The Floating World

 By: Axie Oh

Location: FIC Oh

Genre: Fantasy- with Mythology and Romantasy!

Sunho lives in the Under World, a land of perpetual darkness. An ex-soldier, he can remember little of his life from before two years ago, when he woke up alone with only his name and his sword. Now he does odd-jobs to scrape by, until he comes across the score of a lifetime―a chest of gold for any mercenary who can hunt down a girl who wields silver light.

Meanwhile, far to the west, Ren is a cheerful and spirited acrobat living in an idyllic mountain village with her adoptive family. But everything changes during one of their festival performances when the village is attacked by a horrific humanlike demon. In a moment of fear and rage, Ren releases a blast of silver light―a power she has kept hidden since childhood―and kills the monster. But her efforts are not in time to save her foster father's life, or to save her adoptive uncle from being grievously wounded.

Determined to save her uncle from succumbing to the poisoned wound, Ren sets off over the mountains, where the creature came from―and from where Ren herself fled ten years ago. Her path sets her on a collision course with Sunho, but he doesn't realize she's the girl that he―and a hundred other swords-for-hire―is looking for. As the two grow closer through their travels, they come to realize that their pasts―and destinies―are far more entwined than either of them could have imagined...

Review by Esta

The Floating World is Final Fantasy meets reimagined celestial maiden Korean folklore, with a generous dash of RPG storytelling and it starts out with a bang. A claws-out, people-dying, secret-magic-to-fight-demonic-creature kind of bang.

The Ghibliesque-adjacent worldbuilding is lush and strange with murderous mercenary train journeys, a pitch-black Under World filled with poisonous blue clouds and toxic mines, and a world quite literally floating above it all. It's all beautifully rendered, but never overindulgent. The stakes hit fast and hard and the emotional undercurrent is real. There’s blood, grief, memory loss, scientific experimentation and family, real and found, but it never felt like too much was going on.

What I didn’t expect was how tender the heart of this story would be. Beneath the sword fights and yearning is a story about trauma: inherited, inflicted, survived. What it means to be soft without being weak. And about reclamation of identity and memory.

It didn’t hit instantly for me. Probably due to me taking a while to connect with FMC, Ren, who felt too naive for her age, plus the third-person narration, which kept me emotionally distanced for a while. That’s a “me” problem, I know.

Plus, after the banging start, it was a slower burn, with the first half moving like a side quest-heavy RPG, all mood and mystery. To be fair, however, it really builds up to a gripping crescendo.

Once the character work clicked for me, The Floating World soared, with the last third steeped in love, grief and heart-wrenching reveals. It got under my skin. Made me care more than I expected. And that’s what elevated my rating in the end.