The look on my face when GrahamRocks gave me permission to review her story:
What's that from?
The look on GrahamRocks' face when she saw the above picture and realized what she was getting into:
And that?
GrahamRocks, I'm going to start with the positive. You have tackled an ambitious project, and taken a dive into the deep, dark realm of fanfiction, a concept that has been the butt of many jokes over the years. And considering some of the creepy Harry Potter stuff that's out there (why did I look for that, anyway?), there is some merit to that. But fanfiction isn't all bad. I know for a fact that fledgling authors get recognized for their prose on fanfiction.net, and sometimes graduate to full-fledged authors as a result. I myself am looking for a career as a novelist, and I too am taking baby steps toward my goal.
No need to welcome my diving in, Numbers. I've been going down deeper and deeper since 2005-2006 with my Cars/Herbie The Love Bug crossover fanfictions which I think suck.
Of course, there are far, FAR better authors than me out there, both original and fanfiction authors. If I might drop a couple names here:
ScytheRider (Pokemon)
whoadrep (WALL-E)
Luna Goldsun (Kung Fu Panda)
and several more! I'm an amateur compared to these people!
Your take on the characters of KQ5 is different enough to separate it from the characters from the source material, and I like that idea. As (somewhat) charming as KQ5 is, the characterizations are extremely flat and stereotypical. Your characters each have at least some personality, if a different personality from the game. Human!Cedric is given a backstory, and the royal family inside the miniature Castle Daventry get their own stuff to do, meaning that they won't be completely unseen until the end of the story.
Thanks! I especially like how I did Alicia.
There are also action scenes, which are a welcome change of pace, and pretty necessary for a written interpretation of a KQ game. If you followed the plot of the game too closely, a lot of what happens would just be puzzle-solving, which is fun to do in a game, but incredibly boring to read about. There will be KQ purists, of course, who insist that everything be exactly like how it's presented in the KQ Companion, but I say, to hell with that. It's your own story, you do what you want with it.
Indeed. Lots of people didn't like the action sequences in TSL either, but I loved 'em!
and, of course, one action scene is canon anyway: the Mordack fight! That's gonna be FUN!

First things first. Your use of exclamation points outside of dialogue is excessive. Extremely excessive. Actual novels reserve exclamation points in normal sentences for only the most significant of events. Here, they are tossed about to and fro, making it feel like the story is constantly shouting. Another bit of punctuation that irritates me are the parentheses. Novels hardly ever use parentheses. If you feel like you need to include more information in a sentence, rewrite it or use a semicolon. In a worst-case scenario, use double hyphens.
I've known that I need to cut back on '!'s for awhile now--sounds like I'm going on a diet if I word it like that-- but I never knew that about parentheses.
As you have said, tenses switch around, which makes reading those parts of the story a chore. Sentence fragments and run-ons in dialogue can add realism to the interactions between characters, but they can also make them look like massive idiots who don't know how to talk. This was an issue with TSL where characters sometimes said redundant information in the same sentence. In this case, it doesn't make the dialogue seem authentic, it makes the characters look like they forgot what they just said. Dialogue in novels is best written with more thought than the thought put into conversations that people have in real life. If an argument in a story was written too accurately to a real-life, it would quickly devolve into a profanity-laden storm that has more to do with being aggressive than what the argument was about in the first place. Such is the case here--if your characters are having an argument, make their dialogue sound witty and clever, because nobody wants to see a boring real-life argument that they've already experienced a million times. Just some food for thought.
TSL has that? Example?
True about arguments though. I've been writing some scenes out of order for my Quest for Glory fics, and there is a really
nasty one between Finn (a Wizard) and Marcus (a Paladin) who are friends with eachother and Rico (a Thief), but here in Mordavia, their friendship hits its lowest point in its unravelling.
See, throughout their adventures across Gloriana I thought of an ongoing character arc that affects all three of them. They all grew up together in Willowsby and became best friends, despite their different home lives; Marcus lost his father at 11, and has been training and trying his best to be like him for the past 10 years to some degree of success, being already a good Fighter since he started training at 9 with his father and becoming a Paladin in Shapier. Finn's mama left his papa when he was a baby due to both a magic accident and her family forcing her to leave, thusly leaving Finn without a mother and his father, while he
does legitimately care and love his son, he won't show it very often because he's afraid of being hurt again. as for Rico, his family's "tradition" is that they all teach their children to be thieves, and Rico's the latest member of that tradition. While he loves his job immensely, he still wishes that he didn't have to steal to survive since his family is very poor and wants moreso to be well off yet still be thieving. nothing wrong with having extra money, right?
Anyway, the arc continues through all five stories:
in Spielburg? They're very close pals, always sticking close together.
in Shapier? They're still friends but they're hanging out less and going off on their own to explore and make new friends.
in Tarna? Their friendship starts to unravel bit by bit.
in Mordavia? Their friendship continues unravelling until it hits rock bottom, and they no longer consider eachother friends.
in Silmaria? Well, when you hit rock bottom, there's no other place to go but up, right? By the end of that adventure, they are friends once more!
I've labelled the scene in Mordavia with the argument as "That Scene".
Perhaps the biggest offender here is the fact that the story has a bunch of cliches. It's still better than the actual source material, but that's not saying much in this case. The cold hard truth is that all of the KQ games had their fair share of cliches, including KQ6, which, magnum opus though it may be, could still have cut out the most obvious tropes and been all the better for it. One such example here is Cedric having a very typical backstory along the lines of "I lost my mother to a bad guy that we'll obviously run into in this story so that I can avenge her." This has been done to death. Nonetheless, Cedric's personality has been changed, and he at least has a backstory rather than none at all, so that's already an improvement. However, it kind of feels unnecessary, as the end result is the same whether Cedric had ties to it or not. The encounter you proposed between Cedric and the Wanderer also feels unnecessary, as it would simply be a rehash of an already not particularly fun part of KQ7.
I'm planning on rewriting this story someday, so... what would you suggest for Cedric then? It's too late to change it now in this version, unfortunately.
I do apologize for the cliches though... I didn't think they were all that bad...

Another thing to keep in mind is the end goal. With the story I'm working on, I have already planned out how many chapters there are, what events will be happening in what chapter, what character development will be going down when, evenly spacing out the action sequences so that they're not too close to each other while still being entertaining, making sure that the bad guy of the story isn't ridiculously overpowered, making sure the good guys are smart, deciding what character traits to emphasize in each person, and so on. If you haven't already, you should plan out your story from start to finish. Write the chapters out of order if need be. Write the chapters you'll be most comfortable writing first, the others will fall into place sooner or later. If you're burned out, take a break from it for a little while. Don't be afraid to take a hiatus from your work. Before you go back and start writing new stuff, re-read the old stuff and see what could be changed.
It's funny, y'know. I'm doing pretty much all that for my QFG fics, writing scenes out of order, trying to do character development, thinking of backstories for my characters enc. So... why can't I do that as well for this?!
What's wrong with me?!
and I feel awful for hiatuses! I feel like I'm letting my readers down, because I'm not working on the next chapter. Numbers, I have not released a chapter for EITHER story for NEARLY A YEAR!
Y'know, I ALMOST regret deleting some of my old drafts of some of my fics that never went anywhere. There was one that I tried to rewrite
three times, called "Many Years Later..." and it just kept getting worse and worse and more and more convoluted and illogical and spinning its wheels, until I finally said, "f*** it! I'm deleting this!" and moved on.
I almost regret deleting it, because if I'd kept it, I could look back on it years later and see how I've improved. Sometimes I give up because I run out of ideas, I realize the story is stupid, or more rarely (only has happened once so far)... I've found someone who just does it better than I ever could.
5 years ago, WALL-E, one of my absolute favorite Pixar films, was released on June 27th. I saw it and I was hooked! So, I decided to write a fanfiction about it. Specifically, it was retelling the story with the characters being humans/cyborgs. It actually got pretty far-- twelve chapters --and i'd managed to get into the third act of the film. It was 2010 when I last tried to write the Garbage Disposal chapter, and not only did I run out of ideas, but I also found someone better than me.
Whoadrep also wrote a WALL-E fanfiction that had the same concept, and she did it better. Her science made sense! She took what I thought were great ideas and just made them better!
Feeling both impressed and a bit intimidated, i decided to stop writing that story, because it had already been done for me.
And if you ever get down, here's a dramatic reading of a Doom fanfiction to make you feel better. It's only two minutes long, and it's easily one of the stupidest things ever written. And you will be safe knowing that you will never sink that low. (Don't worry, you don't need to know a thing about Doom to enjoy/be horrified by it.)
BAHAHAHA!!! Ah, Manwithoutabody! How I love your voice! I don't even have to click the video to know that's him, because I've seen that before!
Or... I could just be horrified by Stephanie Meyer's books. Ugh! I'm an amateur fanfiction writer and even
I write better characters and stories than she does, I swear!
At least
my characters are likable! at least, I hope they are.