Steelborne by Naitoshadou
I… don’t exactly know what I was expecting to read when I started this story, but I can safely say it was not this. Hey, it’s yet another story I read that I not only didn’t look at the description for, but had to look at the tags afterward. [I think it would be a safe bet on anyone’s part to assume I just get assigned stories that I’m supposed to read and I just do that.] So, for anyone inclined to not read descriptions that are supposed to perfectly describe the story and took the author some time to devise, here is the CliffsNotes of what is essentially the canon CliffsNotes. The main six are AIs/robots, their pets are people, and they come together to smash some faces. The best way to describe this, at least to me, is if Oban Star Racer was about the mechs of Avatar fighting in a civil war on a fringe world of 40K [The analogy doesn't even make sense to me so shut up]. We join the adventures of Alowicious (or Owl as he is usually called) as he accidentally becomes important because bookhorse.exe experienced a fatal error and decided that it would be best to choose the “barely able to use the mech” failed pilot rather than an actually competent pilot. Oh, and Chrysalis is tangentially involved at the time of writing.

In terms of what I liked, it is one of the few stories I have read that goes for the slow burn character study approach instead of the in medias res we usually get. So far there are only four chapters in the story and all of them have been used to develop the characters and world. Everyone is fairly relatable and gave me a bit of a Pacific Rim feel with how they are acting during their downtime. Past that, one of the better aspects of this story is that it feels edited. I rarely ran into issues with the grammar and even when I did it was fairly minor issues. 

Now, for the criticisms. The first issue I have is that you could flat out change the names of every character in this story to more generic humans names and you would be none the wiser that this was a MLP fanfic and not the beginning of someones first draft for a mech book. One thing I always want to tell people is to run a find replace on their characters to make sure they are using ones that make sense. And the thing is, this story could have been made with all OCs and nothing would have changed. [Well, except Rarity, she is still running dresshorse.exe at full capacity.] Past that, the only other glaring issue is that the story suffers from a bit of bloat. There are so many characters that the author seems to want to make relevant to the story that none of them are given the time to truly shine. While they are well written, the problem is that as a reader, you need to keep track of and remember the details of around 14 characters, a feat that even professional writers have issues with. My suggestion here would be to narrow the focus down a little and have either the characters split up into two or three groups so it is easier to compartmentalize what is going on with who, or to limit the scope to a smaller group. [this is based on the assumption that going forward all characters used and explored will continue to be used to a high degree]

Final Scores:

Writing, 9/10; there are only minor issues with the writing as the issues found were not enough to bring me out of the experience.

Pacing, 8/10; Now, this story has a type of pacing that I have been crucified for, world building and character introduction with little in the way of story development. Now, I don't personally take too much of an issue with this, as seen by the score, but it must be noted that in a story based on mechs that can wreck some peoples faces, and in a world that found it necessary to make said mechs, the lack of actual mech use is a little disappointing. 

Characters, 7/10; Let me put it to you like this. The main six are A.I.s, the pets are the pilots, and Larson and Faust are the heads of the military base. In the first four chapters we are introduced to all the pets, and while well written, are about as complex as BMX bikes. Only Twilight and Rarity have been given a modicum of dialog, and suffer the same fate as the pets. And to top it off, Larson exists for about 2K words while Faust is resigned to 500 before both of them are forgotten. These are issues that are easily fixed by adding to the story, but as it stands, the character bloat is real. 

Total score: 24/30, or 8/10; The issue with reviewing this story is that nothing has really happened so far, it has basically just been character introductions. And as I said in my positives, they are good introductions. My problem comes in that I feel like I am reviewing the first chapter or two of a published book, or trying to review something like the first few hours of Steins;Gate, a lot of introduction but with nothing going on.

6913082
Thank you very much for the review. I can honestly say this scored better than I'd expected, considering. I just want to break down some of your comments from my own end.

First, I'm glad that the editing came through on this. I try very hard to catch any grammar errors when writing, and any I mess there usually get caught on my read through the day after I finish. It's hard without a proper editor, so to know my efforts there bore fruit is rather satisfying.

Second, I absolutely know what you mean by the "change everyone's names" part. A part of this is that the pets themselves get little to no actual development in the show personality wise, which is understandable considering their roles are mainly as story catalysts. This means that my interpretations are a bit unusual if you go in expecting the straight-up characters to appear. As for the AIs, we've only gotten two so far, and while it seems I hit Rarity on the head, Twilight is admittedly harder to write, mostly because of how much focus I'm placing on her in the beginning.

Finally, the character bloat. I completely understand your point here, but there is one reason for it: I see this not quite as fourteen characters, but really six. The pilots and AIs are going to be interacting enough that hopefully I'll be able to merge them into one unit as we go forwards. As for out tech crew, they're currently just side characters. I will say I have future plans for them, but for now they're nothing special, and if that isn't coming across then it's an issue I'll have to fix.

Just as a quick postscript, I wanted to mention that this story started with me imagining what the ponies would be like as mechs, then grew from there, and I began filling roles in this burgeoning world as I went, which might explain some of the bloatedness. What this means, however, is that there will be more mech fights! I wanted to slow down after the introductory fight, give a moment to introduce a few characters and lay some groundwork, but funnily enough the next chapter involves a huge mech battle that it was leading up to thus far, so don't worry, more violence to come. I needed a break from the story for a bit, and am working on another project right now, but I promise I'll return to it as soon as I can!

6913094
So, for your response, the main thing I would have to say going forward is two things.

One) If you want to have "The pilots and AIs are going to be interacting enough that hopefully I'll be able to merge them into one unit as we go forwards." the thing to remember is to either eliminate scenes where the A.I. act independently or reduce them HARD. The more autonomy we see as readers the more we see them as characters. Think of Frodo and Sam for TLoTR. We rarely see them apart yet we always regard them as separate characters. Now compare that to Jarvis in the Iron Man movies. He is his own thing but poseses so little autonomy that we just see him as an A.I. If we see the A.I. as their own thing and not as an addition to the suit then they become a character, and thus need development if you don't want the readers to question why a character just up and doesn't have an actual personality.

Two) Pick the path you want to take with how you will utilize the A.I. and pilots post-haste. The 'pets' desperately need more characterization if you are going to be going down the route of a character-driven story or you need to minimize character/character and character/A.I. interactions if you are going the route of world and/or action based. A good example of character-driven would be The Hobbit while action/world driven is The Lord of the Rings.