d_s_t_e's Wattpad Reviews

Crescendo by Torterra657 [Pokémon]

Four Oricorio friends live peacefully in their meadow, where they show off stunning dances to the delight of all. But everything changes when one of them is kidnapped. Will the other three be able to save Pachi and get to the bottom of the humans' plot?

I have to say that Oricorio is one of my favorite Pokémon from the latest generation. It's a cute Pokémon with a fun concept, and the fact that it can change between four different varieties makes it extremely versatile. I loved using one all throughout my playthrough of Moon, so it was really appealing to me to see a story that featured this Pokémon.

I love the idea of a story that shows off all the different types of Oricorio, and it was interesting to see how the abilities of each one were changed based on the type they were. For example, the ghost type Sensu Oricorio was able to listen to the spirits, and the Baile Oricorio commands powerful fire attacks.

I think I would have enjoyed this more, though, if the writing style didn't make it so difficult to remember which Oricorio was which. All four of the Oricorio have unique names, which certainly makes sense, but they're not always referred to by their names. Sometimes they are simply called "the Sensu Oricorio" or "the Pom-Pom Oricorio". Sometimes they are simply identified by what color they are. Even worse, we don't get a paragraph that introduces the Oricorio with all of these traits put together. Rather than telling us that Pachi is the Pom-Pom style one, which is yellow, we get scattered descriptions of what this Oricorio looks like while other things are happening, followed by her name in dialogue so that we just have to piece together that the name belongs to the bird that was previously described. 

Even as a fan who had used Oricorio, I couldn't remember the meaning of Sensu and Pa'u and Baile, so I kept having to stop and say, hang on, is that the purple ghost one or the pink psychic one? And having to remember their names on top of that was just a nightmare. All of it could have been avoided if the author had taken time to clearly establish which name goes with which bird and then referred to them in a single consistent way from that point on. I have to believe that all this switching back and forth was an attempt to not repeat similar things all the time, but it's the very fact of repeating similar things that keeps the story simple enough for the readers to actually understand it without having to make themselves a character list. I really wish that amateur writers would drop the belief that readers get bored if a chapter use a character's name too many times because it's just not true.

In addition to that, I felt as though the author made a number of other decisions in an attempt to create a fancy style and only succeeded in making things even more confusing. For example, the opening paragraph seems at first glance as though it's something a reviewer such as myself would praise by saying: "good description!", but in reality I read it three times in a row and still couldn't picture what the main character was doing. I mean, I know that he was dancing, but how is it even possible to stand on one foot and make it look like you're revolving around the world? The moon is a thing that revolves around the world, and it does so by making a big circle around the outside of it. I don't think that's physically possible for an Oricorio to do, and I can't begin to imagine how it would make it look as though it was as part of a dance. And that's just the first sentence. The second tells us that he feels "greater than the world" without explaining how or why, and the third tells us that he's bound people under some kind of spell without explaining what that is or why he did it. None of the sentences seem connected to each other.

Unfortunately, my confusion at what was even happening in the book did not stop after that. The notes I made while reading this story are filled with question marks, and even major plot points are so murky that I still don't understand what happened to certain characters.

One more weird detail is that the author seemed to have a fixation for rhymes. They show up in the narration, in the character's thoughts, and even in dialogue with one character remarking about how funny it is that she just made a rhyme. It felt like the author was just enjoying the way the words sounded more than the actual meanings behind them, which is really not a good thing when trying to tell a story. Actually, it's not even a good way to write a poem, since even rhyming words in those should be chosen for a greater reason than "because this makes it rhyme".

On the technical side, the writing wasn't too bad. The most common error was incorrect dialogue formatting, but it did manage to get this right a large portion of the time. Besides that was some tense switching, incorrectly conjugated verbs, and comma errors.

I did enjoy a few little details dropped throughout the story, like the fact that the title and the chapter headings follow a common naming theme that's creative and evocative of Oricorio. A creepier detail is the fact that the bad guys have furniture made out of Pokémon. I also liked the way that the author attempted to show the psychology of bird-like Pokémon from their perspective. They actually did remind me of real life birds that people keep as pets at certain points, and it kind of flirted with the idea of commenting on the way that these pets are sometimes treated. I kind of wish it had gone all in like Black Beauty because that would have really been enjoyable for me.

I wish that I could say that the plot of the story and the emotions it evoked made up for some of the stylistic issues, but I had to do so much rereading and thinking to try to understand what was happening that any emotion there might have been was drained out of it for me. It really is too bad because I can tell that it was trying to be powerfully emotional, and it might have actually evoked a bit of that if the author had just kept it simple. It probably would have been easier to write that way and actually resulted in a better story.

Unfortunately, I think this story suffered a lot of damage because of unnecessary and poorly executed frills.  I can tell that the author was going for an emotional story with some shocking twists, but it was just too heavily obscured for me to really appreciate any of it. There were some clever details and some good ideas, but I couldn't get past the way that they were told.