FGJHFGJHJH I'm glad you love the monster designs!! I spent a lot more time than I should've trying to make them creepy and I spent a lot of time thinking about how to scary them up lol. Pinkie is one of my faves lol love that design (and it's def gonna reappear in another work in the future if/when I can shove it in and make it work haha)
I mean,,, the relics are guardian angels in that it gives them powers to fight monsters but the result is... >:3c
Yeah the story is most definitely rushed! I essentially had to speedrun the building of a whole alternate universe with no time to properly pad it out and the pacing definitely reflects that! I had hoped to put more scenes to give readers time to adjust to the changes in this world but, as you've probably noticed, a lot more "tell" than "show" was thrown in here to basically dump worldbuilding info on people for later stuff. I usually like to create complex worlds and slowburn my way into them (something im struggling with fixing in my Hologram project atm!! Especially because there's a lot of things being thrown at once as the inciting incident occurs and i Do Not want people to get overwhelmed haha) but this was a complex world from the get go set-up without any pacing or slowburn to match it OTL
This said!! Glad you enjoy the little ships in here!! Abby/Vidal and Michi/Irise are pairings i had fun teasing in this piece, although it's probably the closest I'll ever get to writing real romance (esp. since i'm only in it for the queerplatonicness not truly the romance itself haha).
The ending was intentionally meant to end there! Though, if I'd had my way, there might have been an epilogue stating that the common populace now realizes what happens to certain people and are facing a mass panic by those in the afflicted party~
And yeah it definitely seems like NVL in ADV format suffers. I will admit I'm more used to reading stuff like fanfic than reading vns in the typical ADV format so I think that played a factor in how I thought it was comprehensible but sounds like it's confusing instead ;w; I apologize for the headache! It'll definitely read much better when I update to that new format I promise!!!
and feel free to give more crits and feedback if you like!! I know there's a lot of issues with this (I imagine the sprites are one of them and the "tell instead of show" playing a big part in what bogs this down?) and tbh I'd like to hear what I did wrong so I can try my best to fix/evade such errors in the future if possible!!
Thank you so much for the comment though!! I loved reading your thoughts on this and it makes me happy to know you like this and want to see more of my writing in the future ^0^ Hopefully I can get one of my projects out to fruition to make that happen and YES definitely in the NVL style where it'll shine more!