TSun Never Sets

• Equestria Girls
• Devil May Cry
• Dark
• Adventure

The gates of the underworld are opening for the first time in two thousand years. It's up to Sunset Shimmer, demon hunter extrordinaire, to slam 'em shut.

• Violence
• Gore
• Profanity
• Crossover
• Human
• Alt. Universe
• Sunset Shimmer
• Flash Sentry
• Starlight Glimmer
• Sci-Twi

CrownofDissonance · 202k words  ·  160  5 · 4k views

Woah, mama, someone tried to put "long" into the "long description".
Long (unnecessarily long) story short, Sunset is Dante. That's it.
Sunset is Dante, Nightmare Moon is Satan, or whoever is the BBEG of Devil may cry, and improbably large anime swords and impracrical anime guns will be involved in copious amounts.

You know what? Yeah, it can work. I'm psyched. Let's have ourselves some gratuitous violence, edgy cool one liners and more demon gore than you can shake a keyblade* at!

*Full disclosure, I have neither played not watched a single full episode of Anything DMC related. I'm pretty sure keyblades aren't in this thing, but not, like, 100%

SP/00- Darkness May Dawn

record scratch sound here
Wait. What.
The first chapter, which is actually wroth chapter, is actuay not the first chapter but a first special chapter added three years into the writing of the fic, and you are not supposed to read it first, but go back to it, once you read the whole story?
I haven't started reading yet, but I am already awash in the sea of confusion.

OK. Fine. If you say not ti read it, dear author, who am I to argue?

Let's go straight to 00- The Legendary Demon Hunter

Woo!

Nope. No woo. Zero woos.
Because we start with an expo dump. Which, like mostly repeats the long description. Shee.
Way to kill a mood.

But fine, we're done with expodump! Now something wills surely happen?

Weeeel, kinda.

There is a lot of description. Pretty accurate, if I recall that anime I almost watched, but tootslly unnecessary.
And more history expodumps about this AUs version of EQG first movie.
But at least the plot is moving forward.

And then finally demons appear, and there is a fight.

Woo.

Its about as anime as you'd expect - a lot of play-by-play, a soundtrack, that thankfully is not force-fed via YouTube link, a lot of things that would look pretty tad on the screen, but don't quite work in the text,etc.
But let's not lie to ourselves - that's pretty much what this fic exists for, and it does its best to deliver.

Also Sunset here has a serious oral fixation. Is it a DMC thing? I think its some sort of joke about PG censure in US media, in which case its clever.
Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Either way the fight is generally not very threatening or consequential, but it sets up the tone for the story, showcases Dante Shimmers powers, and segways reasonably into another phonecall, with Celestia.

It is equally ominous and not super informative, but then SUDDENLY Rarity is under attack, so the next mission has started.

Woo..

Sunset rides out to save the damsel in distress, as one does when they are anime protagonist with a giant sword, and all is right in the world, when something completely unexpected happens.

We have a PoV switch.

Wow.

You know what? Credit where credit is due, I did not expect that. I think its a staple of the DMC games, but nevertheless, I did not expect it.
And done pretty well too.
Good job, mate, keep it up.

Our new PoV is Flash Sentry who is like a supernatural SWAT guy. No idea how it relates to DMC Canon, but I assume it does. He is a lone rebel who plays by his own rules, and has an appropriately tragic backstory, so it's all very fitting.
After expositing this all over himself and the readers (thankfully, at least not in a form of a monologue) he speeds off to fight some demons.

Fight-fight-fight, non-Sunset Shimmer characters are somewhat overwhelmed, the author makes a decent funny, Sunset arrives to kick some demon flank, and the fight goes on.

Now the fight itself is, again 100% chess piece and play-by-play, but the author keeps a good grip on hsi characters, managing to fit in quite a bit of shown, not told dynamic, through their fighting styles and dialogue. It's clunky, but it's there.

They fight the miniboss - the demon version of Rarity. Things are quieting down, when a robot dog appears steals Rarity's magic, and runs away.

Alright, I'm done for the day.

All in all, it was exactly what I expected, maybe even slightly better.

To wit:
The grammar is good. Not great, some words are wrong, occasional grammar thing crops up, etc, but overall, it's readable.

The style is simple, works well with the genre, and I could pretty much imagine it as if I were watching the anime/playing the game, and I haven't even played any DMCs. That being said, the play-by-play fights are boring, and the characters are way more DMC than EQG.
As I said, there is decent, if a bit clunky dialogue, occasional decent joke or a clever turn of phrase, and I liked the PoV switch.
That being said, overabundance of exposition and weapons/descriptions porn is not doing you any favors.

The plot:
Reasonable. It pretty much follows the staples of the genre, and I would not at all be surprised to learn if it is a straightforward novelisation of the anime or a game with a pony job bolted on.

All in all, I say its a 6/10,going all the way into 8/10 if you re here for a DMC fic with minimal pony paint job, detailed descriptions of anime-style punching and nerding out over not-quite-DMC lore.

Thats it for the day, but I'll be back.

Aye, ‘preciate the review. And you did two chapters, neat. That’s one more than I was expecting.

That being said, this is exactly what you read on the tin- if the videogamefication of an already existing world isn’t exactly what you’re into, it might be best to put it down now. The play-by-play fight scenes and overexposition are basically what the story’s built around- if those are a detractor, 30 more chapters that expand on that may not be your speed. The zeroth chapter is the threshold test here, that’s about all I would put anyone through to give it a thorough judgement. You’ve pretty much nailed it here; it’s just the eqg cast reimagined as action game heroes and they fight bad guys, strip off all the flavor text and that’s the long and short of it.

As for the special chapters, I’m not really sure how they’d affect story comprehension- especially since I wrote them after the story was finished. Probably is a bit confusing in hindsight, maybe I’ll get around to finding way to restructure all of that better sometime lol

7508815
If I had a single piece of advice to give - there is a bit of a difference between the visual medium (such as game or anime) and written one. It's ok to make complicated, cool and convoluted fights with animesque plans and cheesy dialogue, but when writing it is also very important to portray the emotions and the stakes - through description, word choice and cadence of the text.
This is the difference between "e2-e4" - "e7-e5" chesspiece laundry list of things being done and something that is interesting to read.
You've got some of the basics in place, but I would urge you to work on that side of your prose.

7515244
Probably should mention that a lot of conventional notions of writing were thrown out the window in the making of this. That much was obvious, though. This isn’t trying to invalidate any points you made, as I’ve said you’ve pretty much nailed it here, but allow me to share some thoughts anyway.

I had to decide at the beginning on the amount of “proper creative writing” I was going to write into in the story, since that directly detracted from how I wanted to write it. Especially in drafts of the first few chapters, things ended up being way too dense or lengthy for my tastes, or only took away from the idea I wanted to make. I ultimately chose to cut down on things like emotional conveyance and creative word choice in favor of emphasizing the direct description of the action sequences, then just made everything else support that choice to the best of my ability. “Chesspiece laundry list of things being done” was what I came to write at the end of the day, since that’s what I’m into, so anything that didn’t help that along got gutted or spread thin.

Totally understandable if that doesn’t qualify as interesting to read for you though, or for most anyone else—it’s why I’ve got that giant warning label on the front page. I’m actually surprised you gave it a high of a rating as you did all things considered. It’s refreshing to get feedback from outside of the narrow target audience.