Aug 23, 2023
The story finally ended! And it's a great story! I wanna say that before anything else. Even though this kind of story isn't my usual cup of tea, you managed to keep to till the end. And sorry again for not commenting much, so I'll give a lengthy review instead...
The first chapter is done really nicely, the description are pretty and the setting of the scene is great! And the chapter Irani first appeared is also really good, probably one of my favorite chapters, it's introduced very slowly but still doesn't feel like stalling.
I've said this before already but your characters are very lively, especially the scene where those two bumped into Takashi and Nao(sorry if I got names wrong, I'm not very good with them and you got a lot of characters lol), I imagined their head stacked on top of each other around a corner. But I wish the side characters have more different speech styles, it gets a bit difficult for me to know who's talking a lot of the time, and the amount of characters didn't help...
I'll also be honest and say, the football chapters are a bit hard for me to read, but that's just because I'm not into sports. I could see that you poured your passion into those chapters, and that's really beautiful! And I really don't mean bad, but I didn't like the Brazil or spanish reference that much. It felt a little immersion breaking when the story is set in Japan, it just felt a little out of place.
The underground arc is a cool twist, but I feel like a big chunk of the later half of the story doesn't really fit the wholesome criteria, it would be fine if it was shorter but it felt a bit weird to have a plot-twisting tone shift and have it stay for quite a long time. (And while talking about long, maybe I should mention that the story is 3k over the max word count...) It also felt a bit repetitive, reading your afterword, I think you wanted to hammer in the 'do not give up' mentality, but maybe I just felt it different.
But even after all those cons I pointed out, this is still a really amazing story!
