You finished 7000 words; nice! I get too caught up in worrying about how everything is going to work and generally lose steam before writing even 1000 words, so simply getting it done is quite an accomplishment.

So it's a serviceable piece of writing, but -- and I say this in a spirit of friendly criticism -- I didn't find the story very interesting. To be honest, after a few paragraphs I skimmed the rest.


Partly it's to do with the ideas in the story itself; I don't play JRPGs, read manga, or watch any anime aside from Miyazaki, but it read to me like a collection of Japanese media tropes: the heroes sent to save the world are children/adolescents (when one would expect the best warriors in the cities to be professional fighters in their 20's or 30's, or something), there are four cities and four characters each representing some facet of some system of symbolism or something, then there are some kind of weird spirits that can somehow meld with people, airships, something about saving the world, boss-fights ... The problem is, if I have some idea of what the tropes that drive this sort of story are, I can make a pretty reasonable guess as to exactly what is going to happen. And I've seen variations on all these tropes in one form or another, so it feels to me like re-treading old ground, which I'm not willing to do unless it does something I haven't seen before.
Or maybe you take the tropes as a starting point and do something unique with it -- if you do, I didn't get far enough in to see it.

On the other hand, I'm definitely not your target market for this kind of game -- people who enjoy such settings/tropes for what they are will likely be more interested and willing to get into it. Also, what doesn't make sense in a written story will probably make more sense in a game when presented as a part of interactive media. People are willing to accept all kinds of crazy stuff if it just happens in a game, and otherwise nonsensical or uninteresting ideas are completely different when they're a part of gameplay. Take Mario for example -- this plumber guy jumping on things and eating mushrooms, what? It didn't make any sense at all but it made a great game.


Partly what turned me off was the structure of the story: The way it's written, we get info-dumped before establishing a hook; That is, we hear all about the setting and characters that the author clearly cares about, but which I the reader do not yet care about.

But then this is not supposed to be read as a straight narrative. It looks like an outline for your game (which I assume is what it is) -- frankly, the outline of any game might not look very interesting because it is a list of actions the player plays through, eg. fight this monster here, figure out this puzzle here, this character gains this power at this point, fight this boss next, etc. Gameplay doesn't often make interesting stories. (Did anyone else read the Doom novels? Heh!)


So like what Wai said: Written as a script or gameplay outline, your story might make more sense for what I think you want to do with it because I wouldn't be reading it with the expectations I have of a story in a book or something.

And as said, you're using certain tropes heavily. This is perfectly fine so long as you're aware that you're doing it.