Last Dragon Standing

So I reached the end of this. I have some thoughts of it as a whole and also the last couple of books, because there is a difference between how this started out and how it ended.

When you read a series of books it's inevitable to have some differences in the lengths of the individual volumes, it's not that weird. Some series have quite big ones, actually. I remember getting Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire as a kid and being amazed by how thick it was compared to the previous books in the series.
Here, though... the last one is incredibly short and absolutely unnecessary as a separate volume. Now let me point out the thing; the biggest mistake of this series was always just blabbering about stuff without moving the plot ahead effectively. One of the protagonists (Julius) is all about diplomacy, but I would assume diplomacy means it has to be of use. The characters certainly brainstorm a lot. Needlessly. With some clever editing the last couple of books could have been just one and we would have gotten the same ending.

Overall I loved some things about this and at the same time felt like some others could have been handled a bit better. Certain characters were unnecessary and still hyped up (like Emily) and others were hella fun and could have been around much more instead of just so much blabbering (like Bob).
I have learnt that the author has some sort of a method or tutorial stuff about writing a lot every day. I guess that's good in some way, it lets you get a lot of your story out of your system, but it also shows. Verbose. So verbose. You can't just word vomit like crazy and not cut it down drastically.

All in all, I did like the series. I would even recommend it. But it's far, far from perfect and while monumental things happen later in the series it's not nearly as concise and tight as far as the plot goes as it could have been (and should have been, lets be real).