Saint Marie 2

There’s also a vague romance going on in the plot, not just between the main character and two potential interests (one who may be toying with her! gasp), but between other characters, too.  Other characters who you may or may not remember from previous chapters.  The character designs admittedly help out with keeping everyone straight, but there are still a lot of characters who get gender confused and enough similar-looking characters that it’s hard to keep the active participants straight.  There are lengthy appendices in the backs of both volumes detailing lots of background info on all the characters.  It was kind of annoying.

The plot could use a little work too, because it turns into these weird random battles that may be taking place in several places at once (as does the main battle in this volume), so it becomes less about chess and more about psychic wars.  I think the chess was symbolic anyway, but whatever.  I’m not really big into psychic wars, but the plot was still pretty good, I liked the various uses of power, and like I said, I would have kept reading it to the end and probably liked it okay.

I apologize for the reviews for both volumes.  Noone is going to read this series anyway, so I didn’t need to go into depth or make sense.  Hm.

Saint Marie 1

This is one of those terminated ADV series that we’ll never see the end of, and it’s a shame because I think it’s only four volumes.  Knowing this, I picked it up recently anyway, because the premise sounded pretty awesome, and it was also very cheap.

The plot, incidentally, is about select students at this school playing games of psychic chess.  Students are assigned a role on the chess board, and once they are eliminated, the white or black side is down a piece.  What are they fighting for?  If you can believe it, I believe it was the ultimate battle of good and evil, and there had been chess games played during the crusades, etc previously.  Awesome.

Unfortunately, it’s not that good.  I had a hard time keeping all the characters straight, which is extremely important since they all have different powers, roles, etc. and the plot is extremely intricate.  The main character doesn’t have a role in the chess game, but finds out about it because she can overhear the psychic conversations of the white side.  It’s pretty weird.

I did like it, admittedly, but it’s not very good, and of course we don’t get to see the end.  I did read through volume 2 though, which is as far as ADV got.