Dec 13, 2024
Aight, first story I finish this competition. As you could tell based on the notif spam, I binged this in a few sittings. It was REALLY easy to read. Not only that, but it was fun.
Despite the time constraints, the story seemed very well structured to me. If you wrote this once the competition started, I really must commend you for doing it so well. The whole life of life episodic shenanigans that give place to a more action-packed adventure as more of the plot gets revealed is an old but gold formula, and I think you nailed it. I could easily see this getting adapted as a 13 episode anime.
With that said, while I had fun and enjoyed the characters for what they were, I never really felt the connection between LUNA and Riku. I suppose the first half or so was devoted to them building a relationship, but you kind of ended everything on the same 'maybe, just maybe, things were better than they seemed' format after the chapter also followed the same basic elements (LUNA messes up, Riku gets angry, she basically forces him out of his shell). Side characters just kind of came and went, which is fine because it'd be basically impossible to develop everyone in such a short time frame/word count, but I've found that stories like these often rely on their colorful cast of characters to give it that extra flavor. I'd say Riku had a well established personality, but he never really deviated from the 'trope' so to say. LUNA, by definition, had little to none. Not saying this is necessarily a flaw since, well, it'd be kind of dumb to say 'hey, the robot designed to please its owner really tries to please his owner' but this is where I'd say side characters could help her show a different side beyond her singular goal if being the perfect waifu. If nothing else, her shenanigans could've brought a different side to Riku other than the expected mellowing out. It almost feels like I'm reading templates, not to mention Akio is basically a plot device, which leads me to the other thing.
Like I said, I think the way you structured events in a vacuum was pretty good, and I believe a big reason why this was so easy to read. The issue lies more in everything being... too easy. You mean to tell me three people took down a billionaire corporation planning to take over the world because said corporation apparently had no security system? That two randos with no fighting experience were able to handle guards with just melee weapons? Not to mention LUNA being able to casually hijack a system probably worth billions of dollars and protected by multiple sources, or her even being purchasable in the first place, assuming she was truly the key to everything. While I commend the way everything happened 'when it had to', from intro to buildup to climax, the matter-of-fact way in which increasingly outrageous things happened really broke my immersion. I don't know, I wasn't able to feel any tention because everything had an air of inevitability to it. Of course they'll win, this is a romcom (?). Evil corpo gets taken down. That sort of stuff. Even the ending felt way too lenient. If they know who Riku is, surely, they'd be able to track him and take LUNA away anyway. (Not to mention it's weird that they're apparently unable to track down the key to their evil scheme, but I digress.)
To some degree I think this might be due to the contest and this possibly being a first draft, but there's still roughly a month. It's up to you if you go back and edit, or if this is just the story you wanted to tell. As is, it's aight, and I had fun and was entertained, but that's it. It was whelming. It was aight. And maybe that's aight, too.
