Well, I about used up David Eddings' supply of witicisms in my title, so now I'm tapped.

MG was my favorite of the books, and to be fair, the Belgariad was the best of his first four series. The problem was, he had one good idea, and his attempts to dress it up really failed. He left out all the cool characters from the Belgariad when picking his team for the Mallorean, and couldn't even come up with a valid reason beyond an oracular figure appearing and saying "They can't come." It was more like "David Eddings is really, REALLY proud of his world building and he's going to beat you over the head with it for the next four books. Oh, and he REALLY likes that archaic dialect, and is going to randomly place a transplanted culture on the other side of the world to force the heroes to go undercover there so he can write whole pages of dialogue like that!"

And then there was the Elenium & the Tamuli, which was basically changing some names from the Belgariad:
An international all-star team of warriors, including a motherly-yet-smugly-superior, dark-haired ancient sorceress, a gruff salt-of-the-earth common fellow, and a mysterious child who will turn out to be a diety, must wander through EACH AND EVERY COUNTRY in on the western continent in order to find a magic blue rock created by a supernatural being, in order to use it in a throne room to restore a monarch to the "good" country. After that, the heroes must travel into the heart of the enemy empire to slay their evil god, using the magic blue rock.
Then we go to the Mallorean redux:
The good guys are summoned to explore the mysterious eastern continent by one of its inhabitants, traveling eventually to the easternmost country where they will meet an urbane & sophisticated ethnic group (you will be able to tell they have these traits, beause they say "old boy" a lot), and wander around until they find out about the true, ancient origins of the magic blue rock, which was NOT made by the guy they think made it, but is actually a manifestation of a superior power that runs the universe, and has an evil twin, that they have to beat. Oh, and the talking, subhuman species that had a few lines in the prior series? They're going to get a lot more dialogue in this one, becase Eddings LOVES his funny diction!


But the Belgariad is a time when it was all fresh and new and we had not idea how far into the ground he was going to beat this.