Like a fish trying to stealthily peek its face out of the water (this intro will make sense in a minute), Boss Fight Books is back with an announcement for their next slate of books.
Boss Fight Books: Season 8 will include a trio of new books, all focusing on titles that had their own unique impact on the world video games.
First up is a travelogue-style approach to the world’s first portable fishing RPG, Legend of the River King, by Alexander B. Joy. Closely connected to the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons series, more than a dozen River King games have been released in Japan, but Legend of the River King was the first to make its way to North America. Launching just before Pokemon, it built up a cult following among Game Boy players and Joy will plumb the depths of what Legend of the River King has to say about “the fields of art, culture, philosophy, and ecology.”
Next is Kaitlin Tremblay’s Life is Strange, which will explore the adventure game’s relationship to “personal history, YA fantasy, identity formation, grief, and most of all, choice.” Life is Strange was something of an unexpected blockbuster, possibly because of its ability to give players the chance to make choices that “[say] something about who we are and who we want to be.”
Finally, Charlotte Reber will unpack exactly what happened during the notoriously short development cycle of Dragon Age II. Hoping to capitalize on the massive popularity of Dragon Age: Origins, BioWare rushed a sequel into production that ultimately divided fans and critics alike. Was it a flop? Was it a secret success? New interviews with the game’s narrative team (David Gaider, Jennifer Hepler, Lukas Kristjanson, and Karin Weekes) will attempt to get to the bottom of it.
Boss Fight Books is currently seeking funding for Season 8 through Kickstarter until August 5th, and they’ve promised that a fourth book in the season will make its debut in a separate campaign later this year.
But in the meantime, you can learn more about Legend of the River King, Life is Strange, and Dragon Age II after the break.
Legend of the River King by Alexander B. Joy
Expected Publication Date: September/October 2025Featuring a baseball-capped kid who leaves his tiny village for the wilds beyond to catch valuable creatures, Victor Interactive’s 1998 Game Boy classic Legend of the River King arrived in North America mere months before Pokémon Red and Blue, raising the question: What if River King, the world’s first portable fishing RPG, had been the game to change culture forever?
You’re invited to play along with writer and scholar Alexander B. Joy on a travelogue through the game’s meadows, forests, lakes, and rivers, stopping along the way to explore River King’s valuable insights in the fields of art, culture, philosophy, and ecology. Drawing connections to the work of Rachel Carson, Plato, Pearl Jam, David Foster Wallace, Richard Brautigan, and more, Joy shows River King to be a work of art in its own right.
Whether you’re a diehard fan of the game or just learning of it now, Joy’s work of digital nature writing encourages readers to take a closer look at River King’s surprisingly rich meditations on humankind’s relation to the natural world, our fragility in the face of elemental forces, and the duty of care we owe other living beings.
Life is Strange by Kaitlin Tremblay
Expected Publication Date: November/December 2025Despite its time travel mechanics, high stakes, and pulpy murder plot, Don’t Nod Entertainment’s 2015 adventure game Life is Strange stood out from most video games with its unapologetic emphasis on queer romance and friendships.
Yet for all the game’s specificity, players around the world found something of themselves in its protagonist, Max Caulfield, a perceptive yet insecure teen photographer who discovers she has the ability to rewind time itself.
Narrative designer Kaitlin Tremblay offers an intimate close reading of Life is Strange through the lenses of personal history, YA fantasy, identity formation, grief, and most of all, choice. If Max is “the sum of all the possible choices that she could make,” as Tremblay writes, then every decision we players make says something about who we are—and who we want to be.
Dragon Age II by Charlotte Reber
Expected Publication Date: January/February 2026Rushed through development in just a year to capitalize on the runaway success of its predecessor, Dragon Age II’s writing team had only a few months to write an entire game before handing it off to voice acting and development. The result was an often ramshackle sequel featuring a smaller world, fewer companions, and repetitive quests—as well as some of the best characters, dialogue, and storytelling Bioware has ever put to screen.
Based on new interviews with DA2 writers David Gaider, Jennifer Hepler, Lukas Kristjanson, as well as editor Karin Weekes, author Charlotte Reber tells the wild behind-the-scenes story of how a team at the top of their game made the best of an impossible assignment to create the series’s first fully voiced protagonist, its charmingly unreliable narrator, and a crew of unforgettable party members to bother, befriend, and romance. From DA2’s inception to its mishandled marketing campaign to its volatile reactions from players, Reber’s book raises a mug of ale to the game that was—and the game that might have been.