Heya, friends! Hope everyone had a good week! This week’s story is a pretty long one:

TA Walk Among Spirits

• MLP: FiM
• Adventure
• Mystery
• Thriller

There are many secrets Equestria hides from the ponies that live there and for one Colt and his friends. He'll see a secret first hand and the horrors it hides.

• Alt. Universe
• OC
• CMCs

ChaosDragoon · 73k words  ·  12  2 · 602 views

Oh, and, if you’re going to read through the story, I guess I should give a little warning, this story has quite a few scenes that explore some dark and mature concepts. It’s a lot darker than the tags suggest, so beware if you’re going to read this.

Anyway, on to the review!

Let me just say right away, I could barely bring myself to finish this one. Not because of any story content or anything, but just because I was so incredibly bored.

Here’s how the story starts. We enter in our OC protagonist, Skyline. He’s a colt attending the Ponyville school. Chapter 1 begins with him going to school excited, and ends with him being kidnapped in a room with the CMCs, with his wings having been removed. The CMCs have also lost their wings and horn. They, and by extension we, have no idea what’s going on here. Sounds exciting, yeah?

Don’t be fooled. This delightful air of dread and mystery is decidedly weaker by Chapter 6 when Skyline is taken to the 'Arena', where it's revealed that he has convenient magical powers for combat. The mystery fades altogether with the end of Chapter 12, when we find out exactly what the facility is for. So yeah, about that ‘Mystery’ tag…

Actually, I want to talk a bit about the story tags. Or rather, what’s not tagged. Reading through the story I can’t help but notice that Gore, Dark or Mature are not tagged in it. Maybe it’s just me being over sensitive or something, but this story contains, among other things: experimentation on children, physical mutilation, long-term imprisonment, heavily implied rape, graphic death scenes, and ponies being made into food; the scene where the last one is revealed is when Skyline realises he’s been eating the CMC’s remains. Y’know, the type of stuff Schatten might like. So yeah, a little warning would be nice, maybe.

Anyway, moving on: the story very often feels confused and incoherent. The entire story feels like just a collection of ‘things happening to Skyline’ and not much of a story at all. There are large portions of the story where nothing new is really happening, or the story just loses focus. As a prime example: Chapters 20 - 26 takes the focus of the story away from Skyline to focus on some things that we don’t really care about. Things like random Arena fights between ponies we haven’t heard much of, nor will hear much of again.

After the first shock, what plot there is moves at a snail’s pace, and is also missing many important parts that would normally form a story structure, like a clear rising action before the climax. Also, many of the plot points are a mess; there’s this part where Skyline meets a corrupted version of himself that just comes out of nowhere and serves absolutely no clear purpose in the main plot.

Here’s another huge problem. What happens between the important plot events? Well, in this story, filler. The story mostly consists of Skyline discovering some convenient new power, something bad happening to him, and him going back to the cell before the next meaningless battle. 

Oh, also, the story is filled with these weird fight scenes that take place in Skyline’s dreams. 

Skyline watched as the Scorpion lunged for him. He was about to move when the ground in front of him shot up like a trap door. When the ground fell back down, Skyline saw a Pony-sized trapdoor spider standing between him and the Pony-sized scorpion. The scorpion skidded to a stop. The spider's body was made of thick white fog while its eight legs were made of pitch-black smoke. The two seemed to size one another up for quite a while. When one stepped to the right, the other did the same. The dragon suddenly roared as the wolf howled and collided with one another and in that split second: the scorpion and spider charged one another.

The scorpion lunged its right pincer at the spider, but the spider jumped back to avoid its grasp. The spider's two front legs extended and shot towards the scorpion. They morphed into snakes, ready to sink their fangs into the scorpion. The scorpion jumped back and avoided them. The spider's legs retracted back before they changed into drills. The spider dug into the ground and disappeared. The scorpion looked around and waited for the spider to emerge. Its gaze landed on Skyline before it charged towards him. Before he could run, the earth shook and eight black vines erupted around him. Behind him, a ten-foot white rose erupted from the ground with its bud closed. The black vines shot towards the scorpion that dodged and weaved around the vines.

...okay…?

These are unexplained fight scenes between his spirit espers and these ‘red mist’ creatures. The problem is, we’re thrown directly into the middle of this with no explanation of what’s going on for the majority of the story. There is no meaning to these battles, they just feel like random nightmares; as a result, they’re not very interesting.

Making things worse is the fact that these fight scenes go into far more detail about the battles than is really necessary. In each battle there’s like, around five or six different fights going on, and the story goes into painful detail on each one in succession. It gets really boring reading about some random giant animals fighting each other after a while, and as a whole they just really, really drag.

Scores

Grammar and Use of Language
Many, many errors. Typos, wrong words, and awkward sentences are scattered plentily throughout the story. I’d suggest getting an editor in the future.

Though, the story is still readable, nonetheless.

5/10

Characters and Characterisation
Little character development, and the interactions between the characters are not very interesting either. Most of the characters feel very flat, with dialogue that doesn’t feel very realistic. Still, characters still behave kinda believably, I guess, if you don’t think too much about it.

3/10

Plot Structure and Coherence
This story is not very well structured. The story progresses with little sense of how it all fits together, and sometimes loses focus of the main action. Additionally, a lot of the story is told with no major changes in the plot or character development, giving this horrible sense of directionlessness.

1/10

The most major problems with this fic are, as with most fics, on the storytelling side of things. The story feels very directionless, with no clear focus; in fact, at times it feels like the fic is so obsessed with its fight scenes that the story is just neglected

Total score: 3/10

Feedback for ChaosDragoon

It feels like nothing happens in your story. In fact, let’s talk a bit about it. What actually happens?

I brought up using scene lists in last week’s review, so here’s an adaptation of that method: I’ve compiled a quick list of your major plot points.
Ch 1: Skyline is brought to the Arena.
Ch 5-6: Skyline realises he has unexplained magical powers, and finds out a little more about how the facility functions.
Ch 12: Skyline meets Nip Tuck and finds out about what the facility is for.
Ch 28: Skyline realises he can use his powers to control a mouse that can travel outside and starts using this to try and escape.
Ch 34 - 36: Final confrontation between Skyline and Nip Tuck (or Splice, Nip Tuck’s sister, who’s been pretending to be Nip Tuck for some reason). The fight concludes with Splice dying not even because of Skyline himself.
Ch 40: Escape.

First, Skyline’s story goal is established in Chapter 1: escape the facility. But he doesn’t actually visibly progress in that goal until Chapter 28, and the story feels very slow for the majority of the time.The story also tends to bring up plotlines that turn out to be more or less unrelated to the main story, like that chunk of fight scenes in Chapters 20 - 26, pretty much everything happening outside the facility, and the CMC scenes in general. Combine these two issues, and the story just feels like it’s constantly going nowhere. Always make sure that whatever you write serves a purpose, otherwise it’s going to just be unnecessary filler.

Bleh, it feels like I’ve been giving quite a few negative reviews recently. Let’s hope next week’s story does a little better, all this negativity’s not for me

... just kidding, I already know how next week’s review is gonna go. Let’s just say, I’m pretty happy that I managed to claim this story. See you guys next week!