'United We Stand, Divided We Fall' Workshop

[Mordelain]

Rules

1. No outright attacks on thread writers or reviewers. You may criticize the thread only. This is not a venue for trolling, flaming, or otherwise bashing, demonizing or demoralizing individuals. You will receive only one warning, and upon the second offense in the entire forum, action will be taken.

2. This forum is for Workshop type evaluations only. If you have a thread you want others to look over and comment on, create your own Personal Workshop thread (or whatever you want to call it) in the Role Players' Corner.

3. Take criticism well. The comments here are intended to help writers improve as such. Do not get disheartened if someone says something ill of your work, but rather take it to heart and work hard to improve.

Whispers of Abyssion has requested a Workshop Judgement for the thread, United We Stand, Divided We Fall (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?25047-United-We-Stand-Divided-We-Fall).

To relaunch the Writer's Workshop, and to encourage contributions, all contributors on this workshop will receive an additional 50 gold, and the best contributor double experience! It will remain open for feedback until midnight on the 19th of September.

[Les Misérables]

Thanks for choosing the writer's workshop! I have to say, this thread exhibited some of the highest levels of creative prose I've read on the site in awhile. I feel like I learned quite a bit about writing epic magical battles, and some previously unknown lore. Kudos to you, and I hope I'm not the only one who reads this all the way through. Aside from the things I'm going to mention below, I found this to be an enthralling story packed with excellent writing and action and believable, consistent characters.

Now, on to the criticizing part!

Story
-Strong narrative hook, however the opening post may have served better split into two, see more in writing style
-Although your writing is strong and centres me in the chosen setting, a prevalence on telling over showing and awkward transistions between the two makes the word picture patchy and inconsistent. For example, in the second scene of post #1 you showed me what Akiyoshi looked like in great detail, then merely told me that he stabbed a zombie and his friend used some magic to dull the sound. While it is important to describe your protagonists, it's equally as important to show how they do all the cool stuff that they do. And there's no reason not to do both at the same time!
-Careful with the composition of your descriptions - when Akiyoshi chanced a careful glance into the huge antechamber, the description you gave was excellent, but the fact it started with "Dim light illuminated the scene" really took me out of the moment. There's a few easy substitutions that could have made that a bit less wordy and even more descriptive.
-I felt like you put about three times as much energy into the opening as you did the ending, and that left a bit to be desired in the storyline department. I ended up with a lot of unanswered questions about the characters, and not a lot of direction as to what's happening next.

Character
-Overall the introduction of your PC as an antagonist (though obivously the line between good and evil is blurring) was masterful, and the opening sentence of post #4 set that scene up beautifully. For the record though, I do believe it would have served better as two sentences, mostly because "The light of a dozen candles danced in the depths of a hundred mirrors." is complex and elegant enough to deserve its own thought.
-With some exceptions, the spoken dialogue seemed much less character-rooted than the internal monologue. Try giving more weight to how a character's personality and background influences their word choice and speech patterns.
-It's not always 100% apparent which character is talking. Try using he-said she-said a bit more often as necessary.
-Towards the last two-thirds of the thread, the action started to feel almost exactly like a D&D campaign or a game of DotHack. While these are interesting allusions, I found it difficult to stay emotionally connected with the characters with them seeming to exist in such a narrow world.

Writing Style
-Be careful when you use generic descriptions. While describing the Akashiman mercenary as "sullen" is good because it gives us an idea of how he moves, behaves, and looks in a single word, "Numerous shapeless heaps collapsed in disordered randomness" is a bunch of words that really tells us nothing. I think that giving a brief description of one of the "shapeless heaps" and then generically mentioning the others would have served better here. Basically this was an opportunity to raise the stakes (give the audience an idea of the danger our heroes are facing), but it fell flat.
-I noticed a tendency to overdescribe - things like referring to Aki as a "samurai warrior" or referring to the village - "reducing it irrecoverably beyond shambled ruin." Again, I feel like some specific verb-heavy descriptions in active voice could have served better.
-Referring to your flashbacks as flashbacks took me out of the moment
-Careful with overusing terms like "dark and malevolent". Once it can be effective, twice in one post starts to sound like a catch phrase.
-I noticed a number of phony intensifiers "quite literally", "absolute minimum", which thicken the writing unnecessarily.
-Overuse of definers such as "arcane" "mana" "power"... try getting more descriptive and imaginative more often, and you shouldn't have to use these as much. Also in the scene fighting the Titan you used the descriptor "churned" like a dozen times.
-I'm a big fan of alliteration, and you use it well often, but sometimes I caught you being redundant just for the sake of getting an alliteration in, and that's the kind of purple prose you don't want.
Hope I don't sound overly critical! The better your writing is, the more specific I have to be to find suggestions to make, and your writing is excellent. I'm looking forward to checking out your next thread! If you have any questions about this or want further clarification, feel free to PM me.