The Striker

I’ll drop two scenes per post. Please critisize. Tell me what’s wrong, what could be better, and what you would do to improve it.

Also, I have a hard time getting my characters to not sound alike.

I double space everything, but the forum eliminates the spacing and makes it hard to read. Is there a tag that will let it keep it’s formatting?

Keep in mind that I have no education beyond High School, and keep the hateful remarks pretending to be useful suggestions - Arac, Zeppelin, Charlamagne - to a minimum. You may be better educated than me, but that doesn’t make you smarter than me.

Whoever guesses what game this is a fanfic of gets a brownie.

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Nice to see you post your story, Pen. Did you get the email with my comments?

And no, I can’t tell what game this is based on yet, we need more clues. Then again, how many fantasies are there that use soccer balls as weapons?

And the story reads well to me this way.

When I was in sixth grade, my parents bought me a PS1, along with FF7 and SaGa Frontier. I was so in love with these two games that I made an outline for an entie world built from these two games and my own nightmares and fantasies. I misplaced the notebook containing all my notes, and didn’t find it until a few years ago, just as I was getting interested in writing after failing at everything else in my life. Imagine my surprise at finding a chunk of my childhood - and the memories I had long since forgotten - and discovering that it was good, that I still loved it as much as I did when I couldn’t bring myself to look at girls, let alone talk to them?

So it’s not really a fan-fiction. I just stole a bunch of stuff from all the video games I played growing up. Without SaGa Frontier, there would be no striker. But that doesn’t bother me, because all creative people steal from one another. All writers are liars, thieves, and whores.

But in a good way.

There’s a lot of Discworld in here, and some Stephen King, a dash of Peter Straub, a healthy serving of Richard Mathieson, and a great big heaping pile of Thomas Tessier.

Hope you enjoy the meal.

So it is a doubletrick question. You get a brownie if you guess what I was referencing with “doubletrick”.

How ironic, I’m currently replaying SaGa Frontier right now, and it’s one of my favorite RPGs ever. Still, unless you use something truly unique to the game in your story (like the “Monster” races who change form when they absorb each other) I would never have guessed it was based on it. I was in fact thinking it was based on Captain Tsubasa (Soccer Anime).

And it isn’t so much that writers steal from each other (though many do) as that truly original ideas are rare these days; almost everything has already been tried. Oh well, as long as the story is good, it’s Ok; it’s the details that matter, not originality.

Credits? Mec Repair?

I think it’s not about coming up with an original idea; it’s about coming up with an original combonation of ideas. Everything HAS already been done before. It’s like cooking. My chicken cassarole isn’t the same thing as your chicken cassarole, though they both use the same ingredients.

Everything? What about a planet where people ride giant centipedes and are at war with the other people who ride millipedes. That hasn’t been done, especially if that is all its about.

“Credits” as the name of currency is at least as old as some 50s Sci Fi novels. And I’ve seen robots called Mecs elsewhere too (tho it’s less common.) And yeah, combining old ideas counts as giving things a new spin… though even many combinations are starting to get old. Once upon a time mixing SF and Fantasy the way SaGa does was unheard of, but today you see it in many Animes and games.

  1. People riding bugs has been done. 2. Mounted warfare has been done. 3. That specific combination has probably not been done.

If anything, you’re proving his point.

Let’s set it on a desert planet where a Messiah seeks to unite the tribes to overthrow the oppressors he was part of!

Ha ha ha.

But I don’t think Paul Atreides was part of the oppressors, even though he was related Baron Harkonenenenen… Can’t… Stop!

There are just more genres nowadays.

Banananana? In all honesty I can’t remember; it turns out they had “accepted” Arrakis to lord over, so they weren’t exactly hippies.