In Review: A Fool's Goddess - Chapter Twenty-Eight

Hey hey, people. As usual, let’s dig into another chapter review. But first, I need to get something off my chest.

Fuck California.

I have never had nor made the opportunity to leave this accursed state, and the fact that it’s got wildfires raging out of control again reminds me of how badly I want to leave. But this place is a goddamn money sink: you never have enough to move without fear and it’s too expensive to stay (unless you have at least two roommates). Tack on how I’m basically trapped here because COVID just won’t fuck off and I’m feeling more than a little salty about my home state at the moment.

My dream is move somewhere more north, ideally where it snows, but then I run into the issue that my present job skills don’t transfer well to most northern states, where industrial work is more prominent. I mean, I could always switch to one of those, but I can’t deny that I like my cushy litigation job. It also pays well enough that I can fund my writing ventures freely, and since I ultimately value expressing myself over changing my living circumstances, I guess that means I’ll just have to accept the bullshit I keep myself in.

Still, fuck California.

Chapter Twenty-eight is another of those infamous fluff sections my past self really adored. As previously stated, there’s nothing wrong with slowing down and giving a more thorough exposition, but I think I made the mistake of dedicating whole chapters to that sort of frivolity. I was never a Nisioisin, who will fill 70+ pages with irrelevant shenanigans before the main story even starts (while remaining delightful, too), but I do think that the amount of fluff I used to throw around is no longer conducive to my writing style.

So, as it’s probably obvious now, I wanna talk about pacing again—though I will be speaking primarily in regards to opening a story. I don’t recall (and am too lazy to check) if I touched on it much back in Chapter One so let’s go over it now. I’ll start with a recent anecdote.

In an attempt to assuage my boredom and stress from the pandemic/wildfire combo, I picked up a couple video games, Inmost and Remnant: From the Ashes. They’re both very different games, being a puzzle platformer and a third-person action shooter respectively, and I had very different experiences with my first hour in each of them. That got me thinking on openings, so here we go.

Hirohiko Araki, creator of the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure series, has a wonderful book describing his tips on how to create manga. One of the most notable things he mentions is the importance of the first page and how necessary it is to make sure that first page grips the reader. He’s not first person to talk on this—and seeing as I’m typing this up, not the last either—but I think he expressed the idea very cleanly.

I only borrowed the book so I don’t have it in front of me, but if memory serves, he talked about how the first page should take hold of the reader’s attention by expressing a prominent feature of the manga. This can be through good art (or even bad art, as Araki offered), a strong story hook, or a hilarious joke. The basic premise is that that first page should immediately show the reader why the manga is worth reading.

Bringing it back to the games I played, Inmost got my attention almost instantly. The game shows you a beautiful scene where a fairy seems to bring life to a grand tree, only for it to become twisted and ultimately clash with a castle. The fairy then flits down to meet a knight, yet the knight brutally kills the fairy and discards its corpse. The game then hard cuts to you playing as a little girl escaping from her bedroom while nightmarish events occur, and I’ll leave the rest to your curiosity.

Overall, a fantastic start. In less than five minutes, I was completely invested. I ended up beating the game in two days, though to be fair, it’s also only about four hours long.

Comparatively, Remnant almost lost me in the first hour. You start off with a character creator so bare-bones it might as well not exist, then go into a cutscene where your character sails on a boat, only to wash ashore on a strange island. You then go through the tutorial which only teaches you movement and melee combat—aka the worst part of the combat—before dropping you into the hub world where you talk to a bunch of NPCs that have you running around learning system shit before you finally get your hands on a couple guns and actually get to shoot something. Then you get more NPC and system tutorial bullshit before doing what I believe was unlocking the first dungeon or something.

I don’t know—I didn’t feel like playing more by then.

I wanna frame this by restating how different these games are, both in their design and development. Inmost is from a tiny indie studio while Remnant had a much bigger budget. Similarly, Inmost had only a few hours to tell its entire story while Remnant likely intends to play with you for at least a fortnight. With that said, I still felt the difference in my “first-hour” experiences was worth dissecting.

I think one of the most prominent reasons Inmost held my attention much better was that it appealed to my intrigue. It didn’t explain much as it showed its absurd imagery, while Remnant conversely stopped and asked me to be interested in its characters and world, making it feel more like lessons I had to sit through than ones I wanted to delve into.

This isn’t to say Remnants approach is bad; many of my favorite RPGs use a similar style, but I do think Remnant did it badly. The game was clearly designed for multiplayer so its NPC interactions feel stiff and unnecessary, and the way lore is presented feels like the writing department had a bunch of ideas they liked and tried to force it into the game. Because of that, I wasn’t given the chance to want to learn more about the world—I was just told about it until I got sick enough to start skipping dialogue.

But here’s the flipside: Inmost’s gameplay is its weakest part while the sections I played in Remnant teased at some very enjoyable combat. If Inmost made me run around its world without any narrative hooks while Remnant gave me an hour of rooty-tooty point-and-shooty, I’d probably be talking about how sad it is that a short game can’t grip me in an hour while a massive shooter got me immediately.

In other words, Inmost opened with its strongest aspect while Remnant did not. If these were manga, I could tell you which one Araki would approve of.

Now, bringing it further back to writing, you should always try to open your tale by plainly stating what your story is offering. Writers will debate how much space you have to do this; some say the first chapter, others the first page, others still the first paragraph—it’s up to you to decide your introduction allowance. Just try to start off on the right foot without blowing your load entirely.

As for me, I’ve been pretty aware of the opener thing from before I first tried writing novels, so I try to make them as good as possible. A Fool’s Goddess is a drama and thus opens with a scene of abuse, Demon Healer Naberius is primarily a comedy so I wanted people laugh at an otaku trying to summon his demon waifu. Whether or not I succeeded is up for debate, but I can assure that at least the effort was there.

And if I suck, then that’s just another avenue I can still improve at.

So there—that was a fuckton of stuff that has nothing to do with the chapter. You may be wondering why I bothered, and the answer is my usual excuse: I didn’t have much to say on the chapter itself. As I said, it’s mostly fluff to help develop characters and set the tone before the “final battle”. Some of it’s good—I really liked taking the time to illustrate Libi and her prosopagnosia a little more—but I could have sped this up or combined and condensed it with another chapter. Oh well.

The chapter then closes with a cliffhanger, one that clearly implies how close to the end we are. With only two chapters left, the story will soon come to its conclusion. I know for certain I’ve got plenty to say on those last two, so I hope you’ll stick with me for the last legs of this journey.

And that’s all I got for now. I’m gonna try to enjoy some video games and writing while avoiding a fiery death and I hope you’ll do the same. Stay cool, stay safe, stay healthy, and most importantly, stay fresh.

Booyah!