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The Story Of Castle Wars

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~>|+|<~ Review of “The Story of Castlewars” by Poller5 ~ Dav_dog92 ~>|+|<~

First, I’d like to apologize for the delay in the review of this story. I realize that I’ve been taking a very long time to review lately. Anyway, here is the review…

Note: Although this is a re-review, the scores are not comparable as the format has been changed since the first review. An increase or decrease is due to differing values, not necessarily an improvement or decline in quality.

~ Spelling and Grammar – 32/40 ~

This was pretty good. I did*’t notice too many mistakes, but I saw a few typos, run-on sentences, and some formatting errors scattered about.

- Formatting Multiple Paragraph Quotations {throughout the story}
Whenever a single character’s quotation is unbroken throughout several paragraphs, quotation marks should be placed at the beginning of each paragraph but should not close until the last paragraph of the monologue. (I believe that you did*’t put any quotation marks in the paragraphs in the middle of the speech.) This looks like:

“First Paragraph.

“Middle Paragraph.

“Last Paragraph.”

I would advise you to limit the number of monologues in the story.

- Formatting a Quotation {page 1, post 10}
"Yes, they leave tomorrow," he said, "They hope to catch your forces off guard." > This could be considered a run-on sentence, as you have not stopped the first part of the sentence (“Yes, they leave tomorrow,” he said,) or used something to join this with the latter part of the sentence. This could be fixed in several ways, but I think the best would be to change the comma after ‘he said’ to a period.

02-Mar-2008 20:24:05

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Also, I noticed similar problems with word overuse throughout the story. If you constantly use the same words over and over within a small amount of space, it becomes very tiring to read, almost like when someone talks to you in monotone – their voice is so boring you do not want to listen to it anymore. Vary the sentence structure enough so that the reader is forced to stay focused on the story. One might have to pause and think about you’re saying in order to understand, which keeps the reader from growing bored. Here’s another place where you were overusing things: {page 46, post 2}

The **dragons** soon made the same deduction Gul’dan had: the dragonfear had worn off. The **dragons** lowered themselves in the sky until they were scarcely fifty feet above the Army of the Alliance. [And the next paragraph continues this.]

- Wording {page 41, post 2}
Through the darkness bombarding his mind Gul’dan thought he felt something brush up against his conscience but pushed it away, sure its intent was malign. > When I read this sentence, I had a hard time understanding it at first. Although it’s good to vary sentence structure in order to keep the reader focused, it’s not good to confuse them. There’s just too much going on in this sentence to keep it all straight. Try re-wording the sentence: Though Gul’dan’s mind was bombarded by darkness, he still felt something brush up against his conscience, but he pushed it away, sure it had malign intent. (‘Malign’ is an adjective that should be used before the noun.)

I noticed wording problems like this in other parts of the story as well. The best way to fix this is to break the sentence into smaller pieces so that it is easier for our minds to “digest”. Also, as I have done here -- re-word the sentence until it flows in a 'straight line': meaning that you don’t have to back up to an earlier part of the sentence to figure out what the end of the sentence means.

02-Mar-2008 20:24:23 - Last edited on 02-Mar-2008 20:28:49 by [#WPO3NUGNZ]

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---
As I said, few mistakes, but there were some formatting issues. Read the whole thing again, read it aloud, have someone else read it aloud to you: any of those will work to catch wording errors.

~ Plot – 42/50 ~

I like the premise of the story. Typically, I’d say that this is too much game-like and not enough story-like, but you have done a good job of stretching CW creatively. I think that it flows well and that you have a good balance of “downtime” and action in the story. The biggest thing I noticed was pacing. Despite the fact that it moved well, I think that it moves too slowly for a primarily war story. There’s too much waiting around for the next enemy to arrive and then the actual battle is described in agonizing detail. Remember that battles are usually fast-paced, and it all actuality there’s more stuff happening than is realistic to describe. Try to focus on the actions of the main character(s) and toss in details about the overview of the battle.

Also, describing the scene at each fortress is taking up some of this pace time. I think that you should keep that stuff on the down-low unless something really important is happening. Again, toss in details – and lots of them – whenever necessary, but don’t bore the reader away from the main part of the story with the “sideshow”.

02-Mar-2008 20:24:56 - Last edited on 02-Mar-2008 20:29:26 by [#WPO3NUGNZ]

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~ Conflict – 30/40 ~

I think a problem with a lot of war stories is that they don’t provide the motivation for Zamorak’s part of the conflict as much as they do the good side’s motivation. Why does Zamorak wish to control the world? Why is he using these two fortresses as a means of doing it? And if he wants some sort of revenge, why does he? Obviously, the good side’s motivation is that it wants to repel the bad side. In this case, you need to think about individual motivations for each of the groups and characters involved. Tell us why they are risking their lives in spite of such power? Aren’t they worried that they may die and that their efforts won’t benefit them? Shouldn’t they be selfish and flee? Think about all of each character’s personality regarding these decisions: they have flaws and that might sway their actions in some way.

* Characters – 40/50 ~

There are two main problems that I’m noticing with the characters, and these problems are, unfortunately, compounding to make them seem even worse. Number one, the characters on both sides seem to have flat personalities – that they’re purely good without any selfish inhibitions or that their purely evil without any conscience at all. This causes the characters to seem bland, which is the second problem. As I mentioned earlier, the characters on the good side are risking their lives for this cause. I want to know if any of them are thinking about what they could do to save their own skins without worrying about the others on their side. On the bad side, they’re just killing away as if they are robots – do they not have consciences?

02-Mar-2008 20:25:15

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No matter how evil or good a character is, they’ve got to have something inside of them that makes them consider doing something that might harm their side of the war. The good guys might have just a tinge of selfishness that would lead them to desert. The bad guys might have a tinge of remorse and hesitate as they’re about to kill someone. I’m not saying that half the army has to run away or even that anyone would run away. But if you throw in some form of doubt in their mind, it makes them seem so much more interesting. It also makes them more realistic, as no real being is perfectly aligned to whatever their cause is. They can be 99% good, but that remaining percent makes them 100% more real.

~ Dialogue – 38/40 ~

This was very good. I liked the balance of dialogue that moved the action and dialogue that supplemented the action. I also liked the couple of monologues that you threw in to give the armies a morale boost. The only thing that I came across was a tinge of emotional “backup” in various characters’ words. Basically, they were feeling very emotional at the time, but you did*’t convey it well enough in how you described how they were speaking or how you punctuated their speech. If you know of any certain high-emotion period, I would go back and make sure that the dialogue is good.

02-Mar-2008 20:25:33

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~ Description – 28/40 ~

This was the worst part of the story, I think. Now, before you fret about this, let me make it clear that the descriptions were vivid and great and that I saw plenty of similes and metaphors and other fancy things like that. However, the description was excessive in many ways. You would describe something very simple in about twice as many words as it really needed. It wasn’t that you did*’t describe it well, but it was just too long of a description. The whole story was just wordy – you used much too many words on everything and it just becomes too hard to stomach it all. I was reading slowly because there was so much extra junk in there that I had to keep going over everything in my mind. Instead of flowing like water, this was like turning on the faucet and oatmeal coming out. That sounds kind of funny, but it** true. Go back and cut any word that is not vitally important to the description you were making at the time. As a bonus, this will help to speed up the pace a bit.

~ Style – 35/40 ~

The entire thing was going well and seemed very original until you brought Zaros into the picture. Throughout the whole story, the gods were worried about some new power arising and not knowing if it was good or evil. I don’t know too much about this aspect of Runescape’s history, but I do think that the gods would have figured out that it was Zaros a lot faster than they did. This really disappointed me right about the end of the finished part of story. I hope that you are able to twist this development in such a way that it** interesting; otherwise, this may go the way of all the other cliché war stories of the forum.

~>| Total Score: 245/ 300 points ~ 81.7% |<~

Overall, this was a great story. I did enjoy reading it, but you are going to have to work on wordiness and pace. I definitely think that there are parts that need to be sped up to keep things interesting.

~> This is review number 33/92. Completed on March 2, 2008 <~

02-Mar-2008 20:25:59

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