Faun & Games [Mass Market Paperback]

The puns are numerous but do they really detract from the story? Not really, if you can't handle this, then you probably should read any of the Xanth books period. The pun strips are overflowing with puns, but guess what? That was the idea

To the story, we find a decent faun made good by his association with his tree, helped by a nightmare gone soft. Later, he's accompanied by two lovely princesses out for a good time but in the middle of a crisis so the good times will have to wait.
This journey takes them into a series of moons upon moons. The journey was not so much tedious, but the shift of planes gets disjointed. I suppose some people can't handle that. If you require your stories to stay effectively in a single plane of existence then be warned this book travels around.
That having been said is the story predictable. If that above is what you've expect when you pick up a book then I guess yes it is, I didn't. I suppose in a xanthy kind of way however, you can guess certain things. There will be an appropriately goofy manner of resolving the problem and a somewhat goofy problem
... The first 8 books are so detailed a xanth somewhat in strife. The magician trent had just taken over for the storm king, and the dark age of xanth had just ended, soon to enter a new golden era. The earlier books had more realistic problems and quests (search for the source of magic, considering the place is Xanth its not that unrealistic of a quest).
Truly in many ways the earlier novels, not the later ones, were the typical and predictable tales. They took a new world with plenty of potential but used more common fantasy themes, example, the lone warrior fighting dragons and other terrors of the fantasy wild.
Later novels, this time had ended, the tales involve more personal quests of individual characters. The stories became less about missions and more about the journeys, and the quests became by-products of a journey of greater character growth, the quest became a backdrop.
Similarly the character views changed scope. Older novels tended to be scoped from the overview perspective. Newer novels I find to be more based on a single character. The other characters will be crafted and molded around this character. Thus to those people out there who expect the story to tell all, then yes the character in the newer Xanth novels will seem shallow and uneventful. Their true depth becomes evident when you understand how they change through the eyes of the main character of the novel
I think if you view Xanth as you would other fantasy books, you'll think the characters are shallow, as you will be seeing the characters as simply the participants of the quests. But I think Xanth should be approached more from the aspect of the character being the story, and the quest is the backdrop.
This book is somewhat of a fine example of this. Ultimately (sorry to ruin the story) but the quest was meaningless. Forrest Faun's journey did nothing to solve his initial problem. But the journey that his quest took him on caused him to change, and this caused him to find what he was looking for and then some.
If you look to the quest to be the tale, then yes, Faun and Games is a disappointing book, and the ending would be rather empty. The quest leads nowhere
If you look to the faun to be the story, then you see the growth and the depth of characters that was there in all of Piers Anthony's books.

This book was not the best of Piers Anthony's books. I found the book to be not as alluring as all of his books before, since it just brought some points that seemed rather predictable and unrealistic for me to believe. In the World of Xanth, things can get pretty unbelievable, but in this case, it was ridiculus and needs a change of personality of some characters to make things more interesting than sexually alluring.

I find that Faun & Games would be a fair novel because of the introductions of new and interesting worlds that I find appealing and of the introductions for future expectations of new characters that drew my attention for further novels.