I read it (and the whole series) as a kid so it's hard to seperate my love for this and the obvious problems with the book.

I love the world and I like the way Feist writes for the most part, I think he does action quite well and his descriptions of the more magical fantasy elements like the rifts, Valheru and the tower test are great. I really like Pug and Tomas (bar the Elf Queen stuff), and Pugs' time learning his trade are some of my favourite scenes across the whole series. I think Feist does a great job of making the Tsuranuanni feel alien and slowly introducing them as more human as Pug learns about them.

He does write romance and women generally badly in this book, Aglaranna being treated as barely a character after a certain point stands out as awful, and it made me so much for thankful for Wurst in the Empire trilogy. His pacing is a bit weird sometimes and the time skips, which I like generally as they do help to make the world feel a bit more real, did tend to contain scenes and events that seemed rather important to the plot. He does take quite a lot of ideas from other fantasy series but I think he puts enough of his own spin to make it different enough.

Despite this I still find myself loving it. The epic magic and cool fights, the universe spanning plot, the hints at greater forces at work behind the scenes and the world itself led to me loving fanstasy as a whole genre. This series (or to be specific the first few arcs of this series) are just pure comfort reading to me.