Not to pile on too much, but I feel very similarly. It seems like about 80% of the way through the first book (beginning with the Panama Canal attack), Liu gave up on trying to write characters and started trying to compensate with bigger (and admittedly very cool) sci-fi set pieces. Overall, the first book had a good set of strong characters (Ye Wenjie, Wang Miao, Da Shi) and was still good enough to be one of my favorites.

The second book still had some good character writing (mostly in Zhang Beihai, although Luo Ji had a okay arc), but I felt like the plot really meandered to the point where I almost put the book down before the reveal of the Dark Forest concept, which was interesting and novel enough to compel me to finish.

The final book has the whole kitchen sink of cool sci-fi conceits thrown at it, but there are even fewer memorable characters, and the plot time-jumps so many times that it feels like the antithesis of “show, don’t tell”.

What’s sad is that the core storytelling skill of Liu is clearly there (for example, with the fairy-tale allegories), but it’s so buried under the drive to introduce a new technology every chapter that it’s hard to appreciate the final book as a good novel.