Player Comments on The Lonely King

"The Lonely King" wasn't a bad piece of writing, but it had some major issues that just made things seem a bit lazy.

The grammar didn't have any distracting issues, the narration was in an interesting and somewhat different style that I liked, and the plot was definitely more engaging than that of most noob stories.
However, some parts of the plot did seem to move a bit fast. I felt like I got most of the important information dumped on me in a couple paragraphs.

The single biggest issue of this story is the branching. Spoilers for you faggots who read reviews before stories: There's effectively none. Even the little optional side quest we are given ends up being meaningless, because instead of tracking the results with a variable or something, the endings come down to some lazy honor system of sorts where the reader can choose an end based on whether or not they have obtained an artifact--with both options being an option no matter what.
And, yes, there are multiple endings. think there were five, but I may be remembering incorrectly. However, those endings did not come about as a natural consequence of past choices. They came down to the reader directly deciding how the story would end.
Even if the only things that changed were giving the reader a choice in what to have the main character do rather than a direct choice of what ending to read and giving them a variable rather than a tacky note to only choose certain links if you have a certain artifact, this would have been much better.


I think the author has potential to do a pretty good job with a story-game, but he needs to be less lazy with the choices.
Seriously.
This is supposed to be a choose-your-own-adventure, not a choose-your-own-end.

I am mixed about this story. I liked the plot, twists, and intrigue! I did not like the half-done choices. I almost wish the story had committed to be linear because the choices were so poorly done that they made the story worse. As a simple short story, I would give this a 5 rather than the 4 I gave it.
Do not read if you do not want spoilers...well too late it was sort of spoiled, but it gets worse if you keep going.

General comments - You took too long to get to choices. Even quick-death choices would make the story seem less linear. It also would provide some ways to"lose".
-you use a ton of commas, for the most part, this is good and well done. There are some mistakes, but the sentences are interesting
- Your descriptions are amazing, I felt the tone and imagery worked well!
- Your world and main character had a lot of intrigue! They had a definite tone/feeling, but they were not explained in detail--this made me want to know how they got this way! It added this element of mystery.
- Choices were strange when they did exist, the reader does not know what is happening when he chooses something. The last choice is basically "choose what ending you want!"
-Dialogue was not well done. The punctuation was bad, and the conversations felt unnatural. Sometimes multiple people spoke in the same paragraph which is disorientating. Also the last of dialogue tags sometimes made it hard to tell who was talking. Basically anytime a character spoke the story got worse, but it was otherwise well-written. Make the conversations reflect how people might talk.

Specifics:
New and old friends - 2nd to last para, need to add "at her" to the first sentence to know what character is staring at initially.
Town with a secret- make the choices "Help Merchant" and "Don't Help Merchant"
Sword of sealing - 5th para: "lond" should be "long"
-The color thing is very interesting!
- Choice felt like it didn't matter until the last page.
- Alesis does not use a weapon...
The Dark Castle - This page is fantastic! Descriptions are gorgeous. The dialogue punctuation is all that is wrong with this page.
Promise of purpose- Here was the only real choice in the game
-conditional links can be used to remove choices.
-I like the different endings, but they are too similar! You need to change something the character does that leads to the differences in endings and work that into the choice. for example: "surrender to the beast" "Attack it directly" "attack from the side" "throw your sword"
-The plot twist and conflict about Alesis is so good! Work with that more! Talk more about the sense of loss and how you want to kill the creature, but not the girl you met! Work that into the choices.
Last pages- so similar I can review all at once...
- very good fight scene and interesting endings!
-change something the character does that leads to different endings, not the weather.
-Made me want a prequel or epilogue! I want to know how the world got to this dark state and what the creature was! This added so much intrigue it was great!

All in all a great linear story. Work on the dialogue, it can add somuch if done right.

This author knows their way around a sentence--there's interesting and evocative description, and they have a good eye and ear for sensory details. The narrative voice is engaging as well, particularly in setting a moody atmosphere: I thought the overall maudlin tone was set well right on the first page, and that is not always easy to do. The one thing I would recommend is working on natural sounding dialogue--that was the one standout weakness of the prose style.

The choice structure, however, had some serious problems. Instead of any sense of what a choice is or does, we get instead something like "Expressionless"--is it a tone, a mood, a (lack of) facial expression on the part of the MC, or something a bit more abstract and poetic? And so the choices--and there are only a couple of them--turn out to be sort of crapshoots.

One of the choices at the end offer a with-sword or without-sword selection, and again the phrasing there felt a bit clumsy in execution. A tiny bit of variable use there would help.

Overall, the story felt--was--very linear; it was a pleasant read, with several moments of authentically good writing. I would be very interesting to see what this author could do with a branchier structure and a longer story that gave more autonomy to the player.

i think it cool

just wished it would be longer

The story, while mostly linear, was still decent. It is a nice tale of adventure, certainly respectable.

> CHARACTERS
Ah, so let's take a look at the characters. You have certainly put detail into the characters, and throughout the story, they remain true to themselves. Furthermore, the characters develop as the plot unfolds, and I always love seeing that.

> PLOT
The plot itself was somewhat disappointing, but it is woven into the story well, and the characters do interact and develop with the plot, so I guess it is, to an extent, made up for. I feel like the plot was somewhat unrealistic, and did not exactly complement the rest of the story.

> SETTING & DETAILS
You have implemented background details into this story, and the setting remained consistent, which is nice. However, occasional poor word choice and typos tend to break the flow of the story, so I would strongly suggest proofreading each page before moving on to prevent such errors. I feel like some scenes lacked proper detail, as well.

> OVERALL
All in all, this story was pleasant to read and pleasant to reread. It was, by all means, a good story. However, I would recommend reading the story prior to publishing to make sure the flow remains unbroken throughout the story.
I look forward to seeing your next work.

This has a lot of potential. The characters are interesting, there is plenty of action, and the setting is rich and full of history. The imagery in several places is very nice.

However, it is mostly linear, more a story than a game. There is only one key choice in the middle and a few at the end. But the choices don't really make sense as written - i.e. they don't read as asking you what you want to do. They are more like section titles or choosing a mood. This disassociates the reader from the tale. It would be a more 'fun' game if some of the action scenes had actual choices.

Overall the language is good, but there are many sentence fragments, run on sentences, and minor errors. Dialogue between two characters is often incorrectly put inside the same paragraph.