Well, guess I better get a move on. I’ve read all the participating entries, so I might as well.

The following things are just my personal opinion that I’ve formed upon reading the entries. Yeah.

[hider=Flesh & Steel]Yeah. It’s good. It’s well written. It’s basically the first thought I had when I read the challenge, except I didn’t go through with it because of the second thought being that someone else was already doing that… [i]kinda[/i]. This doesn’t really feel like the story is about fighting the metal menace, does it? The story is about Adelaide and her quest to become Empress, and I really do wonder why she needed to banish Siegfried through a portal and why she couldn’t just cut his throat in his sleep earlier. Eh, there’s probably plenty of reasons.

The basics of this victory is that Magic > Technology, which works. Magic might be more situational, but used right it has no limits and is extremely unpredictable. Yeah, it’s simple enough. Your writing is good and descriptive, you’re pretty artistic in your word-choices and all that. I just didn’t entirely see anything in this entry that stood out to me as noteworthy, I’m afraid. I’ve seen plots of betrayal and coup d'etats before, and the metal army could really have been replaced with basically any threatening force as far as the main plot goes. Eh, oh, well.[/hider]

[hider=Evolution MKII][i]*reads title*[/i] I really hope this is Gundam-inspired somehow.

Nope, it was not. XD

… That was amazing. Well done. Hank made himself immediately likable, and there was always something off, but their conversation was really nice. Something off developed, and you made it into something interesting. The “Metal Age” wasn’t just something invading, it was far more interesting. And… I’ve never thought of there being a third stage behind machines, heh. Homunculus developed because machines wanted humans, huh. That’s so interesting. I have not heard of that before. Well done. I am thoroughly impressed.[/hider]

[hider=The sun rises and the world has changed]Hm. This entry, unfortunately, didn’t feel very alive. Trevor and Mikhal’s first conversation felt far too casual for the horrific nature of being invaded, and the fact they had to speak one another’s names for no in-universe reason so the reader would know felt off. The conversation didn’t feel natural. Later, while having Trevor be captured immediately might be realistic, it was very bland to read about. It feels like there would have been ways to write that in a more interesting way, somehow.

Lemitsa’s little additional bit felt really random and didn’t feel like it added anything. … Linda appeared out of nowhere and I’m not sure she made anything better, hah. Yeah, you established that this was a fantasy world, but yikes. She’s a bit out-there for me to accept out of nowhere.

Alright. I’m sorry to say, but that was somewhat of a drag to read through for me. The story wasn’t particularly interesting. I’m not sure I can pinpoint how or why, but that was one of the reasons I opted against actually writing about an invading army for my entry, because it could easily become uninteresting. More than that, the conversations felt empty to me, and I’m not entirely sure how to fix that.

This entry is long, and it isn’t even the full story. It might become more exciting later, because hearing about our heroes being successful is more entertaining than hearing about our heroes failing to protect their kingdom, but that’s not what we have here. I’m sorry to say so. Oh, well.

I’ll mention I think my own entry suffer a couple of similar problems. I don’t feel that it’s among any of my better work, hah.[/hider]

[hider=Batten Valley]Woah. Second-person point of view? Okay. Let’s see where this goes. 

… Yupp. Guessed the twist within the first couple sentences. Sometimes, I really wish I could just, like, NOT make those guesses, but I guess I’ve just been subjected to too much media for that. Oh, well.

“You” kind of works when we’re able to relate to the person we’re in, in a weird way. It goes out the window when the individual in question does something we’d never do. It’d been cool if you somehow managed to keep the person logically acting within what we’d reason ourselves to do, and THEN sprang the twist out of nowhere, heh. That would have been much more disturbing, suddenly thinking back and perhaps a death you accidentally caused or so was actually perhaps not so accidental. Eh, not necessary. You just made an entry as you wanted it. Well, this made me smile, anyway. So nicely done on that part.[/hider]

[hider=Sunday]Um. Okay. So it’s a story about machines taking over the world, told in newscasts, kinda. I’m, uh… well, good work. I’m just going to move on now, because I felt virtually nothing while reading, and as such don’t have a lot of comments that would be interpreted as helpful, hah.

Edit: Suppose that’s just me being a brick while I was writing. Okay, let me try to add something.

The concept is cool. Telling about how machine-inducement slowly takes over and fewer purists remain until nothing remains of the original humans. Everything being told in broadcasts is pretty cool, yeah. You’re pretty fancy in the editing, too, and your language is most certainly up to par. It’s simply that I, personally, did not feel particularly grabbed by the story that was going on. I realized what was happening, knew where it was going, and saw it go there. No big surprises, no characters for me to relate to, nothing in that vein. The last jump into the future went really far, which threw me off additionally. It was simply a story, told in a slightly new way, but yeah. It told the story as you wanted it told, and suppose you may have told that perfectly, I don’t know if I’d have changed anything. Others seems to have liked it, while I’m indifferent. So, yeah. Well done.[/hider]

[hider=The Program]Whelp. Uuuuh. Okay, so I’m sincerely confused right now. In the end, who was the machine? The Program? Prime? The Government? The news broadcasts? All of the above? … Hahahahaha. I don’t know who’s word I can trust. Would be cool if it was Prime, though.

Okay, that was interesting. Kudos to you for writing something interesting. The end was a bit disappointing, but perhaps that’s just because I’m stupid and don’t get it. In any case. Well done. I was really interested in what was going to happen there for a bit, and that’s a really good thing. Nice.[/hider]

[hider=My Vote]I vote for Evolution MKII, because I personally found it the most charming and interesting entry out of those available. Well done, Broken.

Shoutout to The Program, too. It’s really good. If I was more satisfied by the end, I may have considered it over the one I now voted for. Anyways, yupp.[/hider]

Edit: Here’s to the missing thing. Oh, and I added some more to Sunday, because I don’t think I was being fair there.

[hider=Act 1]I didn’t really read why this wasn’t submitted for voting, but I suppose I could guess. This story isn’t finished, is it? You didn’t even get to actually telling us what it was you were hiding, which is, like, the big thing in stories like this where you’re hiding something from the audience. I personally never got to a point where I thought I had any grasp of the situation that was going on. I also feel like this might have needed a couple examinations. These blocks of text uses a lot of complicated word-choices yet I could barely understand what they were saying in many occasions. Perhaps try to simplify just a bit? Or is that me being a bad reader? I dunno. But I did find a lot of the sentences here confusing, heh.

Merely trying to find examples I find more and more confusing bits that I swear wasn’t here first time I read it. Hah. Who was screaming? The owners of those arms trying to grab him? Why could he sink into the ground? If he’s walking on a mountain of corpses, why is it described as the ground? What’s even the dimensions of this place? Why was that blue beam recognizable, what did it mean? Wires apparently dug into him, but apparently he ran off no problem? I can imagine why, but no description of them not affecting him or so? Why did he think of grabbing the device between Rytok’s knees? Did he have the cleaver with him when he came down? Was he thrown down, but they’re apparently under a fake sky? 

Wait, now that I read it again, it was a foot he grabbed that inserted itself into his… … … I’m going to stop reading now, because apparently I was not in a state to read this when I read it, I missed way too much. I'm losing faith in my ability to read here.

Still, I was curious where it was going, and that’s a plus. I wondered what kind of world you had in mind here and read to the end… and didn’t get anything, hah. So, yeah. The first part. You had something going here, at the very least. So nicely done on that part.[/hider]