Eclipsed Moon – Review by ReviewAnon

By: ReviewAnon (name given by the readers)
Originally posted: 27.02.2016
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PREMISE
You play as Mikage Chiba, the first (technically second) daughter of Usagi Tsukino, and the second (technically third) bearer of the Sailor Moon mantle. Or you were, anyway. Things happened, bad things, and you turned that responsibility over to your little sister. It's been a while since then, and the nagging concern in the back of your mind that your little sister might end up facing the same trials you did have yet to cease.

This a world based off a continuation post-canon of Sailor Moon, with a new set of Senshi awakening to protect the world their parents once saved... But that's not your story. You aren't a Senshi, not anymore. Just a big sister with a lot of problems, and you're going to make damn sure your baby sister doesn't end up like you did.

Good thing masked vigilante-ism runs in the family, right dad?

[spoiler]Don't even get me started on masks.[/spoiler]

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REVIEW pt1

Mechanics.

Let's take 3.PF and then homebrew it to shit and toss in a lot of alternative rulesets. I'm not going to waste a lot of time here explaining the mechanics behind Eclipsed Moon because it is literally an entire TTRPG system that's been hacksawed apart and frankenstein'd back together (as 3.PF is apt to do) to serve as the basis to this quest. Luckily I have previous experience with the system, so it was all fairly intuitive to pick up and understand for me - As I suspect it would be for most people on /tg/, since I like to assume we've all at least had a tangential understanding of certain systems.

What I will say is that it runs on Mythic tier PF with e6 rules (meaning normal humans never actually go past level 6). I had some misgivings about the use of a d20 (with crit priority, meaning success and failures take priority amongst Best Of rolls), and the application of one of the more grid-oriented systems being used for Theater of the Mind type play... But aside from being a little awkward here or there, it actually plays out decently.

It helps that after 121 threads, no one is actually past level 6/7 yet, meaning that the rocket-tag and power imbalance 3.PF is infamous for at higher levels hasn't reared its head yet. Also, the crits themselves are typically translated into degrees of success/failure instead of world-ending disaster/ridiculous victory.

Note: [spoiler]Rocket-tag in higher levels may be counter-balanced by the 3.5 Wounds/Vitality system going on? I don't have any experience with that ruleset at higher levels, but it seems made with that sort of thing in mind. Any comment on this as an aside? I'm kind of interested in its application.[/spoiler]

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REVIEW pt2

Plot.

Somewhere buried in here there's an ongoing plot about remnants of the Earth Kingdom, Elysion, attempting to resurrect the old queen in order to reinstate their rule. Involved in this is the typical Sailor Moon "we drain energy" type monsters as shady enemy generals run their schemes in the background. It does an interesting job of tying in references to a lot of SM's classic villain arcs such as Metallia (who reprises a fascinating role), Wiseman (with some interesting implications about the MC), Pharaoh 90, and finally Chaos itself... Which is a nice perk if you're familiar with the series, but ultimately not necessary or even remotely important. Very little of the above even really matters as more than an excuse.

Because you aren't a Senshi. You are Mikage Chiba, and the plot primarily revolves her problems regarding self-image, trust, friendship, and tentative romance. She has a lot of problems, for each of those categories, and almost exactly 2 years of running this quest later, we're just starting to clean them up. It's extremely easy to forget there's even really a world ending plot going on when nearly the entire quest's focus revolves around the MC resolving her issues as she stumbles through trying to be a sneaky guardian for her baby sister... Among other things.

In fact, the actual plot takes a huge departure from the premise, because you're very rarely actually looking after your little sister's Sailor Moon antics so much as trying to get over yourself and having your own adventures behind the scenes. Despite every sign pointing otherwise, your alternate identity as Eclipse amounts to fuck all because you show up maybe 2-4 times the ENTIRE QUEST, and everyone but your little sister figure out who you are frustratingly fast, and then you just tell her like it's still a big deal when you BARELY played the role in the first place.

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REVIEW pt3

Writing.

The writing in Eclipsed Moon isn't bad. I have some notes of complaint regarding formatting, presentation of certain content, and some of the content itself... But speaking from a general point of view, there's not a whole lot to complain about with EMQ's writing. In fact, most posts are actually fairly long and dialogue filled. Not much time is spent chewing on scenery, which is kind of important given the sheer SIZE of the cast.

The dialogue remains unique to each character, lending a fairly distinctive 'voice' to each of the many, MANY, possible talking heads through-out the quest... Which is helpful when you're trying your damnedest to figure out who is speaking in an Interlude to gain some kind of frame of reference as to what's even happening.

As I try to keep most of the objective problems/statements in this part, I'll go ahead and leave this here:
~Quotations exist for a reason. You use them for every other character in the quest, use them for the MC.~
~This serves no purpose besides picking out the MC's lines from a wall, which you should be reading anyway.~
~These are tildes, they are not quotation marks. Stop.~

I'd say something about -telepathy- as well, but at some point you have to start making concessions due to 4chan's lack of text formatting options.

There's a lot of quality to be found in Eclipsed Moon; This highschool, Gaia Online tier, free-form forum RP, special snowflake punctuation is not part of it.

One other thing is that I will never forget Mikage's backstory, because it gets repeated to every character she knows, in full length detail. Every time. This becomes something that nearly drove me to tears as the quest went on, because...

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PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt1

The Cast.

Not counting the pre-existing character roster, as this IS a fanfiction quest, you've got the entire new roster of Senshi, the new roster of classmates, the new enemies, the new friends, Mikage's allies, the "expanded" cast of the original series and their descendants or alt.Timeline versions.

All of them are pulled out into the scene and given personalities, given dialogue, given rotating time on screen and via interludes to develop themselves. Given their own thread into what they're doing, motivations behind what they're doing, personal relationships with other people, etc.

And THAT, frustratingly, doesn't even cover the fact that the MC herself is almost six or seven different characters. This is it's own teeth grittingly annoying thing which feels like it got caught halfway between Very Important and Discarded In Development. I'll talk about this on it's own later.

Eclipsed Moon handles writing and developing THIS many characters better than some quests handle developing even just their main character. The QM is rather adept at juggling all of the people on and off the set, which helps keep this from becoming truly terrible... But it must be said that there are simply too many people.

After taking a moment to divide and tally up the characters I could remember just offhand, there are FIFTY-ONE (51) characters in play, and I know for a fact I'm forgetting some. This must be a nightmare to write, but can you stop for a moment and realize how miserable this roster is to read? There's having a large cast, and then there's THIS. Through-out the quest you have to remember who knows who, who is part of which social circle, who knows what... And this isn't even starting on where all the relationship markers are pointing.

Even if you divide them into groups (which they are), you still run into issues of groups overlapping with other groups who don't know about each other's groups.

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PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt2

The Cast 2: Enter Mikage.

The MC broke down so hard she became a schizophrenic and prone to panic attacks. One thing I really liked reading through EMQ was that the panic attacks were treated as a consistent thing, something the cast worried about, something that gave the MC something of a frail feeling as she was recovering. This isn't about the panic attacks, I just wanted to point out one of the (many) small details of character writing which was a pleasure to read through before I remember how miserable this cast size is.

However, her schizophrenis manifested itself in the form of 'masks'; Different personalities she could use to express herself and live life as anyone but herself. Earlier I listed a staggering 51 cast total, can you imagine how that character relationship chart pans out?

Okay, now imagine the main character has six masks: Daphne, Mimi, Dan D, Red Eyes, Dark Lady, and Miki.

Good?

Now imagine that relationship chart again when each of these masks has different relationships with various groups and characters.
Now imagine that chart AGAIN, but with additional lines explaining who knows which mask is Mikage, or which mask is connected to which mask.

Are you almost done?

Imagine it AGAIN, but this time add your superhero alter-ego Eclipse (because he is evidently important?) to the whole deal.

Do you hate life yet? Because I do. Even more so when a large chunk of the early plot revolves around trying to keep things secret (which you can't, partly because of actual bullshit reasons which I'll discuss later), and the latter half of the plot revolves primarily around trying to reconcile all your masks as just one person by accepting different aspects of yourself and learning valuable life lessons.

That you then promptly FORGET.

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PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt3

Secrets.

The point of having a secret is that it means something, and it stays... A secret. That you can take actions to keep that secret, and that things you do (or forget to do) would result in the success or failure of keeping that secret. Let's review the secrets Mikage has, how she fairs in keeping them, and how they matter.

1. Watashi wa Eclipse desu.
Kept or Failed: Failed
What went wrong: A character turned out to be FUCKING PSYCHIC. Another was spying on us through our second story window in the middle of the night and has future visions. Another inexplicably notices we have breasts despite no one else before this noticing, ostensibly just because she was inordinantly angry at us? I don't know. Also we just admit it later, because fuck it.
How does it matter: I have no idea. We only show up as Eclipse a couple times in the early quest, and a big deal gets made about you secretly being Eclipse when almost everyone in the cast EXCEPT your little sister has more or less figured it out. What's the point of this, even? That they don't know you're helping them? But they know Red Eyes is helping? And they know you are Red Eyes? What... Why... God dammit.

2. Mikage is the Red Eyed Beast
Kept or Failed: Failed
What went wrong: A character turns out to be able to SEE THE INVISIBLE, making the connection between Miki and REB, and then goes home and finds us giving Ganguro make-overs to our family (Miki is a Ganguro revolutionist). Promptly tells everyone. Later, our little sister promptly reveals that the REB is Mikage directly to another character by fussing about you being her sister.
How does it matter: The Red Eyed Beast persona gets used a LOT. It's the primary heavy lifter, gets involved in all of the monster scraps and in tracking down baddies. Red Eyed Beast is everything Eclipse was supposed to be, but NEVER HAPPENED.

At least Sasha was as pissed off about how rude all of this is as I was.

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PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt4

Secrets 2: Keep It.

3. The identities of our knights
Kept or Failed: Kept
How did we keep it: I have no idea. Presumably because no bullshit chain of events entirely out of our control have forced our hand in revealing things we're trying to keep to ourselves.
How does it matter: It literally doesn't. Everyone knows we are Eclipse, they obviously know that we know our knights.

There are more secrets most likely, but let's look at these 3 really important ones and analyse the pattern here. Our secrets typically don't actually matter, but are treated as if they matter a LOT. Typically we lose our secrets out of what I only feel comfortable describing as arbitrary fiat; Things and reasons that players can't have known or avoided (except the ganguro make over). The only secret we have been able to keep, really, is the one that matters the least... And honestly, that's only because no one in the quest even seems to be trying to look into it.

Special mention goes to Umeki Saori, who has single handedly managed to actually make a relationship chart and zeroed in on Mikage as being connected to/the center of everything weird going on. She is the ONLY character who has managed to come close to sussing out our secrets without any kind of bullshit, out of left field magical power, or reveal. She's just a stalker [spoiler]and the best character in the quest, right up there with Sasha who is similarly amazing with no applicable bullshit powers so far.[/spoiler].

Why even have secrets when they don't matter? Why give your players secrets to keep, make it an important theme, only to just reveal them at your leisure? There's no reward here for a playerbase to try and hold it close to their chest, and there's nothing but an arbitrary reveal when their efforts eventually fail. A revealed secret should be a huge step, it should have a reaction proportional to how important the secret REALLY was... And even that has been failed.

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PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt5

Nothing makes sense.

Mikage refuses to work with the Senshi because her heart isn't ready for it, but she'll do all of the heavy lifting and investigation work in the background just fine. She'll work with them off and on as the Red Eyed Beast, but her heart's just not ready for it. At this point nearly everyone is aware Mikage is Eclipse, and the Red Eyed Beast, and that both of them either are working with the Senshi or have in the past, but Mikage still refuses to do it because her heart isn't ready for it. But she's already doing it.

Mikage learns that she needs to accept the masks inside of her to recover and become herself again, the very first thing she does is accept Dark Lady and realize she wasn't evil; She was lonely. Mikage learns, time and time again, that what she really needs is to learn and accept aspects of herself instead of denying them, or trying to push them away. She promptly refuses to eat negative emotions/chaos energy because it's evil and it feeds her evil half Dark Lady, who she accepted over a year of questing ago as not being evil, after she got done learning to accept every part of her. She nearly STARVES herself doing this, and I swear this is partly a player base fault, but for fucks sake, you don't just learn a lesson and then turn around and NOT APPLY IT.

Why is Sasha a magical void? Why is his bear a magical void? Why did the QM think it was a good idea to blatantly include cross-over references (and characters, including Sasha) as part of their fanfiction quest? Were they just going the whole nine-yards? Why are there ghosts? Why are there psychics? Why is the gateway to Kingdom Hearts open? Did we really need to include not-heartless? What happened in our between-worlds adventure when time suddenly stopped because reasons? How did Helios get dragged out of a dream world? Why can our little sister empathize SO HARD she yoinks some vaguely described and unexplained thing from us?

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PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt6

There is too much everything.

This is a problem that can't really be fixed now, but in future projects needs to really be paid close attention to. Stories typically try to stick to a relatively small cast, maybe a handful or two, and then revolve the story around them. Additions to this cast are done in small doses, much like expansion packs don't give you a whole new game, but a little more of the game you already had. The HUGE size of the cast in Eclipsed Moon, while handled remarkably well, is still not a good thing. The only thing keeping it from outright crushing the story is the QM's ability to juggle them on and off stage, but even that is just a stop-gap measure. The writing suffers heavily because of this.

Some people like large casts, and this isn't to say that large casts immediately translate to bad stories. However, there is a marked difference between having a large cast, and having 51+ actual characters. The dialogue starts to get spread too thin, the relationships become strained, and just keeping up with everyone becomes a chore.

Then there's the concepts themselves. You obviously have Sailor Moon, which includes magical girls, alternate timelines, reincarnation, aliens, fire-reading as a form of fortune telling, premonitions, etc. Sailor Moon is a HUGE blanket for these things, but then you went and included psychics, government organizations (PIT has existed for 121 threads and only recently can we begin to say they even remotely matter. What is their point, even? What do they do? Nothing? Because they've done nothing almost the entire quest), and other things I can only reluctantly theorize on.

For example, with the shift towards the things that eat emotions/hearts and use this to breed, with the notion that they come from beyond your planets, is this literally not-heartless? Are we adding Kingdom Hearts to this?

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PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt7

Shadowruns.

The QM is stated as enjoying shadowruns, which is something I can appreciate and empathize with, but is miserable at setting them up in any manner. Often things that should be shadowruns end up being treated completely unimportantly, or just unravelled with the same sense of mystery investigation that was inherent to the actual Sailor Moon series: You stumble into the answer like an idiot, sometimes not even realizing there was a question.

I just want to clarify this now for everyone reading, and for anyone with similar interests...

Shadowruns are a player thing. You can't make them as a writer/QM. They are the result of a certain type of playerbase enjoying paranoia and going wild with it as they try to piece together the answer. As a writer/QM, what you CAN do, is focus on creating the Mystery. The Mystery is what players who enjoy shadowruns latch onto, it's what they try to solve. The old saying about leading a horse to water can and DOES apply here; You can present a mystery to players, but you can't make them shadowrun.

Crafting a mystery is delicate work. It requires patience, and often it requires the willingness to let it go unsolved until it's too late. It requires an important sense of focus, so that the mystery you've crafted stays in the forefront of your player's minds.

If your plot is too scattered, spread out across too many perspectives, the mystery begins to lose its focus. It falls out of the forefront of your player's mind.

Similarly, if you plan to stay true to the Sailor Moon formula of just stumbling into answers to resolve things, then you've voluntarily already decided that you WON'T let mysteries go until it's too late to solve them. The fact that, eventually, something will happen that has you stumble into the answer makes the worth of the mystery practically nil, as there's no real purpose in solving something that you know will just be handed to you later.

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PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt8

Relationship is a Catch-All term; It doesn't necessarily mean romance.

There are a lot of things I still haven't touched on, such as the wonderful way that relationships are teased and slowly developed, the way each character is written well enough to each have their own flaws which you can easily pick out and enjoy as part of their overall personality (Like when Kanari said she wouldn't snap and bite off her brother's head for bringing up Mikage... As she snapped and yelled at him for bringing up Mikage). That the character personalities are individualistic instead of romanticized, and even the MC shows a great deal of signs of being extremely self-centered and lacking in empathy (Will overwork herself constantly, held a vicious grudge against various members of her family and demanded apologies when she wouldn't even acknowledge she was hurting them as well, etc.)

One recent moment that sprung out at me was when Sasha rejected knighthood. As a reader, I wanted Sasha to join up more than anyone else... But he personally didn't agree with getting stronger through any power other than his own, even if it meant he would eventually reach a dead-end. I loved this scene, even though I hated he wasn't joining, because it's so very evocative of who he is, and there are a LOT of scenes like this, where you can just appreciate characters for who they are.

I alternate a little between loving how Mikage's reintegration of her masks feels very genuine, like they're really coming home and her problems are honestly being resolved. I loved the part where REB flipped out over the mask not wanting to die, and the implications there in. REB is honestly one of my favorite 'characters', and the way she's handled has been a special mark for me. You can SEE her slip from urban legend to an angry and desperate girl, and finally to being afraid.

Unfortunately, while I love that, there are many, MANY times where I just felt like groaning about tumblrs.

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CLOSING

I'd recommend Eclipsed Moon to someone who enjoys the drama genre, or who wanted to see examples of well rounded character development. I would, ironically, not recommend this to anyone who wanted to read about magical girls.

The QM writes and manages characters extremely well... But I feel like they get lost when it comes to a story. The time taken juggling the ever-growing cast forced the story to grind to a halt, and constant seduction of adding more concepts to the story results in a lot of badly handled things to fall through. Even though this is nominally a Sailor Moon fanfiction, it reads much more like a Character Drama, because much of the 'story' has had to be pushed aside in favour of being carried atop relationship development.

This isn't a bad thing, because Character Dramas are their own fascinating genre and are quite interesting to read if the writer can execute the dynamic well enough (which the QM is fairly adept at), but it's an important distinction. I don't believe the QM meant it to become that, and the fact that the story was lost in detriment to EMQ's development into what it became is a little disappointing. I feel like more self-control could and should have been exercised during the development process as far as how many people they would really feel comfortable digging into and properly developing, and how many spices they were adding to the pot.

If the cast had been smaller, much smaller, then the QM could have taken more time to really develop and dig into each character without having to sacrifice the plot, or flub various aspects. Instead, while each character is relatively well developed, it almost feels like it's not scratching the surface of what could have been if we hadn't had to spread out so much attention between them.

As an aside, belated happy second year anniversary Artemis; Your quest started February 13, 2014.