The Origin/Aftermath of Mount Woe by Nanaki

Genre: Drama

Chapters: 50

Plot: 25/25

Characters: 25/25

Grammar: 25/25

Entertainment: 25/25

Overall: 100

    I knew that, if I were to begin reviewing for this site, I'd have to review this piece. It was the first completed long fic I ever read (Chrono Continuum by Cain was actually the first fic I've ever read... but I've only read through 92 chapters of the 100 he intends for it), and most certainly my favorite. It begins with an original, yet obvious plot idea: who was the King of Zeal (actually Enhasa, by his story), and more importantly, how did the kingdom of Zeal come to exist in the first place? In the course of the fic, all the unexplained bits of the game from 12,000 BC come to be explained, from Mount Woe itself (as the title would suggest) to many, many other things.

Character development... wow. This story was simply incredible in this area. All but about three of the characters the story focused on were original, and the three that were not (Zeal, Schala and Janus) were handled in such a way that gave them incredible, incredible depth, and made me look at them in a completely different way. The original characters, meanwhile, were incredibly intriguing, and realistic as well (Vigo is one of the cooler characters I've come across, in most any book), and most certainly presented the plot in an entertaining manner.

As far as grammar went, this story actually had fewer mistakes than you'd expect from something of this length. I believe I came across all of two or three typos in the fifty some-odd chapters, but nothing at all that detracted from the story; besides which, you'd have to be insane to assume that there would be NO spelling errors in nearly five hundred pages of writing.

And the entertainment value... staggering. Nanaki's fight scenes are very vivid in their descriptions, and the simple premises of some of the fights (everything from WEAPONs to Queen Zeal) were incredible. Later on, description gave way a bit to simple yellings of spell names, but nothing was present that was confusing - all the things that weren't described already had been earlier in the story. An incredible, incredible work; you should definitely read it now, if you've got some time.