User blog:Krayfish/DP Rant Part 3: Stories

Previous blog

The Best of the Best
To start off, quite frankly, The Best of the Best is a sloppy opening. It’s like four different introductions stitched together without any real integration, and it can get very hard to follow if the reader does not know what to focus on.

Firstly, the prologue opens up some questions. Out of trillions of people in the galaxy, why only four people? And why does it have to be one of each empire? If GSSOC was far more expansive, it’s organization and structure would make more sense.

Etah’s introduction seems to be the strongest and it establishes the character fairly well. But the other introductions ultimately fail to set the stage for their own characters. The perspective shift is generally unnecessary and wordy.

However, the worst part about it in my opinion is Galiana’s introduction towards the end of the story. This is mostly my fault as I was the one that wrote it, but here, the execution is utterly poor. In the prologue, it stated that four members were to be chosen, yet Galiana somehow makes an exception. Does that make her special in some way? Is that supposed to be significant? Who is the main character in this story? Who do I have to pay attention to?

Already, the characters lack focus and this story only serves the confuse the audience. While Etah’s segment can be kept, the rest of it really needs work.

Operation Dragonslayer
Operation Dragonslayer is an okay story, but as our writing skills have increased over the years, the choppiness of this story now stands out like a sore thumb.

The insult is added to the injury with Galiana’s character when she doesn’t even appear at all for this mission. The time spent building her in the last story seems to go to waste. This may be because I’m not particularly fond of nonlinear storytelling, but nonetheless, it’s just poor execution.

The vast portion of the rest of this story greatly suffers from telling, rather than showing. Most of it is just an exchange of dialogue making it very hard to visualize and follow. In fact, the last chapter is nothing more than just blocks of spoken dialogues save for a few sentences that describe the setting.

Tholker’s character is highly inconsistent here as well. In the last story, he was portrayed as a cynical, tough soldier. Now, he’s a jokester here. This is likely because he has yet to be edited, but even here, he doesn’t seem all that smart. For the lack of a better word, the way he blew up the Oculus is outright idiotic - far from something a professional soldier would do. If the tone of this story is supposed to be serious with lighthearted humor from time to time, this segment goes against the atmosphere.

The wormhole tech is something else that bothers me. The reason being is that it creates a lot of plot holes. Looking back, I’m somewhat baffled about a gaping plot hole in the story’s ending. Earlier, we see Etah beam up to the Oculus, but why couldn’t he use the same technology to just beam to the ground? Ahrganot would not have to make that massive, implausible jump. Sure, it can be handwaved as to why Etah couldn’t, but the wormhole tech should just be ditched in this situation.

Operation Raising Hell
Since the old version of this story is only available in the edit history, I’ll only look at what we have now. Right now, it suffers the same structural problems as Dragonslayer. Too much dialogue and not enough “showing”. But ultimately, Sol I Dor and Galiana suffer more. If they are supposed to be main characters, their lack of appearance at this point makes them very forgettable. At most, they are side characters.

Operation Sentinel
This is a solid story for Galiana and Sol I Dor. The balance between dialogue and setting is excellent providing a good atmosphere for the mission. There are still some parts that can be ironed out such as the last chapter (which almost entirely consists of dialogue exchanges). Overall, this is a good story for a personal Galiana and Sol I Dor arc. The real issue with it is that it still doesn’t tie well into Dark Prophecy. It comes across as a stand-alone story rather than an actual sequel to Operation Dragonslayer.

Operation Money Cushion
Once again, it tells rather than shows with long blocks of dialogue exchanges. And like the previous stories (except for Operation Sentinel), Galiana suffers as just being tossed in there. Heck, she just replaced all instances of the name “Pyro” who wasn’t that well-integrated in the first place. Sol I Dor also suffers as well as he seems just tacked on, not actually doing anything until the Umbra scene.

The latter parts of the story do get interesting though. Umbra comes across as jerk character that one would enjoy hating. Being killed off within the story isn’t really the right move - he was a potential source of comic relief or an affably evil character, but being cut short prevents exploration of this character further.

I like the way this story ends. It’s dark and a perfect cliffhanger to set up the next story.

Volume 2
The Operation Titanic Discoveries saga, to put it bluntly, adds virtually nothing to the narrative and only serves as a method to padding the length of the story. It is far too methodical and formulaic. Each story becomes very predictable: approach the planet, learn about the planet, go on some walk, confront your past, retrieve the relic, get out. While each individual story could flourish on its own, when put all together, it heavily suffers from dullness and repetition. To be honest, it’s probably better to just cut out this part from the main saga entirely and make each individual story its own separate tale.

The Final Confrontation is way too wordy and doesn’t make much sense. The worst part about it is that it contains one of my pet peeve cliches: preaching. Notably, Infra’s argument is weaker than Etah’s, but that’s not the main problem. The aesop presented is broken. It ultimately fails to sum up all of the previous stories. The chaos aesop would have worked best if this was a rebels vs. empire story, but it isn’t. In fact, it’s the opposite: empires trying to bring order to the rebels. To top it off, Etah seems to be the only that supports the Chaos ideology and none of the other characters are like that. So Etah’s message just fall flat in the end, not contributing anything other than an opportunity to filibuster.

Conclusion
Dark Prophecy overall, while a very entertaining tale, is riddled with cliches and bad writing techniques. It lacks a solid structure and is weakly stitched together. Some of the individual stories are really good on their own, but as a whole, they fail to integrate together. As one of the earliest attempts of our writing, DP is not terrible nor is it a complete failure. But by no means has Dark Prophecy aged well.

Thank you for reading my three part rant. Please post your comments in the relevant blogs.