A Silver Lining The Assassins Story by Deathstroke3170
I have once again been rendered a very sad panda. To any of you that know, I am a gamer, and a series I have done my best to keep up with is Assassin’s Creed, so when I say this story, I was very interested. The unfortunate thing is, this story is not an Assassin’ Creed III where philosophical differences butt heads and lead to interesting questions, nor is it an Ezio trilogy where the main character has a charisma stat of 20. What we have here, in an Assassin’s Creed Unity. We get a very box standard HiE where humans rule and ponies get 360 no-scoped with the occasional moments of down time to try to elicit the feels. There just wasn’t much here to keep me motivated to continue reading.

Now I need to explain and expand on why I felt so disappointed with this story. This story uses a style of dialog that I like to call ‘the saidining’. The use of ‘X said’ is already maddening for me, but when the levels are this high, it’s an actual problem. Just about EVERY piece of dialog uses this. As many of you may know, ‘X said’ is my least liked way to convey characters speaking, and this is just about all I get for the spoken word for this story. There DESPERATELY needs to be some variety in this regard because it’s almost mind numbing to keep reading the same phrase over and over and over again.

 And this leads me into the writing. This story has obvious symptoms of ‘first-story-itus’. The major symptoms being; over explanation, stilted dialog, and major grammatical faux pas. And when I say over explaining I mean it. A large portion of character and environment descriptions get way too detailed and use about twice the number of words than would be necessary. Worse yet, in several instances, we are just told something in its entirety, no lengthy reveal, no subtle hinting, nothing. The show don't tell ‘rule’ is there to explain that just reading a description of something is not as interesting as reading the clues that lead to the conclusion serving as the description. Added on to this, the dialog is not much help in this matter as the characters don't entirely talk like people do, there is too much exposision that didn’t need to exist and would have helped the story more as an aside that the character comments on in their head. Now, I will not claim to be innocent of doing the same things in my own stories, but that does not make it the right thing to do. 

Added on to this, the pacing is off from my perspective. We are introduced to a cavalcade of characters in the first chapter but we learn jack-diddly about any of them. Now, introducing and fully exploring secondary and tertiary characters is both unnecessary and damaging to a story, but unless I know something about the characters I’m reading about, I question why they’re there. And when I need to care about one character because their misfortune is the major motivation at the beginning, the author NEEDS to make me want to care by showing them being people. And this problem continues with just about every character introduced, we don't get good examinations or clues as to what makes them tick. But that is just the characters, most sections are written in a way that you barely can get a grasp on what anything looks like or get invested in what’s going on due to a general lack of good descriptions.

Finally, the use of music cues. Criticizing this has been done to death by other people and I honestly don't care about them, they are unobtrusive and can be ignored if you so desire. My problem here is two fold: one, the links are not the most well implemented; and two, there are timing cues IN THE TEXT. Well done ambient music is best done if you embed the youtube video itself in the text so your reader doesn't have to right click to open in new window. And for the music, NEVER assume someone will read at a certain speed. This is the biggest problem with music in a story because reading speed it too variable. My father can finish an entire book in a day while it takes me about two to three. Good ambient music needs to have low dynamism, or in other words, if I turn on the song at literally any point, it should work for any point in the area where the music will be placed. DOOM (2016) Flesh & Metal is a perfect example of a song with enough variety to not be too repetitive, but uniform enough that it works as background music. Hell, all the AC OSTs are filled with the optimal kinds of music for this kind of thing.

Final scores:

Writing; 4/10, There is major work that needs to be done here, the construction of the sentences being the most important of these. While they are not wrong on a fundamental level most of the time, they are poorly done and are substandard as is.

“Grrrh, I have to come back here,” I groaned in annoyance, activating my eagle vision to find a passage underneath the throne. I pushed the stone throne away from the tile, the grinding sound causing a guard to stir in its sleep. Lifting the tile, a roughly made dark hole was in place, it led roughly 2 metres down and led around the back to the garden by the looks of my eagle vision. I jumped down and moved the heavy throne back in place with a crack of space left and walked away listening to the breathing of ponies.

Would read better as;

”Grrrh, I’ll have to come back.” I growled with annoyance at the fact that they hadn’t seen fit to include it among my things. While I would have loved nothing more than to go looking for it, the sleeping gas only lasted for so long, and I had no idea how the two princesses would respond after finding out I had escaped. I activating my eagle vision to look for the entrance to any hidden passages that might have been there. 

I eventually found one sitting right underneath Celestia’s throne. I quickly moved forward and began examining the throne. I found that, while heavy, it could be moved, given the person had both the strength and will. I pushed the throne forward with a fair bit of my strength, finding eventually moving it far enough that the distinct outline of a trapdoor was revealed along with two grooves on both sides of it, likely tracks for the throne. The sound of the stone grinding against the tiles caused at least one of the guards to stur in his sleep, but that didn’t worry me, I knew the strength of the sleeping gas.

I grabbed ahold of the recessed handle that was inset in the door and lifted up, revealing a dark, roughly cut hole. Judging by what I could see, the tunnel went about two meter down and looked to go towards the back of the castle, leading to what I assumed was the garden. I jumped down, letting the trap door fall back into place. Reactivating my eagle vision, I noticed that there was a crank along the left side. Figuring I knew what it was for, I began to turn it, and unsurprisingly, the sound of the throne moving back into position resonated through the tunnel.

I kept cranking until I felt I had moved the throne back just far enough that it would be difficult to tell that it had been moved. I then began my way down the tunnel at towards wherever it would lead me. The muffled snoring of ponies being the only sounds other than my own footsteps that I could hear as I walked.

With the obvious ‘stop having everyone say things’ being the next issue that needs immediate addressing.

Pacing; 4/10, As you might see from how I corrected the writing, the pacing here is a bit too fast. Things just happen and are not given the proper time to fester or sink in, making things feel rushed. Now, how I think I write is on the border of obscenely slow, but I like to imagine that if It takes me four paragraphs to write what was said in one just to make it sound right to me, the pacing is a little too fast for a story.

Characters; 6/10, They were good for what they are. Were the issues with the writing and pacing not have been here, I’m sure that I would have started to come to like them more, especially seeing as chapter 7 actually takes the time to start humanising a few characters.

Crossover Accuracy; 5/10, While this is mostly true to how the Assassin’s Creed games work, I have played all the main-line games+Rouge, Liberation, and Freedom Cry, and to my recollection, eagle vision in not X-ray vision. This would be a small issue were in not for the fact that eagle vision is used in literally every chapter in this way.

Concept; 5/10, The idea of an assassin in Equestria is an interesting one, especially when you factor in the philosophical differences, but this is never really delved into. Rather than reading about Celestia, Luna, or even the assassin himself having his views and beliefs challenged, delving into people’s true convictions, we are given a story that just runs us through the paces of a human winding up in equestria with wildly superior (insert factor here) and just generally being better than everyone while there.

Total score; 24/50 or 4.8/10, The idea of the story is good, but generally poor writing, too fast pacing, inaccuracy to cannon, and a fairly unoriginal implementation of what could have potentially been here just resulted in a substandard story overall. This story does have it's dedicated followers that love it and that's great, all stories deserve this, I simply wish to express that there are some glaring issues that keep it from being the next Stardust.

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Thanks so much for your input. I really do need help writing lmao and you have helped me by criticizing whatever was necessary for the future of this story. I will be following your guidelines and see how it works from there.