Jake Ishida expected ordinary days when he moved to a new city. He did not expect the mysterious warrior, Pilot, to give him a strange crystal. The crystal transforms him into the Fire Radiant, a warrior of order. Now, he must learn how to utilize his new powers to fight...
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Inspired by shounen battle manga and Sentai genre
Sorry for taking so long, I was busy and lazy, very lazy. Before I start, here is a friendly advice. SH readers prefer shorter chapters. Even 4 thousand words is a bit too much. SH readers on average prefer 1.5-2.5 thousand words long chapters.
Obligatory reminder that English is my second language, and this is subjective feedback from a reader. I stopped reading after I finished
Chapter 1 – The Fire Ignites and about a third of
Chapter 2 – The Hub
I'm sorry, but I couldn't force myself to finish the rest of your second chapter. This feedback will sting since I find your novel really bad. Before I talk about all the downsides and complaints, I will mention the good things. It was easy to read. That's all, sorry.
Back to talking about why I find your novel bad. The reason is simple, it does feel like a Shounen Battle Manga, but there is a twist. It feels like a really bad, old one. It doesn't feel like you pay homage, or were inspired by it. It feels like your novel was stuck in the past and didn't evolve, and again, you do not write a cult classic, sorry.
Why is that? Well, the main problem here is that it looks like you write a script for those who know. The first part of this problem, your novel looking like a script isn't as bad as some other cases I had in this thread, but I can't call your novel a proper story either. Perhaps the second part of this problem is the reason. I'm not sure. Because the story so far was EXTREMELY formulaic, generic, and predictable.
Don't take this wrong, I'm not asking you to write Ranger Reject and subvert every trope and basically write a different story. I'm asking to add something new, break the standard formula, or at least make it REALLY good. You fail at everything. Again, it doesn't look like a NEW story. It looks like a story that I have already read, but a lot worse.
To elaborate on the things I said above, I will start with my biggest gripe, dialogues. They are bad for multiple reasons.
Reason number one is dialogue tags. Too many, and they are bad. They are bad because they don't add to characters at all, despite their variety, their only purpose is to show who is talking. And that's the reason number two. Despite the staggering amount of dialogue tags, I still get lost on who is talking. Why? Because no one here has a personality or emotions. Every character is the same in every situation. You write them the same. No quirks, no attempts to diversify how they talk, nothing. Aliens talk the same as a random bully(jock?), who talks the same way as the sister of MC, who talks the same as MC.
The biggest example of all the things I said about your dialogues is this.
"What, why?" asked Jake.
"Because you still look deeply disturbed."
He does not look disturbed. Do you know why? Because you didn't describe it.
Jake recovered first, then pointed an accusing finger at her. "WERE YOU THERE THE WHOLE TIME?!"
"THAT'S EVEN WORSE!" shouted Jake. "How am I supposed to explain a woman in her 20s in my closet?"
Jake smacked his forehead. "No… no…. no… that's not..."
"Dimension crossing is a thing, got it." Jake said. "Are you the same as Pilot? Guardian?"
"What, why?" asked Jake.
I copied Jake's every dialogue line that had a tag, in the same order as they appeared. I can agree that he was disturbed... at first. You see, you give us two tags. "Jake said," and "Jake asked." He calmed down since you didn't write it otherwise. You might argue that I'm nitpicking here, but as I said this is only an example.
I didn't notice ANY emotions across the first chapter. Oh! A crystal appears and an ALIEN!? Meh, just your everyday thing. Someone kicked me in the face? Embarrassing. And so on. They don't feel ANY appropriate emotions.
"I know…" He reached out for the crystal. "But if the next guy messes up, I will feel bad, knowing
I would have done a better job or something." This is his motivation. "
Or something." This screams of apathy so much, that I can't even express my own feelings at the time I read it.
Btw, this one sentence shows how much is wrong with the logic of the novel.
I watched(briefly) the first episode of A Power Ranger(random season) to quickly look at the way rangers react to situations, and to see WHO they are. First of all, they express a strong sense of bewilderment and disbelief. Second, they are scared. Third, they have strong morals. Obviously, there are five of them, so they are all different. The thing is, each and every one of them usually is some kind of a stereotype. Despite that, they do have reactions like the ones I described.
You COMPLETELY skipped this part. Jake acted like it was just his everyday life, while at times expressing his exhilaration at what happened to him, and at other times,
I will feel bad, knowing I would have done a better job or something. He isn't consistent either. You can see this from the example above about Jake being disrupted. At first, he is disrupted, but when he needs to be disrupted, he acts calm. Or he experiences some feeling, NOTHING HAPPENS, and his feelings change 180 degrees. Can this happen in real life? It can. But in the text, you have to explain why the hell is afraid one second, and the next second he throws an inside joke.
Since I mentioned Jake, I should talk about other characters as well. All of them are caricatures but in the most basic and bad way.
Another thing I want to mention about the general vibe of the story.
The violet-haired woman chuckled.
"Alright, let's be serious for a bit." This is what your story lacks. It's not serious at all. You skim over everything, and there is no comedy genre or comedic subplot.
Backtracking a little bit and talking about dialogues and your worldbuilding a bit. You introduce TOO much too early. So many characters that talk the same makes it hard to understand who is who. Introducing so many characters and so many elements like crystals and other worlds also doesn't allow you to focus on one thing and flesh it out. You skim over everything and make me not care about anything. There is no buildup, no stakes, and no emotions, in other words, no reason for me to invest in the novel. Why should I care about anything?
One of the last things I want to talk about is the way you write. Although I can understand what you write, I don't enjoy reading it one bit, and your story suffers from the way you write. A good example of why it suffers is your dialogue tags that stick out like a sore thumb and don't add to the story. Although you skim over a lot of things, it doesn't mean that you spend your word count on good things. Descriptions are bad, sometimes out of place or you simply describe the wrong things.
The text simply doesn't flow, it doesn't feel connected. This one is really hard to explain. What I want to say here is that "sentence two" doesn't feel like a continuation of "sentence one." Or "sentence three" doesn't feel like it is connected to sentences one and two. Part of the reason why this happens is a very repetitive way of your writing. You like to use the same words, you like to use the same sentence structures without trying to adjust them.
The last thing I will mention is this.
"Right… I'm Jake, and this is
Tina
Pilot remained unfazed and gazed at her slightl
y."
Something told him it wouldn't matter, but now he had to deal with t
his."
"This strange monster appeared, but… there has to be a sour
ce." The monster leaped in the air,
A bunch of typos, nothing major here.
And this is it. I'm sure I forgot about things. And I'm sure some of my feedback will look like a word salad since there was so much I wanted to say I had strayed off. That's why if you have any questions feel free to ask me. If I can, I will answer them.
One last thing, of course, everything I mentioned here is subjective(except for typos), so you shouldn't run away to change everything based on only my words. But if you see the same things mentioned in other feedback, or if you felt about your story in the same vein as I do, then you should probably change something.
And that's the end of my feedback. As usual, I didn't rate your novel, but if I had to, 1.75 stars.