Right off the bat, before we get down to the review, I have to say I absolutely love the art. Truly professional, exceptional, and stands out. It gives mystery and intrigue perfectly through its use of minimalism, details, and symbolism. The colorization is professionally done and makes the little details stand out crisply while having enough shadow dulling the background to give the impression of a bleak land.
TLDR; Intergalactic MMORPG players come across a world torn in civil war ingame.
Grammar and Word Usage - Cute idea, but no. - Normally I don't bother with grammar and word usage much. So long as the story is readable then it gets a passing grade. Also the author said he is not a native English speaker. So while I am trying to be delicate with this and give as much in the author's favor as possible, we have a completely unavoidable problem. The grammar and word usage is the single element that destroys the entire story to its very core, in every conceivable way. And its not so much the grammar itself. The grammar desperately needs work, but even this can be considered 'passing' as a first draft and just touched up and improved on with later drafts. Instead the problem comes down to Word Usage.
How do I describe this?...
90% of the story is guttural sounds, verbal spell casts, onomatopoeia, and people going "NANI??????" Imagine taking Naruto and turning every panel into a written form, complete with the Batman 60's words splashed across the screen with every step.
Now onomatopoeia is not bad. But there are two ways of doing it. You can use sound effects or you can use description. This story unfortunately leans overwhelmingly 200% into the former.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
(https://7esl.com/onomatopoeia/) - How to use it properly.
I am somewhat used to it as I spent 10+ years reading similar stories on fanfiction.net. So it is was very nostalgic to see it. I found it cute in small doses. However. it is extremely unprofessional and so wouldn't pass final drafts with any publisher on earth. And while I can personally deal with some of it without being bothered, the fact that all of this makes up 90% of the written story turned it, even for me, into an incomprehensible mess, at best, and chalkboard scraping, at worst.
Main Characters - Impossible to ascertain - There are a bunch of 'players' in the group as well as several AI NPCs that act as side characters. There is nothing but problems here, and it is not necessarily in the characters themselves so much as how they are expressed. You cannot figure out who a character is from guttural sounds, onomatopoeia, verbal spell casts, and 5 people going "WHAT?!?!" at the same time every two seconds. You get a sense that some of them are natural leaders and others have other quirks about them, but there is nothing concrete and nothing is clear through the word usage mess.
One thing I have to say is that I was surprised by how easy it was to get into the main character's desire to be engaged with the plot that happened around them. Normally I would think that video game players going into something would feel disconnected because there lacks personal stakes, but though they recognize that the characters they engage with are just AI NPCs and ultimately don't matter, they are engaged and want what is best and become invested in the story around them. This is not a video game where you hit the restart button and start a choice over, but an active engaging sandbox world where consequences stick, and the players are just simply human. There isn't an extreme exploration of adrenaline and consequences don't matter like driving 5x the speed limit, massacreing everyone, or building yourself a personal harem while setting all buildings on fire. More like an RPG where they want to see a proper ending. And being travelers, it successfully replicates the 'Westerns' feel where a lone gunslinger rides into town and cleans up the mess despite how easy it would be just to turn the other way and keep going. I absolutely loved that.
Side Characters - Vary - The side characters vary in quality. Similar to the main characters, the amount of wasted word mess really makes it difficult. But despite that I quite liked a couple, like the ten year old girl that gets rescued repeatedly. She acted as a decent vessel to introduce the main characters to the new world they landed on and to start being involved. However this is about as good as that gets. I have mentioned it before, but side characters have a specific mechanism of fleshing out the MCs; but when you can barely understand who is who or does what or is even speaking because entire chapters are pretty much one giant sequence of dialogue between anywhere between 5-12 people at once, depending on the scene, then I can't say the side characters succeeded in their job.
World Building - Prologue from Hell - Again, I am trying to be nice. This is the author's first time. However, I have to be honest. Prologues are an incredibly delicicate thing to pull off properly, and everyone tries to do them without even 1% of them knowing how or why. Out of the dozens of stories I have reviewed I think I have liked maybe one prologue. It is a story mechanism choice that needs to be understood, studied, and used like a surgeon, because it has a very specific purpose, use case, and anything else is just shooting the story in the foot. This is among those prologues that uses it mistakenly when, quite frankly, you are better off without and learning along the way. What this prologue does is give the answer before the question, like oh so many bad prologues. Then to make a mistake into something truly bad is that the pacing of the prologue is... just... image every paragraph having different pacing and purpose. One paragraph can have the slow, building up, foundation of the 4-hour Lawrence of Arabia, and the next paragraph can be as fast as the first 5 minutes of The Lord of the Rings that gives you 1000-years of history in a few sentences. Now take these two kinds of paces and shake it furiously together into a blender. Now, to take this into the kind where i am sitting groaning in pain is when all of this is combined with a word usage, thankfully not as bad as after the prologue but still bad, to the point that by the end of the prologue I can't even begin to tell you what the hell I just read. I was more confused after the prologue than before it.
My advice: burn it. The idea behind the story elements and history portrayed is good, but it needs to be introduced through the rest of the story over time as something we learn alongside the main characters. Turn it into a kind of mystery and exploration to be revealed, one layer at a time. When you have MC who are literal outsiders, then it is fine, even EXPECTED, to be clueless at first and trying to figure things out as you go along. That is where the fun is in following outsider main characters. You learn along with them.
There is also a lot of telling over showing, but that is something far more advanced and shouldn't be focused on until later when basics should be the focus.
Plot - No idea - The plot as a basic idea is very good. As said before, you have some outsiders, you show up, and you have a world that is ruined by civil war. There is clear values given to help determine who the good guy and bad guy is, who the attacker and who the defender is, who the bully and who the victim is, and then the rest come down to details and a natural progression of these values provided to outsiders who want to make the world/galaxy a better place. However the plot suffers as a consequence of the issues given by the prologue and the word usage, which also bogs down the characters. These primary problems have a final result in a plot that is incomprehensible, and can only be understood from a high level. If you descend into the details then the general mess just makes it impossible to make out what is happening at any point.
I rate this 2 smashing out of 5. The weaknesses outweigh the strengths, but there is potential. The story suffers from two issues. Its choice to be a naruto-manga turned to written word, and the prologue.
A good story written badly is fixable, but a bad story written well is not. This story is very much the former. I absolutely love what it is trying to tell and the potential I see it having, but it will take work and edits to reach that. Some things will need to be hacked away and every sentence will need to be sharpened, but by the end of it you will be left with something beautiful.
If you are interested in learning to write, mastering the craft, want some really good reads, or just to chat and hang out with a mature group of adults, feel free to hit me up for a smashing discord book club that has lasted years.
