Tales of Revelia: JRPG-styled Fantasy Webcomic

[Zwiebelchen]

Oh god, I just wrote a very lenghty and in-depth review of the first 32 pages of this webcomic, along with a critic of what I like and what I don't like, then the "you need to log in again after being afk for too long" prompt ate my entire post. -.-

Great...

I uh... I'm sorry that I won't go through all the details I wrote earlier anymore and keep this new critic a bit shorter:


I think this comic is missing a "hook" yet. As you intend this to be an OOTS style character-driven storytelling, you must give the reader something to suck them in instantly. This is why OOTS starts with an "in medias res" opening and constant D&D jokes. The IMR opening instantly throws up questions and the jokes keep the reader entertained until the characters have been fleshed out strong enough to stem the tension of the story on their own.

I get that this is supposed to make fun of JRPGs and that this is exactly how JRPGs usually start with, but by doing this your comic ultimately suffers from the same problems as the games it is trying to parody, by playing it too straight.


What I'm saying is: so far, we are in an extremely generic environment with an extremely generic quest. And when it's not the setting that sucks you in, the characters must make up for that. But here we have two characters that didn't show any interesting personality traits yet. There was a hint of Aria in the situation where she jumped to attack and then recognized that she should problably have announced that first. This suggested a hasty, rash personality, but it wasn't elaborated further yet.
Other than that both she and the second PC are extremely generic so far.

The pitfall that many new authors fall into is that they obviously know much more about the characters than the reader does. As such, they know that there are cool and interesting reveals coming. However, what they don't recognize is that a character must be interesting even before the reveal happens, otherwise the reader simply does not care for that character until then.

If you have a "to be revealed" trait on a character, you either need an obvious secondary trait to grab the reader's attention or have to foreshadow the revelation so that the reader knows that there is something up with this char.
You could also create a situation that builds immediate conflict between the protagonists to keep the reader on track until the central conflict can be explored. A common trope for that is to give hints of sexual one-sided attraction from one character to another. Or negative sentiments against certain ethics like generosity ("I like you, Sir PC, but sharing your wealth without reason is just dumb!"), being a push-over, etc. ... there's countless possibilities.


So far, so good.
I really like the art and the idea of this. It's just missing momentum yet.