Picking this story up for the first time, I’m reminded heavily of the first story I ever wrote on this site. It also dealt with events surrounding Sombra’s rise to power and that sort of thing (and would have been much better served if I’d decided to try writing the concept later on in my career, but that’s hopefully beside the point). I’ll be the first to admit that my skills with descriptions are pretty laughably bad, but I notice that there’s something that doesn’t quite feel right about the way it’s written.

I guess I’ll just do my best to point it out. Apologies to the author in advance if this isn’t very helpful, but to me, the decription feels pretty spartan. Very choppy and brisk, presenting information about the setting passably, but not really painting a vivid picture that would be more apt to draw a crowd. Notably, the tone of it felt a bit angry, like a drill sergeant barking out orders.

Seriously, I wish I could be of more help with finding a good way to fix that description, but I’m terrible with those things, so that’s the best I can do, unfortunately. Now then, with that out of the way, let’s have a read and see how this story stacks up!

I hate to say it so plainly, but this story was not good. Usually I have a lot to say about the plot of a story, but it was quite difficult to read this thing. I had a decent idea of what was going on, and the plot seemed at least decently constructed, but it was so hard to read through this story because of all of the major technical issues, I bailed after chapter one, around 12,000 words in, and then skipped ahead to one of the final chapters to skim and look for some improvement on the author’s part, but it looked just about the same as the first part of the story. Any issues I note for the rest of the review should be looked at throughout the entirety of the story, provided you want to try and save it.

So, from what I saw, the plot was okay. Sombra puts a mental block on the crystal ponies to keep them from remembering the end of his reign, and the ponies of the present day try to figure out what happened that led up to his downfall.

I’m really sorry, I tried to read this story for as long as I could, but I couldn’t keep up with what was happening to save my life. I’ll just give the plot a passing grade because I really don’t know how it all went down.

Also, for the love of Celestia’s fuzzy slippers, don’t write a film as a script. There are site rules that you can’t write stories like that, so it goes without saying that you shouldn’t do it for even a little bit.

Grammar/Formatting— One major thing I noticed especially in the early parts of this story was the inconsistency with tense. It felt like every other sentence had a misplaced word in present tense. This is a pretty major issue to your storytelling, and I highly recommend working on fixing it.

As for formatting, there was one glaring issue that first picked up in chapter one. You had multiple characters speaking in the same paragraph, and that is a major no-no. A new paragraph is mandatory every time someone different speaks.

I also noted a number of misused words (proof instead of prove) and other errors that would normally cause me to raise an eyebrow, but I hardly noticed them due to other issues.

Dialogue/Narration— The narration is one of the story’s major downfalls. In general, when we want to write a fiction, we want our narrator to be closely tied to the characters of the story. The narrative is what fills in the blanks between the dialogue and shows us more directly how characters are feeling, what they are seeing, how they’re doing things.

And the narration in this story? It feels like it’s straight out of a textbook. Everything reads like a laundry list that someone is reading off to us to only cover the bare basics of the story. Lots and lots of details about the world and its history are obtusely shoved down our throats in the opening scenes of the story, and because of that ham-fisted presentation, they don’t stick.

My advice to fix that problem is to try letting your narrator rest. Instead of trying to reveal all of the details at once, stay your hand. Let things come out slowly, revealed to the readers as the story progresses. Avoid exposition and worldbuilding dumps at all costs, because they actively harm your story.

And please work on crafting your dialogue better. From what little bit of speaking there is, it never felt very comfortable. I’d consider trying to balance things out a bit better with more dialogue and less narration, revealing information through both to make things flow better.

Worldbuilding— The worldbuilding was done in sloppy, uninteresting blocks of exposition that did little to expand on the world the author envisioned, and it was difficult to get any sense of it.

Pacing— There is clearly little attention to the pacing of the story, because zips along lightning quick. Complex moments of character interaction are summed up a single sentence, and what I would assume are important details glossed over. Of course, some issues are more important than this, and fixing some of those will help improve the pacing.

Point of View— The viewpoint was very, very difficult to pin down, and I almost wanted to call it 3rd person camera viewpoint, but there was still things internal to the characters in there, so I’d call it 3rd person omniscient.

Show/Tell— This story does not balance showing and telling well at all. The entire thing is written like a textbook, telling everything that the audience clearly should know, and showing us none of it. Lots of storytelling value is lost when you don’t balance showing with telling.

Writing Style— There really wasn’t much to say about the writing style. Whatever comments I could make on it were lost in the avalanche of technical problems.

God, that hurt me to write all of those negative things, but they needed to be said. This story is in bad shape, and it needs help.

There isn’t much to say here. Characters, when introduced, feel like a copy/paste from a character sheet. We get this long paragraph that tells us all about them, and then they don’t appear for a while and we forget nearly everything about them.

At least the canon ponies are somewhat recognizeable, but there’s nothing that really shows their characterization very strongly. I can’t award much of a score for this category, because there wasn’t much characterization to speak of.

There’s quite a few Crystal Empire/Sombra’s Downfall stories out there, as I have written one myself. This one tried to think outside the box, or at least I think it did, but a lot of those attempts to be different fell flat. At least there was an effort made in that regard, and I can award a few points for that.

Achievement— I can’t really say it achieved much, because I couldn’t finish it. Or really understand a lot of it for that matter.

Impression— I did not like this story. It was difficult to follow, had tons of errors on a basic level, and frankly left a bad taste in my mouth.

Get an editor.

Editors are fun little dwarves who follow you around and make sure you stay away from electric fences and beehives. They are also known to help whip authors into shape and help them improve their craft.

Seriously, get an editor. A good one will help set you down the right path. A bad one will at least probably tell you not to post something that isn’t good.

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Thank you for your review, I was thinking that it would get something that low.

Sadly, I cannot fix it, that's how I wanted it to be. My first story, as a mean to get the hang of writing, was meant to be based partially on the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez and the ponies of the present looking at it through a documentary (that's based on an actual documentary that showed Jiménez's dictatorship). I do think that some details can be modified, but the story itself is what I wanted it to be and to make it different would be to go against what I wanted to write on the first place.

That doesn't mean that I don't want to go back to this, I've been planning to make a novel-like of this story that's written on the same style as Latino novels (I recommend you to research Magic Realism, it will be the style I'll be trying to write the most in the majority of my stories and latino novels aren't written in a way that you normally see on Fimfiction.net) but it will be a really long time before I go there. I want to finish other stories before going back to this, so I hope you're patient. The only thing that makes me sad is that, out of all of my stories, is the most viewed and liked. I only hope my secret projects surpass it.

Regarding the editor, I've tried on multiple occasions to get one and once I get one and pass them my story, they disappear to never come back. So I got tired of searching for them and wait to see if they'll help me. My only base to write are the books I read and the way they're written.

Thank you for your review and my apologies for such a bad time with my story, I hope you have a good time with a better story.

P.S.: If you want to get an idea of how Latinos write, and how is Magic Realism, I recommend you Doña Barbara (by Rómulo Gallegos), The Red Lance (by Arturo Uslar Pietri) and 100 Years of Solitude (by Gabriel García Márquez). You can find them both in english with the latter being the most popular and well known.