, one of the Winter Fae who plays head villain in a myth arc called The Telling. Where the Summer Fae represent growth, the Winter Fae are all about decay and destruction, and the Maid thinks it’s time the Ballads themselves were destroyed. But winter knows summer will follow it, and the Maid only wants to corrupt The Telling so the Summer Fae can grow a new one rather than being chained to their canon. She wants to be rid of the clichés of questing fantasy heroes, to find new stories to tell.