Z Reviews: Double Feature Part 2: The Mighty Warrior of Epicness

This time's review will be of The Mighty Warrior of Epicness , authored by Shinigamisparda, reviewed by me, TheifofZ. If you like this review, check my blog for other reviews, or follow this link to go to the post containing the mission statement and a list of all the stories I've reviewed so far.
As always, here's how I'll be doing this; First I'll cover the story idea, and writing style and quality of the story. Next, I'll look at the actual story itself, including character motivation, action (if the story has any), and the general plot. Finally, I'll throw down my egotistical and opinionated rating, declaring exactly how good, or bad, I thought this was. And yes, I will do my best to avoid spoilers for the plot IF POSSIBLE. If the spoiled events are integral to the story, I'll throw down spoiler warnings instead, and ask that you proceed with caution. Always remember, folks. This is all opinion. Disagree with me? Think I'm dead wrong, or spot on? Argue about it in the comments if you want. It's cool. Noone has a truly humble opinion, after all, but make sure you read the review first.
As this month I'm allowing authors to make one special request for the reviews, this review is to be accompanied by the song Clash on the Big Bridge, which is appropriate. You'll see why, trust me.
With all that out of the way, here we go!!

Oh, man. Honestly, I'm psyched to finally get to review this story for a few reasons, the first of which being the fact that, of all the LoHaV (Humans acting Villainous? Why not Heroes and Villains? So much better.) stories, this one is my favourite. (Easy to see, it's in my actual favourites list. Unlike the others.) It's also a super fun, over the top and hammy crossover between Final Fantasy and MLP: FiM, and I am quite the FF fan. (Except 7. But we're not getting into that.) Understandably, I was pretty happy when I found this awhile back, but fear not, I may be totally biased, but I've never been one to let that get in the way of really tearing into a story.
The Mighty Warrior of Epicness is a strange and meandering tale that can't seem to stick to one genre. Sometimes it's a touching or sorrowful drama, and others its a slapstick filled comedy, though at it's heart it's an action based story about Gilgamesh trapped in Equestria. The writing is usually well done, with strong character development and an easy descriptive style that makes imagining the scenes fairly simple, and there aren't many problems with how the story moves.
The overarching tale follows Gilgamesh, the over the top and hammy warrior from the Final Fantasy series as the main character, (sort of. it's a LoHaV story, after all.) while he attempts to gather his scattered weapons that were hidden away, and at the same time tries to get Celestia to stop hating him, even though he spends just as much time annoying her no end. And... that's about it, really. There are hints of some vaster evil intent on foul... evils, but there's very little real information about it, and so the plot tends to move like a glacier, all slow motion until something comes unstuck and everything hurtles forward again. Because of this, some of the character interaction can come off as alittle sudden and out of character sometimes, such as Twilight's rapid shift in demeanor towards him and Princess Luna's sudden and giant crush, though that's being explored as more of the past comes up. To be honest, the worst offenses are in the crossovers between other LoHaV stories, as the writing styles sometimes clash, and curdle the result.

The biggest issue is that, in fact, Gilgamesh has easily the strongest, and hammiest, character, and that tends to blur the secondary character's strengths or overshadow them completely, and not just when reading the story; there are moments when the author seems to forget what another character is suppose to be like when Gilgamesh is on the scene. These moments can be hard to spot, honestly, because the character of Gilgamesh is written with so much extra pork that sometimes he practically oinks, so it's just as easy to lose track of the others as it was for the author.
Now the biggest portion of this fanfic, one of the primary selling points even, is the combat. Gilgamesh is renowned throughout gaming history as a Warrior, and he's been a Break Out fan favourite from Final Fantasy ever since he first strode onto the scene in Final Fantasy 5, and that carries over to this story too. The combat is fast paced and intense, with ridiculous over the top attacks and destruction of the surroundings usually only seen in Dragon Ball Z. It's all fairly fluid, too, and it's incredibly easy to imagine the blow by blow fight without trouble. Here, the biggest flaw is that the author has a huge fixation on Jo-Jo's Bizarre Adventure, and to a lesser extent, fighting games in general, and directly lifts many of the attacks Gilgamesh uses from these. It's not terrible, and it certainly doesn't kill the story, but I'm left wondering on occasion when we'll get to see Gilgamesh use awe inspiring swordsmanship that he's known for, instead of knock-offs of other techniques.

Overall... I give this story 7.5 out of 10 moustaches, and 5 out of 5 Twilight's driven insane.

Any opinions or major points you'd like to make go in the comments below. Advice, Major Corrections, story suggestions, and fan mail can be PM'd to me. ... if I ever get fans. HAH!

Final Note: Now that I've said all that, I'm going to just say that sometimes it's better to enjoy a story like this by fetching your inner child and kindly asking them to take over for you. The story is meant more to have fun than to be serious, and it's clear even the author is having a blast hamming it up with as much bad-assness as he can cram into his keyboard. And I think that's the best part about this story, really.