He-Man and the Memory Stone
Author: Jason Kingsley
Illustrators: Judith Wood and David Glen
First Published: 1985
ISBN: 0-7214-0897-4
Length: 150 sections
Number of Endings: 3
Plot Summary: He-Man must find and destroy the evil Memory Stone used
by Skeletor to steal Man-at-Arms' memory.
My Thoughts: This book is aimed at a very young audience, and thus
the writing is simplistic and the gameplay extremely easy; it generally takes
under fifteen minutes to complete the book successfully, and nearly every
path leads to victory. It's written in third person, present tense, which is
a bit strange, though probably as good a choice as any. The book fails to be
particularly exciting and it is a bit disjointed at times, but the cheesiness
of the He-Man universe is kind of amusing and the book has a fairly high
replay value despite being so easy to complete since there are so many
different ways to win. The simple combat system also works fairly well for
something so random. If you roll very well, He-Man wins the combat outright;
otherwise, he either loses life points or gets a bonus on the next roll.
Simplistic, but more interesting than "Roll 4 or higher or else you
die."