My assessment of Feist:
Magician
A really good fantasy story which starts off making you slam your head against the nearest wall in frustration at its Tolkienisms and cliches (long, perilous journey through a mine; hero is an orphan of uncertain parentage) but suddenly kicks into gear about 300 pages in when the samurai turn up and start kicking ass. This is actually a mildly cliche-defying subversive novel.
There is no bad guy. Everyone is the victim of circumstance. Pug's parents are irrelevant menial labourers who died when he was young. They weren't anyone important at all. Read this when you're 14 and have only read Eddings and Brooks and likely it will blow your mind.
Silverthorn: Meh. Less epic than
Magician with much more cheesy, out-and-out evil villians. Disappointing, but passable.
A Darkness at Sethanon: Excellent battle sequences (Armengar is one of the better sieges in fantasy history) give way to Feist's most annoying habit - the employment of unconvincing deus ex machina endings. Readable though.
Prince of the Blood: Feist chainsaws his own foot off with the introduction of Nakor, a character so enragingly annoying that you want him to die the second you meet him. If you can survive that, the book is passble. The Empire of Great Kesh is an interesting culture - notably different to both the Kingdom and the Tsurani - and its politics are intriguing. Not his best writing though.
The King's Buccaneer: Outrageous DEM strikes again, but it sets up Nicholas (one of his more interesting characters) and the whole Pantathian/Novindus storyline that is vitally important in the next series.
The Empire Trilogy: His best work, co-written with Janny Wurts. Cleverly interwoven with the events of the first three
Riftwar books, this is a scorching tale of political intrigue and military machinations. Oddly far better than any other work the authors have produced by themselves.
Shadow of a Dark Queen: A fresh start to the series. The sound of Feist clearing his voice and starting anew with a new cast and a new threat. Cleverly written, with us following new characters around as they interact with older ones and the relevance of
The King's Buccaneer becomes clear. One of his better books.
Rise of a Merchant Prince: I DEFY YOU ALL! But I'm in good company, as Scott Lynch loves this book as well and cites it as an influence on his
Gentleman Bastard series. Feist, almost bemusingly, interrupts his massive end-of-the-world-threatening epic storyline to tell a taut economic thriller about the rise of Roo Avery from warrior-slave to merchant prince extraordinaire. In Avery Feist creates a convincingly arrogant character at the mercy of events transpiring around him that he cannot even see. Feist convincingly answers the question most fantasy authors avoid - who
pays for all these vast armies and fancy castles - and in doing so sets a precedent for Tyrion Lannister, Locke Lamora and Tehol Beddict. One of his strongest books, IMO.
Rage of a Demon King: Possibly the most schizophrenic book I've ever read. In the war sequences, including desperate sea battles, the firebombing of beloved, familiar locations and horrific trench warfare, Feist nearly approches GRRM, SE and even Bakker in his depiction of carnage and desperate, heroic last stands. Spectacular stuff (even if much more detailed maps are needed to follow the campaign). However, the magical subplot set on other planes is exceedingly boring. When Feist swoops in and ends the war with the most unbelievably bad DEM I've ever seen, you may feel the need to throw the book through the nearest window. This could have been Feist's
Memories of Ice and he bottles it
Shards of a Broken Crown: Very, very, very poor and totally unnecessary fourth book in the subseries with another DEM ending that's worse than the volume before. That's all that needs to be said.
The Riftwar Legacy: Loosely adapted from the excellent RPG
Betrayal at Krondor and it's so-so sequel,
Return to Krondor. However, these three books are so bad it's almost impossible to describe.
Krondor: The Betrayal is one of the blandest books I've ever read. Feist was going through a very painful, drawn-out divorce at the time which explains why his mind wasn't on the job, but it's still disappointing.
Honoured Enemy: co-written with William R. Forstchen, this is actually one of the best books in the series (maybe Feist should consider writing in collaboration more often?), pitting two elite military forces - one Tsurani, one Kingdom - against one another during the height of the Riftwar. Razor-sharp characters, excellent dialogue and a generally great if unoriginal behind-enemy-lines storyline make for a thoroughly enjoyable novel. The two follow-ups, written with other authors, I have not read.
Talon of the Silver Hawk: This is where myself and REF parted company, at least for now. A marked improvement over the awful
Legacy books and
Broken Crown, but still not his best work. Pretty bland, in fact, and both Roldem and the Eastern Kingdoms - which people have been waiting to see since they were first mentioned in
Magician - fail to come alive like some of the other lands in his books.
There you have it. For a while in the mid-1990s, with
The Empire Trilogy and the better
Serpentwar books, it looked like Feist was shaping up to be a possible real contender, but then he blew it spectacularly and has never really recovered. He's easy to read and has some good ideas, but has brought very little new to the table. I'd be tempted to say to read up to
Rage of a Demon King, as all of those books are enjoyable on some level, but only
Honoured Enemy rises above the dross that he's published since.
Shuglin 
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